Slew of new mirai articles

First on the factual matter of whether toyota's chart is factual today we check the notes. The old chart was projecting for breakthroughs that haven't really happened yet, your link says it is still in the lab. We in 2014 still don't have it yet, and who knows if it will ever get out of the lab. TO this they compare the installed base of ccgt, even at the time of the chart newer ccgt tech was able to go natural gas to the plug at 50% efficiency. We do have many ccgt plants running at higher efficiency than this today. In the lab its even higher.

None of the 68 hydrogen stations planned or in operation by 2017 will use this future tech in the chart. Many plug-ins though run on more efficiently generated electricity. So no when you compare future tech with breakthroughs to yesterday's tech it is not accurate it is intentionally misleading.

As for car efficiency you may be right the hybrid and fuel cell were tested on the same test, but it seemed to imply the BEV was tested on EPA. I really don't know, but efficiency in a percentage is really something made to confuse, and all cars need to be tested on the same test, not two on a easy one and one on a realistic one, which appears to be what toyota did in the chart there.

Do you still think it represents the state of the art today or the likely future?

As to what the doe projected it was it was 137,000 btus of natural gas, 2000 btus of electricity, and 7200 btus of other, which I can only guess is electricity because that is what we use to run compressors and chillers. To get to 79% efficiency you can't use toyota's 39% efficiency of natural gas to electricy, that gives you 72%. In fact going up to 875 bars and chilling the hydrogen from 350 bar as NREL has done for a station that actually has to fill 10,000 psi cars fast, probably takes that missing 9800 btus of electricity, which if generated as inefficiently as toyota says it is is an additional 25,000 btus of natural gas. Pop that sucker in there (NRELs electricity for reforming and cooling, DOEs future natural gas SMR, toyota's efficiency for electricity) and we get 62.5% efficiency, not far from the 59% I posted.

If we are using in the lab for hydrogen stations why not batteries where the lab has 400 wh/kg versus 240 wh/kg in the most dense current car? I'm sure the toyota chart was written when state of the art was 150wh/kg cells. You can't comare technologies with one using future in the lab, versus one that is using past tech.

The biggest misdirection of the chart of course as noted is that they assume it will be all natural gas, and not electricity. Its running on other non-fossil electriicty (wind, solar, etc) where plug-ins really get a lot more efficient than fcv. So yes if you use renewable electricity in compressing and chilling that hydrogen the process gets more efficient, but couldn't we also use it in the plug-in car?

Again the lab stuff is possible with breakthroughs. I am not sure if we get there or not. With natural gas electrical technology though we have things that blow away that chart running in the field.

For Japan though you won't see this chart its all about electricity, but the newer NREL report points to promising coal to hydrogen with sequestration, and DOE says this is probably cheapest in a new IGCC coal plant.

 

As to what the doe projected it was it was 137,000 btus of natural gas, 2000 btus of electricity, and 7200 btus of other, which I can only guess is electricity because that is what we use to run compressors and chillers. To get to 79% efficiency you can't use toyota's 39% efficiency of natural gas to electricy, that gives you 72%. In fact going up to 875 bars and chilling the hydrogen from 350 bar as NREL has done for a station that actually has to fill 10,000 psi cars fast, probably takes that missing 9800 btus of electricity, which if generated as inefficiently as toyota says it is is an additional 25,000 btus of natural gas. Pop that sucker in there (NRELs electricity for reforming and cooling, DOEs future natural gas SMR, toyota's efficiency for electricity) and we get 62.5% efficiency, not far from the 59% I posted.

If you use electriicty at 100% though its much better, its 74% using NRELs 19000 btus of electiricty. This is something to shoot for in the future, and could be renewable. There is little pressure to make these high compression hydrogen compressors more efficient as the cost of electricity for compression adds little to the cost of the hydrogen. Then again if you are using electricty at 100% would you have to use that figure for bevs also, or increase it from 39%?

I believe UCS means 80% of natural gas plants power comes from combined cycle plants with the balance as single cycle steam or ocgt. The 42% I gave you for the chart is the eia's heat rate for ccgt (2011) adjusted for grid loss. If you use the 80% figure it would probably drop to 40% as the other natural gas is less efficient, but at least on the texas grid rarely used for plug-ins. All natural gas steam are old technology, and many will get retired long before fcv take off. Replacing a 40% efficient steam with a 59% efficient ccgt not only cuts fuel use by more than 30% but allows the plant to cycle with renewables and reduces the needs for ocgt. 35% natural gas ocgt is still needed to complement coal plants, but coal plants are being shut down much faster than they are being built in the US. Calfifornia can only build new ccgt and should be retiring old natural gas steam, their mix in 2013 was down to 4% coal, so their natural gas + coal efficiency should be higher than 42% today given the marginal wind and other non-fossil fuels in the marginal mix.

You still are trying to compare technology that hasn't made it out of the lab yet for hydrogen to older natural gas technology that has stopped being built. Can you give a rationalization for that? At less than $3/gallon gasoline what do you think is more likely in the next decade? That we use tax payer dollars to build thousands t of hydrogen stations across the country, or that we continue replacing aging natural gas and coal plants with today's technology natural gas, wind, and solar? I only mean to inform what today's tech can do and the bad assumptions on that chart. You can't get to the hydrogen efficiency promised without having much higher electrical efficiency.

 

+1

http://www.h2alliance.com/pdf/ie3002843.pdf

DOE didn't meet its 2010 goal.

The top efficient SMR to hydrogen plants use the waste heat to generate electricity and heat the feedstocks in the refinery. These are massive units, but we need a lot of hydrogen to remove sulfur from oil prioducts. We can definitely build huge plants to do this, but then you need to build pipelines and/or truck the hydrogen. The NREL estimate for natural gas at one of these much much smaller average 1500 kg h2/day was 73%. Those in the field are lower, and we need a lot more fuel cell vehicles on the road before.

The difference between that future possible DOE and NREL is only 22,000 btus of natural gas, even those most efficient ones only use 30,000 btus less, or about $0.12/kg of hydrogen The key needed is to drop the cost of the equipment and its maintenance not to make it more efficient at this much smaller size. Equipment and maintenance costs add much more to hydrogen costs. The fuel cell lobby can do hand waiving and claim even more will be made renewable which won't be as expensive.

Now looking out 20 years, say we have some breakthroughs and we are using that 34 kwh of natural gas and 5.6 kwh of renewable electricity. If we think that far out it is highly possible. Then the ghg footprint of a 70 m/kg fcv would be about 105 g/mile carbon dioxide equiv. This is very good, less than half of the gen III prius.

If we have a 70 mile aer phev (i3+rex numbers assume could be in a better car in 20 years) at the same time hat gets 117 mpge for 75% of the miles on electricity and 25% on 40 mpg gasoline, then we need the electricity to be 168 g/kwh or less for the phev to release fewer g of ghg per mile. In 2010 the national grid was 689 g/kwh. PG&E expects to be at 158 in 2017.
http://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/environment/calculator/pge_ghg_emission_factor_info_sheet.pdf

In 2034 I would like to think that many neighborhoods will be as low ghg/kwh as PG&E expects to be in 2017. Lots of assumptions here, but certainly if we look 10 years out fcv are much higher ghg than plug-ins today. In 20 years they may be ahead, and the problem will be cost, but if the breakthoughs happen its then that these cars will be ready for massive public funds for commercialization. If 10,000 psi hydrogen can not be made cheaper, methanol is possible to burn in both phevs and fcv from all the sources of hydrogen. These simply need a methanol reformer on-board which adds to vehicle costs but drops refueling costs. 2004 A UT professor wrote why a methanol replacement for gasoline would be much cheaper than hydrogen.

 

You know it is what it is. I really don't think cutting a 2010 budget that was restored in congress really stopped hydrogen technology break thoughs that were supposed to happen by the end of 2010. Eventually the budget was really cut in 2012 and here we are today. The budget in Japan surely increased a great deal as the US one decreased, and even under chu's cuts R&D for reduced cost hydrogen continued. I don't think he did any damage, the damage really was congress cutting better research to fund this hydrogen boondogle. I'm sure opinions differ. The Federal government has spent about $3B now, GM $2.5B on fcv. Its a lot of money for very slow progress.

Well we do have this new large number of articles about the mirai, and they are talking about 50 or 100 years from now. This is quite different from earlier in the year when this car was going to impact us heavily in the next decade. I think that fairly well validates chu's point of view that they won't have much of an impact for 20 years (stated in 2009, so until 2029).

California has come up with $220M just for stations, Japan has come up with more. Surely this around half a billion dollars for hydrogen fuelling is enough to bring this breakthrough out of the lab if it has happened. How could we behind 2010 today in 2014 with toyota claiming so many breakthroughs?

I don't think chu actually changed his mind, I think he just got tired of dealing with CARB and the California fuel Cell Lobby and Nancy Pelosi over it all. I don't think the fuel cell lobby's claim of a midnight conversion hold's much water.

But it is what it is. Mountains of cash for hydrogen stations. We will see in 2018 how efficient they are and how many of these cars are on the road. Certainly it won't be the 53,000 Nichols claimed would be running around in 2017 when she told Chu how wrong he was.

The goals for plug-ins and fuel cells were both overly optimistic. Goal for fcv by end of 2014 was 3000, we are at about 10% of that, goal for end of 2017 is 53,000, we probably should cut that back to 6000 given the recent articles (12%), no clue when california gets over 50,000. The goal for plug-ins was 1 Million by the end of 2015, it looks like we will ahve slightly less than 400,000 (37%) and the 1M will happen in 2018 or 2019.

The goal of the plug-in subsidy (always less per vehicle than fuel cell subsidy) was sub $300/kwh by 2020. It looks like both tesla/panasonic and lg will achieve that goal ahead of schedule, and tesla/panasonic may be sub $200/kwh at that date. Some battery subsidies were for american manufacture of most of the batteries, and that will also have been achieved. Subsidies failed to make a US company the main cell manufacturer though, that died with A123 being sold to a Chinese company instead of JCI.

So we shouldn't put bad promises of a future for fuel cells, then claim plug-ins and electrical generation won't improve. You can't keep looking at 10 year old promises and claim they are true. I certainly would be claiming that a chart saying 1M plug-ins by 2015 is or was anything but hype.

That seems well and good, but can you tell me why FCV should get more than twice the subsidies as phevs? That appears to be the point you are arguing, which is not a level playing field. At least update your data from that old chart with some real numbers.

 

One that I missed
Has the Time Finally Come for California's Hydrogen Highway? - Scientific American

That makes total california commercialization funds for hydrogen stations only at $270M through end of 2023 ($90M + 9 years (2015-2023 of $20M). How many cars? When Mary Nichols angrily wrote to Chu she said california would have 50,000 cars by 2017 (language makes it beginining of).

That seems like a much more reasonable number. California is not only paying to build these stations but to keep them open too with few customers. The state will pay up to $300,000 for each stations operation and maintenance expenses. What do new stations cost taxpayers?

Notice the weasel words here. They have switched to premium gasoline and are probably using some inflated efficiency to get to competitive to premium gas. Certainly I would expect costs to drop bellow $13/kg if they are going to make this work.
Linde Hydrogen in West Sacramento | Fleets and Fuels.com

Note this is higher volume than other hydrogen stations in california, allowing faster fills. The ghg though will be typical and much higher than CFCP estimates, as it will be filled by trucked in liquid hydrogen. That makes the stations much less expensive though than if it had its own reformer on premises.