A cheaper, better way to make hydrogen (82% efficiency)

This statement requires disclaimers. Gaseous hydrogen refueling is only as fast as gasoline if the station can use more energy to prechill it to way below freezing, and if it isn't too hot outside. More importantly, a hydrogen station does not have the quick refuel speed endurance of a gasoline station. A high capacity hydrogen station can quick refill about 50 cars, a hundred for the biggest, during a 10 hour day. Pull up after that limit has been met, or even after a rush of other customers, the refueling will take longer. Even as long as fast charging a BEV, if the station can do it at all.

A gasoline station can fast refill hundreds to thousands of cars in a full 24 hours. The only limit is keeping its tanks filled. Hydrogen, and any compressed gas fuel, simply can't do that. They have bottlenecks in precompressing and chilling the fuel. They can be as fast as gasoline, but a consumer may encounter a time when it is not. The may will become a will with more FCVs on the road. The hydrogen lobby needs to stop with the fast as gasoline to refuel without limits point, or the negative backlash when it becomes none that isn't so will be larger.

Plug ins require a change in behavior and thinking for the public to accept them. Hydrogen and CNG require the same, but on a much more minor level. They are, however, being told they will have to make no change. Which just means they will be angry about being tricked or lied too about it later on.

As too the announcement, their catalyst lasts for a little more than 8 days. Being nickle and iron, it should be cheap to make. So even if they never get it to last past a week, the cost of continually replacing the catalyst electrodes may be less than the higher upfront install and electricity costs of a traditional electrolysis system.

 

Unlikely.
for me to make the switch, I would also need to be able to safely refuel in the convenience of my own home.
Quality of the drive (which should be there now) , performance and cargo space would also be nice to have, but aren't necessarily deal breakers.

 

You can't do that now with a gasoline engine. Why set the bar so high? Neighbourhood (hydrogen) gas stations seem fine, to me.

 

I looked into the Honda and their home fueling unit. It was not available in Minnesota. Currently there are a few charging locations for CNG vehicles in Wisconsin which is nice, a few years ago there were not.

Currenly I would rather use electricity for flexibility of the fuel source, which isnt possible with natural gas, but if given only the choice of gas or CNG, I would take CNG.

That bar has been set because that is what I have now. It is one of the reasons I won't buy a gas fueled car ever again.

 

He has only BEVs.

Has for home refueling with CNG.
The annual maintenance of the system is pricy, and the systems can let water into the car's fuel system.
Honda had actually stopped recommending them, and weren't covering warranty coverage if using a such a system got water into the car.

 

It depends on cost. It's like asking me if I could have a 240 mile electric car with great performance, reliability and support, would I get one?

 

This appears to be a reference to a new electrode/catalyst which operates at a higher efficiency and uses materials that cost less than those used in electrolysis as it is routinely done today. It isn't clear to me from this article, or from the press release from Stanford University that is the basis of this article, that this new system is more efficient than taking the energy used to produce hydrogen and storing it in a battery directly.

This "breakthrough" doesn't repeal the first and second laws of thermodynamics (so no "hydrogen for free"), but it could reduce the cost of generating hydrogen from water by electrolysis, at least compared to the currently used method. The question remains how well, if at all, this will scale up to industrial production levels and how much cheaper a kilogram of hydrogen produced will be, as a result of this process.

As Tideland said "...it's a start.", but I am still a hydrogen skeptic.

 

You didn't ask me what a general selling point was, you asked me why I didn't go for a natural gas car.
The market probably is smaller than I think, as I think it is about 70% of the light vehicle fleet once the second gen EVs hit the market (3years).

Perhaps it is only 30%. Still, a far larger market than the apparent hybrid market.

 

the good thing is, a lot of smart people are working on alternatives to fossil fuels. even if it's the next 20 years, it can have a major effect on quality of life for everyone.

 

This is about cheaper than current methods, not more efficient than storing in batteries. The quoted performance was 82%, but this will come at low pressure, which means you still need to buy and power high pressure compressors and chill the hydrogen.. Its very very good, as the theoretical maximum efficiency at standard temperature and pressure is 83% for catalytic electrolysis. Efficiency can be over 100% for electricity if the water is heated (external energy) but then you can't simply turn it on and off when the wind blows, the cheapest renewable way to get hydrogen according to NREL (cheap wind at night, while putting wind at high demand on grid).

If you use 2 kwh to compress and chil (range 2-7 kwh currently) then it should take 43 kwh to produce cool and chill a kg of hydrogen in a high volume station. This is better than the best electrolysis station today, but could be met with current technology if this can be commercialized.

 

They aren't directly comparable. The home CNG refill stations cost up to $5000, and have an annual maintenance that costs $1000 to $2000. Then it turns out they could damage the car. But more importantly, the home needs to have natural gas service.

Every home has electric though, and most of the priciest installs may run up to half of a home CNG station. Most are going to be far cheaper though. Then once installed, there are no maintenance costs.

There is also the losses of compressing the hydrogen, which can be up to 10%. Higher if the station stores its hydrogen in liquid state.

Delivery isn't the bottleneck for hydrogen stations. It is the preconditioning of the hydrogen for a fast refuel.

The station has a storage tank of compressed or liquid hydrogen. It isn't a high enough pressure to fill a car. So a compressor pumps up the pressure of the hydrogen in a fill tank. The pressure is increased to something higher than the cars' tanks it will be filling, and this is where the hydrogen is chilled.

For the 3 minute fast refuel to happen, the fill tank has to be fully pressurized and chilled down to -40 Celsius or -72 Fahrenheit. If the pressure is lower or the temperature higher, the refuel will take longer. When a press release says a new hydrogen station can fill 20, 30, or 50 cars during a day, it assumes that the number of cars is spread out over 10 hours in order to allow the compressor and chillers time to get the hydrogen preconditioned for that '3 minute' fill. That isn't how traffic arrives at gas stations. So many FCV drivers will experience slow refuels when and if the number of cars increase.

If the fill tank pressure is lower than what the FCV tank can handle, the person leaves with a partially filled tank after a longer refuel, or they wait EV fast recharge times for the compressor to catch up. As with gasoline tanks, they can't walk away during this time.

It isn't a hard problem, but it isn't has simple as installing a bigger, faster pump as you could do with a liquid fuel. Compress the hydrogen too fast and it gets too hot. So the compressor, fill tank, and chilling system all needs to be scaled up together. This will cost more. Use more energy. And may take up more real estate than a comparable sized gasoline station.

Something like water prefilling the car tank may alleviate some of those costs, but requires redesigning the fuel systems on the cars. Just more evidence that FCV aren't ready for the commercialization push.

 

Let's take an alternate viewpoint about BEVs. A BEV can be inductively recharged without connecting anything between the car and the induction supply. So a BEV user may be quite thrilled with never having to do anything other than park the BEV. That is pretty safe. They will wonder how a FCV will overcome the "shortcoming" of having to actually connect something to the car to refill.

[Again, I'm not against H2 or FCVs...but I'm not against BEVs either. Calling a user-determined-tradeoff a universal-technology-shortcoming is what got my attention.]

 

The major hurdles to renewable hydrogen refueling is costs and cars to pay those costs.

This can be broken down into 2 problems

1) Hydrogen and fuel cells are too expensive so they will not take off except where the government heavily subsidizes them for the life of the cars.

2) Natural gas based hydrogen is a lot cheaper than than renewable hydrogen so fcv will use methane derived hydrogen.

This catalytic breakthrough does nothing for problem number 1. That will take other break through.

It may make problem number two easily solved. Let's say a kg of natural gas based hydrogen at a large (1500 kg a day) station costs $2/kg when made from natural gas. If you drop the price of the equipment by using the new much cheaper catalyst, you may drop the price close to that 41 kwh of low demand wind energy. To do that you probably want to make the hydrogen in the 40 cheapest hours of the week, having the storage tank full monday morning, and refilling only at low demand night. That takes more equipment but if its cheap who cares. This low demand wind can be purchased for about $0.05 cents/kwh after the federal subsidy of $0.022/kwh (may go away before fuel cells work).

At that price of electricity, price of kg of wind electricity electrolysis might only be $2.05 plus some small change added for cost of equipment, profit, etc. That should be cheap enough to subsidize over natural gas based hydrogen.

Say your station fills 100,000 kg a year (that's about 480 - 4 Kg fill-ups each week) the storage tank, compressors, electrolyszers, , etc cost $2M and last 20 years, then this equipment would add $1/kg plus some return on equity plus maintenance. The new stanford method sounded like it not only knocks down up front costs but maintenance as well. I cold see unsubsidized renewable hydrogen costing around $6kg, that's less than half of what unsubsidized renewable hydrogen costs today.

 

Even the Toyota management is saying this is expensive. Of course toyota has when asked honestly said at that price they still lose money with every one. The $58K includes many incentives to toyota, and they are actively lobbying the california legislature and US congress for more. Someone is also picking up the tab for 3 years of hydrogen and using toyota estimates for cost and figuring 12,000 miles a year that is probably another $6000 over those 3 years, then after you may need to pay that. No what makes you think $58,000 for a 9 second to 60 4 seater is not expensive? Toyota's line is they expect to reduce costs quickly, but we have been promised this before and progress has been slower than expected.

We can compare to gen II volt (futures against futures) at $34,000. You probably need to add some options to make it outfitted like the mirai, but after that and installing 5Kw of solar panels you probably are only a little over the mirai's cost and have a lower than today electric bill. That is with a car that an can travel the country plus probably travel the same distance a year as the mirai on solar. The camry hybrid xle loaded with the options is only $35,000. In what world is $58K competitive here?

On a 300 mile bev that can refuel in 5 minutes without battery swap. You are right it doesn't exist. It is a new strange government requirement put forward by the fuel cell lobby in 2013 because the tesla model S satisfied the old government requirement. No one is really asking for that. BEVs like fcv still need subsidies to get over the hurdle. The problem for fcv is BEVs may be able to work without subsidies in 5 years, fuel cells look like they will need much more time and government money. Let's see if these consortiums can come up with as the promised breakthroughs that seem elusive.

My point was that this tech may help on this part. FCV need renewables much more than bevs, as they are asking for much higher government subsidies on the premise of green.

In 80% of the country a consumer can pay a little extra for green energy. In california solar panels may be cheaper than buying browner energy from the utilities. In austin you don't have a choice at public chargers they are all renewable. In only a tiny part of the country will there be hydrogen refueling so you get what the station sells you. If renewables cost $4 more per kg, and states or countries force renewable mandates than it is another barrier to fcv adoption.

 

Even resonance is less efficient than plugging in. The developer quote of a high efficiency figure were using units made from high efficiency components and tuned by hand. Neither of which will happen in a production car and charger.

The Tesla S70D is $57,500.
Yes, that is after the federal tax incentive, but we do not know what before price incentives Toyota is getting for the Mirai. They once claimed to have gotten zero for the Prius, but that wasn't true.
The S70D price is after estimated gasoline savings. Estimated electricity costs are subtracted from the gas savings, or in other words, they didn't assume free charging at Superchargers. All FCVs now include free fuel for three years. This makes unsudsidized, estimated gas savings a fair deduction from the price.
The S70D range is 240 miles, EPA. We do not have any EPA numbers for the Mirai, or JC08 for that matter. It might come up short of the 300 miles.
Tesla's battery swap takes 90 seconds. Tesla owners have chosen to use a Supercharger over it. The cost of the battery swap is comparable to filling the tank of a ICE car in the Model S's segment, so it isn't cost alone for the reason. The option is there though, so it meets the 5 minute refill clause.
A clause not included, but I and John would agree is important, is that the $58k price make a profit.

PS - happy to see you drop the hybrid label from the Mirai and admit it's an EV.