I can't agree with the underlying idea of this article at all.
1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale
2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?
3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all
4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however
5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.
I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.
I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.
1) Hydrogen combustion engines exist, but are extremely inefficent. For this reason all Hydrogen buses currently in use use fuel cells, which are expensive and complicated. That you were unaware of this makes me doubt the rest of your commentary.
2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.
5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.
In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.
In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.
Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.
> 5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.
Thank you, a template ad hominem. I'll cut that out and put it in my scrap book
Ah yes, his opinion on a completely unrelated highly partisan thing being wrong in hindsight implies his opinion about the company he is the very chairman of isn't trustworthy.
Maybe you should be the last person we all learn basic logic from :-)
> hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric
Fuel cells are presumably more expensive than battery packs. The former are barely produced, while the latter are made in gigafactories. You can't just fill up the gas tank with hydrogen, it will leak out and/or cause a violent reaction with oxygen.
> somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot
You can't just store hydrogen in a tank and call it a day. Again, it leaks through everything and is rather reactive. Maybe it could be stored on site, but even then it'll still need to get there.
> it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle
Not intrinsically. Buses could be built with swappable battery packs.
> allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
How many solar panels and how much water you need to power those 100 buses you mention? Hydrolysis isn't very efficient.
> hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy
In theory, maybe. In practice, it is difficult to store at scale.
> Maybe, but a tank of hydrogen burnt through an ICE is much cheaper than either
It's really not. Most of the hydrogen bus projects were killed by the surprising cost of fueling - approximately 4x the cost of electricity.
And no wonder: just the energy wasted producing hydrogen and then using it in a fuel cell is enough to build a battery pack that will last the equivalent.
At its best, generating hydrogen and then putting it through a fuel cell is less than 50% efficient, and that's discounting all the losses present both in BEVs and hydrogen cars.
Hydrogen combustion engines slash that efficiency in half.
Even if you handwave over the hardware required to do all that, the cost is double that of equivalent electricity.
Hydrogen vehicles are EVs too. They don't run H2 through a piston engine, it goes through a catalytic converter that generates electricity, aka Fuel Cell.
Toyota FC stack costs ~$11k, about the same if not cheaper than a 100kWh worth of Li-ion cells.
Because only Toyota makes them and mostly for publicity, yes. But my points are 1) hydrogen cars are pure EVs too, just not lithium, and 2) hydrogen primary battery thing isn't that expensive, or finicky for that matter.
I'm not like a hydrogen believer, I just loathe incorrect technical understandings on the Internet, like any techy person would.
The neat thing with JCB is the hydrogen engines are very similar to the diesel engines, and everything else (transmission etc) is the same. In fact, the engines use the exact same block but with a slightly different head. That means all the expertise and parts required to service these machines in the field is already there. If a battery bus breaks down it'll be on the back of a diesel lorry and back to the depot.
Ever met a diesel mechanic? Every one I've ever come across has a very distinctive diesel cologne. I worry how this plays out in the field when combined with a 10,000psi gas which is explosive is almost any mixture including oxygen.
The greatest tonnages are dug out with bench mining excavators. These work 24/7/365 round the clock to fill trucks from bench faces and empty into trains.
An area such as the Pilbara region moves a billion tonne of raw material a year and ships most of that.
These excavators are electric with cables that drag behind them .. they move very slowly across bench faces and then move back across the face again, it's not like they are very mobile (aside from swinging, dipping, lifting, dumping, returning, etc.)
If you could solve the problem of running electrical cables to mobile equipment that is used in farming, road building, forestry etc. then you'd change the world and put entire industries out of business.
Your example is not very different from how they did mining at the beginning of the industrial revolution: the equipment is tethered to the mine. Electric railways have been thing for almost 150 years now, but the vehicles are still tethered to the rails.
If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution and not worry about mobile energy storage at all. We'd just build stuff around that constraint that equipment has to be tethered. But unfortunately a world has already been built that involves mobile equipment and you won't find much support for tearing it all down and starting again (alas). Greenfield development is engineering on easy mode. The real challenge is figuring out how to move forward given the current world.
I've got a mixed old school capital 'E' Engineering and applied math bachground coupled with a lot of exposure to mining, cattle stations, and wheat farms.
For forty odd years I've been involved in or tangential to projects related to exploration, cost cutting, new technology, optimised processing, etc.
> If we could start from scratch we probably would choose your solution
Not my solution, I first saw electric powered heavy earth moving equipment in th early 1970s.
The greatest savings to companies and greatest benefits to the environment (aside from somehow getting people across the globe to consume less) come from making the greatest consumption areas more efficient.
Mining equipment runs 24/7/365 continuosly, idealy every hour of every day of the year at near maximum capacity allowing for maintainance.
It's a sector that consumes extremely large amounts of transport energy, more than agriculture.
It's open to innovations such as "infinity trains" and massive dedicated solar farms to generate direct power in sunlight and generate on site hydrogen derivitives for generating power at night.
Farming equipment works "hard" (heavy earth turning plowing, harvesting) for a few weeks a year. Other farm activities (seeding, spraying) happens at other times in the year and doesn't require quite the same horsepower.
There's scope to split ag activity between heavy high horsepower peak usage and lighter continuous pass work.
Already we see consumer ready (but not yet widespread) Agri-bots for weeding and spraying - solar charged, battery powered, no human on board, vision enabled self driving devices that can run near continuously (half the night on battery charged during day) that can minimise spraying to "just the weeds".
I don't think a tractor is necessary a bad use case for batteries. They just need battery packs which can do the equivalent of a days work. Electric motors are almost better suited to the use case due to the torque. I'm sure some of the US mega farms have tractors which run all night (and the emissions of those are the least of their environmental issues) but this isn't common elsewhere.
I believe the problem is that a tractor runs for much of the workday at a very high load. Pulling a plough is constant hard work, not like a car that is only using a lot of power while accellerating hard. If you had your foot to the floor in a Tesla constantly you would run your battery flat in a lot less than 8 hours. I have read that the batteries for this application would therefore be infeasibly large.
Yes your example is extremely niche. It only works where you are going to work on one specific application for many years in the same place. It doesn't generalise to building a house, a supermarket or a road. It doesn't generalise to ploughing the Mid-West.
Even in your example it only works if you are taking all of the material to one destination, like an ore refinery. If it was road stone, the rock would get loaded onto a diesel truck for the final part of the journey. So again, the tractor, the excavator on a job site, the lorry, will all stay on diesel or hydrogen ICE
1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale
2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?
3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all
4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however
5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.
I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.
I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.