Featured Nissan freezes fuel cell car development

Nissan, Honda, Cummins, and chinese manufacturers are working with ceres.
Why is our SteelCell™ Unique? - Ceres Power plc

The problem Solid Oxide fuel cells (SOFC) solve versus PEM fuel cells used in the clarity and mirai is they can use inexpensive materials, in this case steel and ceramics and they claim processes similar to making solar panels. Another advantage is SOFC is they are not as sensitive to poisoning from impurities as PEM, so lower quality fuels can be used like industrial hydrogen, or hydrogen produced from reforming liquid fuels (methanol, ethanol, gasoline) without expensive removal of some impurities. Some can even directly use methanol, ethanol, and methane (natural gas) without reforming (direct fuel cells).

The downside is they run hot, in the case of the cells Nissan is using 500 degrees Celsius or higher. That means warm up time and thermal insulation and a fairly large battery buffer. Then really are they much better on flex fuel than say a prius prime or clarity phev. It will be interesting if ceres can get the operating temperature down with other materials to operate well on a car. With the high operating temperatures SOFC are more likely to be used in stationary applications where there is no need to move the hot object.

 

I see the original op goes to a dead link nowadays. Even so according to this link - updated a couple months ago - Nissan / Renault is still publishing that they are more on the 'out' then they are in - w/hydrogen cars after the Daimler joint R&D venture fizzled.

Fuel cell cars hit roadblock as Nissan-Renault pulls out - Nikkei Asian Review

Maybe Nissan will use the $$ savings from the hydrogen R&D pull back to build a decent liquid thermal management system for their EV's.

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Still can't fill up at home. Not interested.

 

The cost is hardly an issue here; I remember reading it costs about $1m to, essentially, hand craft one example of Clarity. Surely adding a few thousand $$$ worth of hardware would not change the equation too much.

Also, adding a larger battery and a plug-in capability would allow to extend the range, to more fully capture kinetic energy when braking or going downhill, and perhaps even to slightly downrate the FC, because a powerful enough battery/circuitry can handle acceleration instead of having to max out the FC stack.

I don't know what these ratios are in a Tesla, but here are some first-hand Bolt figures:

- Cruising @ 60 mph - about 15 kW; normal driving (excluding teaching high-adrenaline Camaro and Mustang owners practical lessons on EV supremacy) rarely draws more than 45 kW - and only briefly - so for a heavier car maybe 50-60 kW would be enough for most scenarios that require accelerating or going steeply uphill.
- Highest regen rate I observed while decelerating (L-mode + paddle) - about 68 kW

I imagine a smaller batter wouldn't be able to harvest anywhere near this amount of energy.

Thanks for posting the video; I do enjoy YouTube a lot, but when I need to update my knowledge on electrochemical processes and devices, I try to look in science papers and talk to people who work with these things, I am lucky

I don't know if Nissan is "coming to its senses"; the new Leaf with its undersized battery (that lacks thermal management!) doesn't look like an apex of engineering on the US EV market, although I understand it sells well elsewhere.

 

I have a BMW i3-REx:

• ~18 kWh battery (measured), ~450 lbs, ~72 mi range
• ~34 hp ICE, ~264 lbs, ~78 mi range, 1.9 gal

source: BMW i3

So what are the Honda Clarity components weight and energy?

Bob Wilson

 

clarity has a 17 kwh battery and a 1.5L 103 hp@5500 rpm engine with a 7 gallon gas tank. All electric range is 47 miles epa, charge sustain mpg is 42 mpg epa. Given the efficiencies, the clarity pack must be keeping more charge. My guess is battery pack weighs around the same as the i3.
Compare Side-by-Side



For reference the 80.5 kwh long range tesla model 3 pack weighs 1,054 lb.

Weight of the clarity is significantly higher than the i3 @ 4,052 lbs.

 

The little GM Bolt is a subcompact /no towing capability - but likely a bike rack couldn't hurt .... but compared to the KW of a Tesla, which can pull a decent-size boat or trailer? It can draw well over 300 KW. All that to say, it's not all about squeezing by with the minimum amount of energy that one can barely deal with - but rather proving a technoligy actually COMPETES in an apples to apples scenario.

it would be a disservice to presume the linked video (& its entire cadre of teachers that put the instructional video series together) falls short because it doesnt source all its facts - because realistically it's trying to help the layperson understand the competing issues, rather than be a treatise that only a scientist could understand, yet make everyone else's eyes glaze over.

Even so - if authority /cited /credentialed sources are necessary - one can consider Robert Zubrin, one of NASA's Aerospace Engineers tasked with such responsibilities as hydrogen propulsion & energy use. Below is an excerpt of his conclusion from his paper & book, "The Hydrogen Hoax" - published in part, in the new Atlantis magazine.

The Hydrogen Hoax - The New Atlantis
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iirc, isn't Brazil the land of lots of extremely poor soil - rain forest, where once it's stripped bare of its irreplaceable vegitation - it's good for just a few rotations of 'product' (corn/grain, switchgrass, sugar/cane etc) that you can turn into a ethanol type fuel source?
Oh well, what the heck, who are we - to scrutinize south American, when our water table in flyover grain States has been sucked down to record lows ... just to make agro $'s flow abundently. So much grain - supply & demand - vast amounts normally mean depressed prices - which would be great for people starving around the world, but if we turn it into land barge fuel? Heck that drops the supply, increases the price, & more people make money (too bad, hungry people). But heck ... the fuel gets turned into ethanol, and at least we can drive on 'clean ethanol' or reduce it to hydrogen ..... notwithstanding the petrochemical fertilizer, petrochemical Bug Killers & the petrochemical harvesting Machinery/Trucking & petrochemical heat sources to refine the stuff into fuel, & use more energy to deliver it.
OK, so now one can analyze ethanol use in a fuel cell .... apples to apples. The video posted above already points out how even burning natural gas in a multi cylinder'ed machine - is no better (efficiency-wise) than the complexity of a fuel cell.
So - dust to dust? As was pointed out with the hydrogen being converted from natural gas, would it really be any better vis a vis ethanol converted hydrogen (even if we don't scrutinize the ethics of how we source the ethanol) ?
iduno
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Glad to see you’re not bitter about it.

Actually I’m in the chorus since driving efficiently leads to accusations of being ‘green.’

Bob Wilson

 

Agreed 120%. I envisage a Volt-like series PHEV with a 40 kWh battery and inductive charging, minus ICE plus FC stack that uses liquid (@ 25C, 1 bar) fuel and atmospheric oxygen. So it can run about town on the battery, picking up a kWh or two here and there, and for longer uninterrupted trips and/or boondocking turn on the stack.

 

Fantastic. If I see a compact luxury sedan, spewing 400 hp while towing a decent-size boat, I'll know it's not a hallucination, but a TM3 owner is proving a point

What does your own intuition tell you: If the FCEV is indeed as inefficient as the ICE car, how come the Mirai does 300 miles on 11 kilograms of H2? which is a weight equivalent of about 4 gallons of gasoline.

 

1st - the Mirai has 5 kilograms of hydrogen.
BUT - the answer to your question is pretty simple, & was listed in BOTH the video & the "hydrogen-hoax" suggested read. Perhaps it would be best to investigate one or the other source. Either are a wealth of information for answering those kinds of question in a much more authoritative manner than I.
But in short, since it requires a great deal of energy (either via compression for storage, or refrigeration - roughly minus 400°f, at driving temperatures) just to get the hydrogen into a car ... the hydrogen itself is just a fraction of the efficiency equation. It really doesn't matter that you can travel 300 miles - if the energy used for travel is in essence, only a of the energy spent.

It's like refining gold from sea-water. Sure you can do it, but if the cost efficiency yields less than the value of the oar .... all you'd be doing is reforming one energy source for another of lessor value.
So yes! Check out one of the two informative sources above and you can get such questions answered.

Once answered .... if those sources don't paint a loosing reality - it gets worse. Japan plans to use Australian Brown coal to reform hydrogen, because it's even cheaper than Natural Gas (leaving the mountains of toxic coal ash for Australia to deal with).

Lastly - here in So Cal, hydrogen currently costs $16.63 per kilogram. So now you can see ... it's no bargain.
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Using your expression, "hydrogen hoax", almost every new tech can be portrayed a hoax, or a fad, or a conspiracy.

For example, the EV-basher movement has produced its own authorities, witnesses and reasoning, used to "prove" that the whole EV swindle is for fools ("Citizen! Is your EV as clean as some will have you believe?"). Here are some carefully aligned piece of info that are not wrong per se: 1. Much of the US electricity comes from coal anyway - true. 2. From the power plant to the car battery, it's about 20% loss - true. 3. If not for tens of billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies, very few people would buy EV's - likely true. 4. Some lithium and other minerals, needed for the EV tech, may be linked to warlords, corrupted dictatorships, slave labor and environmental disasters in the place of origin - sadly, true.

Still, a better alternative for a fossil-fuel-dependent, lossy and potentially ethically tainted EV tech is not the ICE, but a renewable-energy-based, less lossy and more ethical EV tech.

The losses in each stage of the fuel cell cycle can be gradually reduced, and so can the costs and the inconveniences - again, this happens with all tech as it matures. The old tech that the FC is intending to replace, the ICE, has the thermodynamical limit to its efficiency, E = 1 - Tc/Th. Since

T​

c​

is never zero, the E is always below 1, even with 100% combustion and no mechanical losses.

Besides, as others have noted, FC aren't inseparably linked to hydrogen; I think the hydrogen has been favored because it had been regularly used in space exploration, so more R&D, I assume, had gone into it than into let's say methanol etc.

 

HOAX is the hydrogen/aerospace scientist's conclusion. But if one doesn't read it, one would never know that.

that's deflection - avoiding scientific fact & laws of physics - saying that EV detractors claim the same problematic issues. All of that has been debunked for years - ever since the Sudbury mine pollution got blamed on nickel metal hydride batteries even though the mines were operational - decades before nickel metal hydride batteries were invented.

It's shocking anyone nowadays would want to source that kind of fake news - especially when it can easily be understood how much there is at stake, for the fossil fuel industry. The more society relies on clean/renewable energy, the greater the surplus of fossil fuel becomes. That deflates the price & profit. But if you use fossil fuels to reform hydrogen, the supply goes down & price goes up. Great, even higher than $16/kg? As impractical as that price is? Although i sourced a 'rocket scientist' - it doesn't take one to understand that the fossil fuel industry has a lot at stake. Middle east wars are fought over the stuff .... so - which fuel source is more likely to generate a HOAX.

That's true! And similarly you can reduce "80" to 40, to 20, to 10, to 5, to 2½, to 1¼, to #'s infinitely microscopic .... never to reach Zero - but even if losses could be reduced quicker - they will never reach zero. And so it is with energy conversion. You don't get more fossil fuel energy in - than hydrogen you take out.
So why do it - especially if its more costly, less efficient - & isn't any cleaner.

again, agreed - there are small parts of the world with surplus tidal / current energy, & surplus geothermal energy that 'can' be stored / converted to hydrogen, despite all its loss conversions - typically it needs to be transported somewhere else, overseas Etc.
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You are a stranger to us but suddenly making unsubstantiated claims:

1. Much of the US electricity comes from coal anyway - true.

2. From the power plant to the car battery, it's about 20% loss - true.

3. If not for tens of billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded subsidies, very few people would buy EV's - likely true.

4. Some lithium and other minerals, needed for the EV tech, may be linked to warlords, corrupted dictatorships, slave labor and environmental disasters in the place of origin - sadly, true.​

It is not the first time we've had anonymous posters do a "hit and wrong" post. It insults our intelligence because you have such a badly distorted image of us.

Let me suggest "asking" rather than telling (replace the strike out with "?") or if you must 'tell us off,' then cite your sources who lied to you. If there is a comment section in your source, we can "cut and paste" from the replies. Better still, use the excellent search functions Mr. Google or here to see our earlier discussions which come with sources sited . . . a good practice taught in English classes.

Bob Wilson

 

From another reputable and recent source;

Is It Time to Give Up the Hydrogen Hoax? | WIRED

Still - fuel sell research is good, even though the supporting fossil fuel industry knows what side of the bread that the butter is on. It really is an age old war of sorts - who controls the power.
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I don't really buy the argument that EV tech is ethically tainted. There are lots of bogus arguments about it, generally from people with vested interests against.

Fuel cells also have thermodynamic limits, they are not magic. 60% appears to be about as good as you can get for hydrogen for transportation, 50% for ice for liquid fuels. The clarity phev gets 110 mpge on electricity, 42 mpg on gasoline after the battery is drained compared to the clarity fuel cell 68 mpge (note this is approximately 60% conversion of hydrogen to electricity). The similarly sized Camry hybrid le gets 52 mpg, the tesla model 3 long range 130 mpge on electricity.

Compare Side-by-Side



The problems with 10,000 psi fcv is not efficiency in going from hydrogen to the wheels. The biggest problem is the cost of the fuel and the inefficiency in making and distributing it. Perhaps there will be technical breakthroughs, but today it cost about $16 to get a gallon equivalent of hydrogen to a car in California, and even more in Germany and Japan. A gallon equivalent of electricity in the US costs about $4.50 in the US, right now gas prices average around $3/gallon. A fuel cell vehicle is going to need 2.5x the electricity to produce the hydrogen if electricity is used, which means it is always going to cost a lot more to fuel than a plug-in when using renewable electricity unless the government subsidizes it for hydrogen and not for plug-ins. The least expensive way to make hydrogen is in a high volume plant converting natural gas to hydrogen, then to liquefy it using electricity, and truck it out to stations. That takes a lot of capital investment which requires high volumes to justify. Say you can get it to $4/kg, how many people would spend more on a fuel cell vehicle with limited numbers of stations versus getting a less expensive phev, bev, or hybrid? Japan is going to do the experiment by eating all the extra costs. Lets see if it works there, where gasoline and electricity are more expensive than the US. They don't have cheap natural gas, but the government can pay to convert coal in australia and ship the hydrogen.

Methanol has been figured out completely on these fuel cells. In the PEM cells that toyota and honda prefer, a reformer is added before to convert methanol to hydrogen and CO2. These reformers are about 80% efficient, so in the 67 mpge mirai on hydrogen, it would then become 54 mpge on methanol with a reformer. Look up a little and you will see the problem. That hybrid camry could be built more cheaply than a methanol mirai to be flex fuel including 52 mpge on methanol (the ice might actually be more efficient on methanol than E10 gasoline). Get the price of fuel cells and reformers down and maybe, but there you have it, similar efficiency at a higher price. No one can tell me the exhaust out of a hybrid camry is really going to kill the planet.

Nissan is working with a different company to use solid oxide fuel cells in a big battery phev. Their problem versus PEM as discussed above is they run hot (about 500 degrees C) which means fairly large warm up costs (thus the need for a big battery to buffer and provide energy while warming up) and good thermal insulation. This has the potential to drop in price much faster than PEM, but will require some technical breakthroughs.