Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said that there were four miracles needed for hydrogen cars to take off – by comparison to become a Saint in the Catholic Church, you only need three. Funding was cut, but car companies still seem bullish on Hydrogen, and plan on limited production runs in the middle of the next decade.
This week, AutoblogGreen reported on the evolution of GM’s fuel cell cars. The new fifth generation fuel cell stack is much smaller than the previous fourth generation stack. Reading the features of the new FC seem to indicate that GM is trying to “turn the corner” on fuel cells – this unit is designed for manufacturing, as well as dramatically reducing the amount of platinum catalyst used by 62.5%, from 80g to 30g (1.06oz) at the same output power level (93kW/120HP). Thats about $1350 in platinum for the fuel cell. The goal is to eventually get the platinum content down to 10g, less than $500, and to manufacture about 10,000 per year by the middle of the 2010-decade.
Technology is still progressing in terms of making fuel cells affordable and small enough to put into a car. But there are still a number of other pieces to get a hydrogen infrastructure in place.
Hydrogen isn’t naturally found: There is no hydrogen mine, or hydrogen reserves. There are a few ways to “make” hydrogen – electrolysis of water (50% efficient) or steam-based reformation of natural gas into hydrogen. Compared to just plugging in a car and charging batteries for an electric vehicle these are less efficient, however there is currently a limit on how many batteries you can put in a vehicle before you start sacrificing passenger room and cargo space. Pure EVs might only have a range of 100-200 miles.
Vehicle Range: Strides are also being made in this arena as well – Toyota recently announced that their FCHV-adv Highlander SUV that got an extrapolated 431 miles per tank (they drove about 300 miles and extrapolated based on the fuel left in the tank). Previously, the range on fuel cell vehicles had been between 200-300 miles per tank.
Hydrogen Fueling Stations: While there are plenty of gas stations, and you have electrical outlets in your home that would allow you to recharge an EV, there aren’t a whole lot of hydrogen refueling stations, let one ones open to the public. California might have 46 retail locations by 2014, but many are private ones that are built for small capacity refueling of fleet test vehicles or OHVs/golf carts.
Fuel Cell Stack Lifetime: The fuel cells at the turn of the century would last for about 35,000 miles. The fourth generation fuel cell as it is now can get 80,000 miles before it needs to be replaced. The new fifth generation will get a little more than 120,000 miles per GM. This is still low compared to a traditional gasoline engine which can last a very long time if the owner takes good care of it.
There is one shining opportunity for fuel cells though. Its to team up with E-REVs and become the alternate generator, replacing the gasoline engine. The two fit together quite well – you don’t need too big of a tank because you only need 300 miles combined (40 on electric, the remainder on FC), turning on and off the FC doesn’t make noise or vibrate, unlike traditional gasoline engines, and they’ll have much lower duty cycles – 120,000 miles for the FC would be enough to outlast the batteries by a large margin. And hydrogen stations wont need much storage capacity because you’ll probably only be filling up every 6-8 weeks (they see a lower visits per FC vehicle), which means their storage infrastructure doesn’t need to bee too large – instead of lots of equipment to extract hydrogen from water or natural gas and the storage to sell thousands of kg of hydrogen per day, they only need the equipment to generate and store a fraction of that.
The year 2015 has been talked about for the production of fuel cell vehicles. Thats about the time I would expect the Voltec power train to start appearing in other vehicles. It would seem to be a great opportunity to allow a few vehicles to be sold – probably geographically limited to start, since the hydrogen infrastructure will still be sparse. As production ramps to 100,000 in 2020 and 1,000,000 in 2025, they can not only displace the electric generator int he Volt and other future E-REV cars, but also the engine in standard plug-in hybrids.
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2 Responses
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Thanks for writing about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
FYI, here is a post I wrote that is titled “7 reasons to love Toyota hydrogen fuel cell vehicles” that discusses all of the progress that Toyota has made with the technology (like the 431-mile range that was mentioned in your post).
http://hydrogendiscoveries.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/7-reasons-to-love-toyota-hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles/
Toyota is ahead of GM with hydrogen fuel cell technology.
With oil prices heading much higher over the coming years, my view is that the focus needs to be on building LOTS of hydrogen fueling stations before the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are ready in 2015.
There are approximately 170,000 gasoline stations and over 250 million registered passenger vehicles in the U.S. Therefore, I think people need to be thinking MUCH BIGGER.
Greg Blencoe
Chief Executive Officer
Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc.
Anthony, good review. A big challenge for hydrogen you haven’t touched upon is storage. Expensive carbon-fiber tanks store hydrogen compressed up 10,000 psi. Special precautions have to be taken, as hydrogen tends to leak easily given opportunity.
Chemically binding hydrogen in a liquid removes storage and infrastructure problems. One such good example is Direct Methanol Fuel Cells. Have you looked into these?