Featured Shell Closing 7 Hydrogen Stations in California

It was a Fool's promise. I wonder when Toyota will apologize for this Fiasco - what with all of their promotions towards full cells and denigration of electric vehicles. Kind of feel sorry for all of the people duped into leasing or even worse, buying one of these things. Not that toyota was the only or worst promoter.
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wonder what carb is thinking

 

they should have worked with toyota on cow poop

 

Hummm, did someone retire?

Bob Wilson

 

I wonder if there are any Mirai drivers here?

If so, could they give us any indication as to how accurate the report is?

Sounds like one of the major suppliers for hydrogen equipment is part of the problem.

 

Korea also had a hydrogen shortage going one.

 

Maybe the government needs to subsidized the price more & pay suppliers $30 per liter. That ought to hold them for a couple more years as to shortages
(sigh)
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As antithetical as it might seem, yes there was one person here on PC that bought into the Dead End hydrogen Highway.

orenji | PriusChat

I remember about the time he bought into it - you could pick up a used Mirai for something like $15,000 & Toyota would give you the same amount worth of free fuel, which in essence meant the cars were free.

At one time Bob had a California map w/ circles drawn on it representing where you could only drive it around to. The map would make me smile.

Going to have to erase a bunch of circles Bob.
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That's just it.....
They weren't thinking, they were FEELING.

Huffing gas may make sense in some edge cases, but all of its disadvantages will sound somewhat familiar to our readers:
In other words ALL of the usual suspects — high prices, few models, limited charging infrastructure and range anxiety-only MORE so with hydrogen.
They recharge only slightly more quickly than BEVs and a cross-country trip 'may' take on some of the logistical challenges of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
We're just now getting to be somewhat able to plan a cross country trip with BEVs - although this is in CAVU weather and some unfortunately well documented 'trip-fails' have been encountered as recently as this last year.

Range anxiety should not be as much a 'thing' in Japan (as in the EU) but it is what it is......
We're a little more spread out here in the US.

Hydrogen?
It should have died in Manchester Township, New Jersey shortly AFTER people stopped asking "Hindenburg? What's THAT???"

 

Light-duty hydrogen refueling was never the way to go. The hydrogen suppliers should have insisted on heavy duty first and allow the economy of scale to filter down to light-duty. This would have forced them to build a robust and more resilient infrastructure that dragged the compressor and storage manufacturers along with them. You ain't putting in pumps that cost $200 that have duty cycles in the hundreds, you're putting in a compressor that costs 6 figures with a maintenance contract equal to the cost every year and has a duty cycle of 24 fill ups - woohoo. It sucks because there is a whopping two compressor manufacturers (last time I checked) to choose from and their lines don't run full time, because, well gee there is no demand.

My favorite quote from InsideEVs article: Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations

"Few companies can make a better case for it than Shell, though, as the cheapest way to produce hydrogen involves a lot of natural gas. Its proximity to the fossil-fuel industry was supposed to make it cheaper, and provide incentive for robust fueling infrastructure. That hasn't played out, though, and one of the largest oil giants is throwing in the towel. If even a fossil giant like Shell can't justify investing in the future of light-duty hydrogen infrastructure, we're not sure who can."

 

Who would have paid for the fueling stations for heavy duty?
Where would the hydrogen come from?
Government subsidies probably ran out for shell

 

The main reason you saw a light duty surge is because of auto manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, etc., who insisted on producing light duty cars and SUVs. Those manufacturers actually offered up grants to the tune of covering about 80% of initial costs to get a hydrogen station up and running. That's all well and good but what about recurring costs next year and the year after ? The maintenance costs are still astronomically high and they require enormous amounts of electricity to run. I blame this on CARB and other similar government organizations who insisted we change the commuter first and not the heavy duty people like Caterpillar, Peterbilt, Freightliner, Kenworth, Mack, Volvo, Daimler, Ford, Navistar, etc.. The heavy duty mfgs would have had better synergy with the hydrogen suppliers because they use those vehicles too. Even if we used a lot of natural gas to make hydrogen at first, this would eventually lead to more greener ways of producing hydrogen by the time we got to light duty.

 

There is an ongoing shortage of hydrogen as it appears the suppliers are having problems keeping equipment working. This resulted in stations cutting back hours or closing. IIRC, this started back in August, and hasn't improved. Shell closing these stations just made what was suppose to be a temporary condition permanent.

Heavy duty fleets generally have a more defined route than private cars. You can start with stations at a fleet's home base and along some set routes. For cars, you need the stations as common as gas ones. With few hydrogen cars, those stations spend a lot of time idle. More stations with lower utilization means higher costs than a few serving a fleet of delivery trucks.

Where the hydrogen comes from is still a question, but you can focus on more that, and how to transport it, instead of trying to keep enough stations running to support a low number of expensive cars.

 

They heavily subsidized cow poop, but toyota never built its manure feuling stations. Can't blame carb for that.

New Tech Turns Manure Into Hydrogen - FuelCellsWorks

They have a company producing hydrogen from manure in Germany, it isn't going to any fueling stations though. There is a lot of bs in texas, maybe they will use it for the refineries and cut down on the hydrogen from natural gas.

 

Funny thing about cow poop hydrogen - most man-made climate change alarmists find raising cattle the bane of their existence. It can be a very nasty proposition. Looking at some feedlots from satellite images it looks like scorched Earth - not to mention the CO2 that gets released in the poop process. Yet Toyota was extolling the virtues of cow poop. Hard to wrap one's head around the irony.
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Put the cows into huge warehouses and cover the poop piles, and you can capture the methane that is the GHG. Which can then be converted to hydrogen instead of fueling power generation.

 

And the CARB offices.

Bob Wilson

 

Well maybe they were being sarcastic, hydrogen cars run on bs and subsidies. Those who belived it would solve something didn't understand the joke, and maybe toyota's management didn't either.

 

We tried that - at least the 'putting them in warehouses' part.

PITA had objections....AS did biology.
As it turns out, herd animals need more space.