Featured Toyota Chasing Tesla Styling With 2nd Generation 2021 Mirai Fuel Cell Vehicle

In 2010 battery packs cost about $1000/kWh. In 2017 they were down 77% to $227/kWh.
Electric vehicle battery cost dropped 80% in 6 years down to $227/kWh - Tesla claims to be below $190/kWh - Electrek

This doesn't all show up in efficiency gains. Prices of EVs have dropped, ranges have gone up and weight has come down.
Battery technology is advancing very quickly. Will it forever? No, of course not. But there are enough opportunities to pursue where I think it likely to continue at a rapid pace.

 

And the Flux Capacitor/Mr. Fusion could make time travel possible.

What evidence is there that solid state will be more energy dense or cost less?

 

The main advantage I've heard for solid state is less risk of damage when fast charging; it will make the 5 minute charge people want easier to achieve.

 

I haven't heard any SOFC-related news from Nissan for a while. Is it a fact that they are still "working" on it?

 

I'm not sure who "we" are, but world governments and industry had built 377 hydrogen fueling stations by this summer and have used coal, natural gas, land fill gas, wind, and solar and maybe some other stuff to provide them with hydrogen using distribution by pipeline, truck, and ship. It seems most people seemed to say costs would drop when 100 were built. Soon we will be 4x and prices have not dropped as promised. The technological miricles that came with the billions of dollars of R&D have been much slower that those proponents.

By The Numbers | California Fuel Cell Partnership
Most of the fcv are in the US with 41 stations. That makes california the place with highest concentration and highest number of fcv in the world. Costs of building hydrogen stations are much higher than they expected and reliability of the network is poor, meaning they likely will need to add costs instead of reduce them to have a reliable system. In the California there were problems both this summer and last. In Norway problems this summer. No problems in Japan so far but there are over 100 stations costing about $5M each servicing fewer cars than California (less than 40 per station). Do the math, Japanese hydrogen likely can't fall bellow $10/kg of course they can subsidize it a lot and tax oil enough to make it cheaper than oil but ...

One thing that is much makes fueling much more expensive is purity. To use hydrogen to remove sulfur from fuel only requires puity of 80%. For current fcv it requires 99.97% according to nrel. It simply more expensive to produce the fuel and the vehicles than people were assuming. Perhaps next generation mirai will cost only $50K USD to produce and get 70 mpge and 400 mile range. That is about $10k more than the selling price of a 240 mile range tesla model 3 or a lexus es hybrid. How many will sell without massive subsidies. Who will pay for the hydrogen stations?
Compare Side-by-Side


Compare Fuel Cell Vehicles

 

Haven't heard of them abandoning it, and doing so would not be likely before the Tokyo Olympics.

 

i hear they are abandoning ......

Fuel cell cars hit roadblock as Nissan-Renault pulls out - Nikkei Asian Review
iirc - Daimler has started coming to their senses as well;

Daimler Steps Back From Fuel-Cell Car Development | Fortune
.

 

Not so fast my friend. Nissan simply has dropped out of the small battery hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Ceres Power enters new partnership with Nissan on solid oxide fuel cell technology for EVs - Green Car Congress
They appear to be working with less capital on large battery liquid fuel phev fcv that can also operate on hydrogen where governments push them, but can run on methanol or ethanol for governments that want them.

e-Bio Fuel-Cell | NISSAN | TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

Now the demo Nissan SOFC phevs were really for the rio olympics. These things run hot and there are some technical challenges to get costs down, but by using less expensive fuel like methanol. Currently unsubsidized methanol is about $2.25/gge. Dispensing it at stations should be similar to the cost of gasoline. The advantage of methanol is it can be burned in a slightly modified phev with traditional ice that can also use gasoline as fuel.

 

That partnership was about commercialization of a hydrogen FCEV, not the complete end of research, "Although this undertaking has been abandoned, Nissan and Renault are expected to continue cooperating with Daimler and Ford on research involving fuel cell vehicles."

What was not part of that was Nissan's SOFC fuel cell that uses ethanol. Unlike PEM fuel cells that need pure hydrogen, solid oxide ones are flexible when it comes to the fuel they use.
e-Bio Fuel-Cell | NISSAN | TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES
Nissan Brazil ends initial tests of ethanol fuel cell | Automotive Industry News | just-auto
A year ago they entered a partnership with Ceres Power for SOFC development for EVs.
Ceres Power enters new partnership with Nissan on solid oxide fuel cell technology for EVs - Green Car Congress

It seems Nissan is keeping FCEVs from plug ins, but these fuel cells may become replacements to ICE range extenders.

And @austingreen beat me to it.

 

Maybe it is because the launch site buys H2 in quadruple Costco-sized quantities...but personal cars buy in much smaller amounts.

Mike

 

The one that allows you to fully refuel at home with your own solar panels.
This is the same option that "most" people would do 50 out of 52 weeks a year.

Mike

 

So much misinformation California has the most FCV on the road! Really?? Japan has the highest and growing. China is growing. Most Asian countries are looking at FCV over EV. Hydrogen is growing worldwide. Global ownership of fuel cell vehicles will surge to 5.01 million units in 2032 from 10,000 units in 2018, and sales revenue will soar from USD400 million in 2018 to USD255.2 billion in 2032, with an accumulative total of USD1.2 trillion during the period.

 

That same prediction was made back around 2001...don't need hybrids in 10 years we'll have millions of fuel cell cars.
A useless prediction that far out. If there is no factory being built today it is just wishes and hopes

Mike

 

How many on road fcv do you think japan has? It is less than 4000. I included one source the calfifornia fuel cell partnership.
By The Numbers | California Fuel Cell Partnership

They count 3404 on 8/1/2019 in Japan. Toyota banks on Olympic halo for the humble bus to keep hydrogen dream alive - Reuters
That conforms to NPRs report in march, and reuters in september.

Do you have a source that is reliable with a higher number for japan. If you look at your own number of 10,000 in 2018 you should realize that means over half must be in california. I would take numbers in 2032 with a large grain of salt.

 

Is that so?
As of Oct 2019, there are 7570 hydrogen cars and 31 buses in California. The numbers for Japan from August are 3386 cars and 18 buses.
By The Numbers | California Fuel Cell Partnership

Last year, the global electric car fleet exceeded 5.1 million. So it is going to take 13 years for fuel cell vehicles to match just the number of plug in battery cars that were on the road last year. Under current policies, EV car sales by 2030 will be 23 million annually, with over 130 million on the road.
Global EV Outlook 2019

And @austingreen did it again.

Came across this on fuel cell durability. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73011.pdf

The DOE has a 2020 target for fuel cell performance of 5000 hours with less than 10% voltage degradation. That length of time corresponds to 150k miles of service for a car. The data from pre-Mirai(it and the Nexo were too new at the time) FCEVs are showing the average point at 10% loss was 2000hrs with a max of 4000hrs. It is a big improvement from ten years ago, and the average might reach 3250hrs in another ten if the pace continues.

 

please stop confusing us with facts!

 

Meanwhile this just showed up today in my news feed: Cummins hires a FC maven to pursue both PEM and solid oxide

Cummins Inc. Names Amy Adams VP of Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Technologies | Business Wire

 

It’s somewhat worse than that. Currently, the emphasis is on greater storage for those of Us who investigated actually investing in them. So that issue is somewhat mitigated by planning on servicing 28 vehicles. They still haven’t solved the repressurization issue and I’m not sure how physics can get around that. Without getting into NDA territory, I love how they say you can refill in 3 to 5 minutes. Unless you are the 4th car in line. Then you have to wait about 15 to 20 minutes. Also NREL has told us to plan on losing about 20% of product because of evaporation between refilling the storage tanks.

The recurring costs are just nuts, and now that that those two places have had explosions, guess how much insurance went up? There’s a couple of 0’s added to the percent. Currently I’m just not sure how a refilling station can be profitable any time soon on anything less than $15/Kg and that’s with rather substantial tax breaks. I just don’t see how any commercial business can survive on $300/day. I respectfully withdrew.


Unsupervised!

 

Came across a chart in a Power Point presentation on the web that gave the fill times under various conditions. For the SAE 3 minute standard, as long as 15 minutes for 5kg was acceptable. Granted, a station properly sized for the amount of traffic it will see should be closer to the 3 minute side, but it seems the hydrogen car manufacturers are going with larger than 5kg tanks to get longer ranges.

 

lol. I believe a liquid hydrogen truck can carry about 4 metric tons of hydrogen. If you have a plant producing the stuff close that was built over a decade ago, and don't have to deliver it on demand but on a schedule determined over a year go, its pretty easy. It still is going cost you more than $1/kg for delivery and boil off. A shuttle used 739,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (about 220,000 kg) according to NASA in which 239,000 gallons were lost in boil off during storage and transfer. That's about 55 truck loads but you don't need 55 trucks because it can be delivered over days. If the hydrogen going into the trucks cost $3/kg, its still would make the cost in the shuttle be $4.34/kg even if NASA didn't need to pay for equipment to transfer and store because of losses to get it to the shuttles.

Now what if you need to buy enough trucks and storage for 1000 stations (CARBs 2030 goal) that are only fueling 400 kg on average a day? You could build a 10 day tank at each of the stations for a truck load of hydrogen but you either need expensive equipment to store it as a liquid or a lot of space to keep it as compressed hydrogen. That is going to add a lot to the cost if you are only going to supply a small a amount of fuel cell vehicles. Lets say its $5M (it actually costs much more today if you are storing it as liquid and are built for that volume) and the government has given you an interest free loan, and the station operates for 20 years with no maintenance then just that with no electricity costs or human employee cost is going to add $1.71 kg. DOE's goal for the cost is $2/kg and maybe you can get there some day, but no public station is doing this volume and those other costs are adding a lot more than $2/kg even with california and US tax payers putting up so much of the capital cost of the stations. You would need 800,000 fcv driving 12,000 miles per year to use those stations to get costs down to something like $7/kg in a 1000 station network. Given that the US currently has a little less than 1% it would take massive subsidies to get there. Maybe you can tax gas enough to get people to buy in then and build a nation wide network. In 2009 in response to steven chu's effort to cut US hydrogen subsidies, Mary Nichols of CARB said that would be 50,000 fcv on california's roads by the end of 2017. Subsidies were not only restored they were increased. Now in 2019, a decade later, CARBs estimate is 48,000 fcv in 2025. This is definitely more realistic. They would also like to have 200 stations in 2025, but these would face low utilization and require higher subsidies per kg of hydrogen capacity. The government could just charge taxpayers for the difference but as numbers get bigger those subsidies get less sustainable to favor lower volume 10,000 psi hydrogen stations

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/AB8_report_2019_Final.pdf
Challenging Chu on Hydrogen Fuel Cells - MIT Technology Review

Let's continue the experiment but why not wait for a breakthrough instead of asking for funding for more than the 64 hydrogen stations currently operating or at least funded. Perhaps metal hidries will cut distribution and storage costs. Maybe a shift to methanol with on board reformers. Why waste money on more stations? Japan has 109 stations and will build more. The us can change if there are breakthroughs but they do not seem like they are coming. Sure fuel cells might be worthwhile to subsidies 10,000 per year.