It would be cheaper than gasoline only 32% but way more expensive than electricity. If it is real still would not save hydrogen.

Fuel Calorific value MJ/kg Efficiency Useful MJ/kg
Gasoline 44.4 20% 8.88
Hydrogen 121 50% 60.50

Fuel Price Eur/kg Price Price $/gal Price €/MJ
Gasoline 1.083168083 4 0.122
Hydrogen 5 0.083

Dave, at least on my part it is not an opposition to using hydrogen in vehicles. It's economics.

I am 100% for any technology that makes it possible to get away from fossil fuels. Hydrogen math hasn't worked.

If this technology can produce cheap hydrogen in volume then the math has changed some. The next question would be whether it has changed enough.

Producing hydrogen is only one place where energy loss has made hydrogen a less viable technology. That hydrogen still needs to be compressed, distributed and turned into kinetic energy.

Bob:

I've gone through the math on the energy efficiency and cost of hydrogen versus batteries umpteen times on this blog, and heard nothing numeric in response.

If you wish to claim that the math doesn't work, here is one of the umpteen studies on the issue.
I await your detailed point by point rebuttal showing all numbers and calculations.

http://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/progress12/i_0_satyapal_2012.pdf

To me, an obvious application is a cheap hydrogen source for an FT fuels plant. The huge capital investment required for an FT plant doesn't seem so risky when your price of hydrogen is fixed (vs the variable nature of NG).

Split water. Siphon H to Route A, siphon O to route B. Route B feeds a coal fired power plant (essentially) which partially oxidizes C to CO which gets siphoned to Route C. Route A and C converge in the presence of a catalyst and, boom, you have methanol etc.

The question, then, is how durable is this photo-catalyst?

“Route B feeds”

@Greenplease

Do you have any experience with oxygen as an industrial gas?

There are those who always come up with ways for others to do things without considering the safety of those who actually do the work.

“You had better write to Daimler, and tell them ”

@Davemart

When they try bring hydrogen to my town I will explain why I will not let them do it.

“The decades of experience piping and transporting hydrogen was obviously all a mistake, as we have your word for it. ”

Actually I do have decades of experience doing it in an industrial setting. Did it safely. However there are numerous failures resulting in deaths.

Making hydrogen ubiquitous in our communities is just not going to happen. It is not a battle that I will ever have to fight since since HFCV will never be more than an very expensive concept.

@Davemart, "[Kit P] I don't mind your being an ignorant fool, but it is tedious when you keep sharing it."

Thanks for this comment, disregard if gratitude isn't appropriate.

“medical profession is crazy. ”

I have a great deal of respect for the medical profession. When they tell me that levels of pollution above a certain level are harmful I listen. Then I check to see what the levels are where I live. Where I live has good air quality.

What is the problem?

Dave, I don't have any desire to go through your linked paper line by line and review it for you. It doesn't seem to tackle the question of EV or FCEV.

But perhaps there's a thing or two in it that is useful.

They present a drawing of what an 18-wheeler hydrogen fuel delivery trailer might look like.

That, of course, is part of the infrastructure we would need to build were we to use hydrogen. And infrastructure has to be paid for.

With EVs the infrastructure is largely in place. The grid is up and has plenty of spare capacity during off-peak hours. All we would need is some outlets for people who park in lots and on the street. And a few rapid charger points (see my next comment).
--

They suggest that a hydrogen fueling station would cost about the same amount as an EV charging station.

OK, but we would need enough hydrogen fueling station for every FCEV on the road while we would need only a limited number of charging stations along our major travel routes. Most people would charge at home. The infrastructure cost for hydrogen fueling stations could be 20x as much as what we would need to spend on EV charging stations.
--

Perhaps I missed it, but did they do an analysis of the percentage of starting electricity that would make it to kinetic energy with electrolysis/FCEV vs. BEVs?

There are energy losses in compressing, transporting, and converting to electricity in the fuel cell. That drives up the cost per mile.

I don't see what you seem to see in this article.

Let me bring back this older article which could be outdated, but let's see...

The process of separating hydrogen from the water molecule, compressing and distributing is energy lossy. By one accounting if we start with 100 kWh of renewable electricity only 27 kWh actually makes it 'to the road' with a hydrogen FCEV.

Put that in the context out of the original 100 kWh about 69 kWh end up moving an EV.

http://phys.org/news85074285.html

The energy input per mile cost would be 1.9x higher for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle if we used electricity to make hydrogen. Add on the infrastructure costs.

Now the technology in this article might lower the cost of hydrogen below that of hydrogen created by electrolysis. We'd have to look to see if it lowered it enough to overcome the other losses in the process.

And the cost of fuel would need to be significantly lower than using electricity in order to justify the capital expense and operational expenses of the hydrogen infrastructure.

@Bob and Darius,
The message of this article is low-cost H2 production via dirt-cheap catalyst and one-step from solar to H2. When H2 can be produced very cheaply, it can be incorporated into waste biomass to make cheap synthetic methane or liquid hydrocarbon fuel in order to take advantage of existing infrastructure. In this way, we can overcome petroleum dependency without infrastructure change.

The efficiency difference between H2 and battery electricity is moot when synthetic hydrocarbon fuels and H2 can be produced cheaply and at large enough quantity to satisfy demand.

Renewable energy electricity is cheap, but battery storage is not. RE H2 can be stored at much lower cost than battery electricity, so, the overall costs of Battery electricity and H2-FC are comparable.

Distributed electrolysis and FC can take advantage of the waste heat of electrolysis and of FC to greatly reduce the efficiency loss. All it will take is to upgrade the existing NG piping system to become H2-compatible.

Vast quantity of H2 is currently used to make fertilizer and for petroleum refining and for organic chemistry synthesis. The technologies for safe handling and storage of H2 already exist. All it will need is to scale up for mass consumption.

Darius, we can't continue to burn natural gas for electricity. We've got to get carbon off our grids.

Right now NG is 'acceptable' because it lets us get coal off the grid quicker. A 100% NG grid would be as disastrous as a 100% coal grid. NG releases about half as much CO2 as coal per MWh of electricity but methane leaks are an immense problem and cancel out that CO2 gain.

Because NG is dispatchable we can turn if off when wind and/or solar are available, which is quite a bit of the average 24 hour cycle. Coal and NG are about equally bad but 30% NG (plus 70% wind and solar) is immensely better than 100% coal.

Battery technology is coming on pretty quickly. Eos Systems is putting their zinc-air batteries on the ConEd grid in the next few months and claim a total cost of roughly $0.10/kWh for <24 hour storage.

That is a NG killer. If they can store cheap off-peak power at their claimed price they will largely replace gas peakers used for daily peak demand fulfillment.

Eos is more expensive than pump-up hydro but because they can be installed so quickly and distributed around the grid, avoiding transmission costs, they will likely greatly reduce future pump-up and CAES builds.

And there are much cheaper battery technologies headed into manufacturing.

Hydrogen might compete as a grid energy storage methodology. Again, the math will decide.

Bob:
I assure you that I have done exactly that kind of line by line analysis of energy subjects which I am interested in, and can readily provide that level of detail in discussing the often foolish renewables schemes.

Your anecdotal approach simply amounts to pick and mix, and doesn't even get to grips with the issues.

Your notion that the costs of hydrogen infrastructure is massive and virtually rules it out is without foundation, for instance, as infrastructure does not last forever so all the oil and gas infrastructure will need replacing at some point, including the pumps on forecourts, and you need a heck of a lot less of those than you would need roadside charging points if everyone went to BEVS as a lot of cars don't have garages.

You then pick your assumptions which give you the result that BEV cars are more efficient than fuel cell cars if the power comes from electrolysis.

For starters it doesn't, as a lot of both electricity and hydrogen comes from natural gas and fossil fuels, and the two are level pegging on that.

So the ground shifts to insisting that we must allow for renewable sources, not fossil fuels.
There is no way we can actually determine what the efficiencies will be at that date in the future, as the article we are commenting on shows.

The efficiencies you reckon on simply would not apply.
They also don't apply to hydrogen from biomass, or to the same extent to high temperature electrolysis, or indeed to systems like that Audi is using so that the waste heat from hydrogen production is utilised in combined heat and power.

Your notion that renewables can form a major portion of the grid without the use of hydrogen is not one which any of the countries or major schemes is on board with, they are all looking to use hydrogen in a big way, which might give you a clue as to what is practical.

I'm not even going to start on the idea that CAES or whatever can avoid the need.
A bit of reading up would show that the few alternatives are in fact severely constrained in all sorts of ways, including in the case of CAES geography and the large amounts of natural gas that have to be used.

The simple reality is that the bright ideas have already been thought of, and if people do a quick search they would find out the reason why hydrogen is an essential component of renewable grids.

Personally nuclear works just fine with battery cars, much more efficiently than via hydrogen, but that is never, ever what battery only people want.

They have a fantasy that we can just run the lot on solar with a bit of wind.

That fantasy has no basis in technical reality.

Even the Germans who are completely nuts in their energy plans recognise that the only way they can make that work is with shed loads of hydrogen storage.

If you think differently, and that you have a cunning plan with they have not thought of, I would have thought the very least you could do is engage in substantial, detailed, point by point rebuttals.

I have for loony wind power in the UK, and solar in the UK

@Bob,
A hydrogen generation and distribution system will be built gradually as H2 will gradually overtake petroleum as transportation fuel and NG for home heating in the form of FC-CHP. The cost will come down with experience and with mass production. The cost of H2 infrastructure will be financed by private money and will be amortized gradually as the consumers will pay for the new form of energy, but at no higher cost than what they are paying now for fossil-fuel energy, due to the greater efficiency of H2 utilization in FCV's and in home FC-CHP.

BEV's and PHEV's are also very valuable way to displace petroleum demand, but cannot replace H2 infrastructure, and Davemart has discussed at length.