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Obama’s Hydrogen Push Coming Soon

March 7, 2013 by 27 Comments
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honda-clarityWe think it is fair to say that pure electric vehicles have not panned out as both government and auto industry bigwigs had hoped. This has both parties switching gears, and perhaps even getting on the same page for once. A new report says that the Department of Energy is planning to push hydrogen fuel cell technology, and some automakers are optimistic about this shift.

The Obama Administration pushed hard for electric vehicles, but the goal of having 1 million EVs on the road by 2016 seems extremely unlikely at this point. Instead, the Department of Energy is forming a commision called H2USA, which will work with automakers to figure out how to get a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the road.

Big automakers are already forming hydrogen fuel alliances. BMW and Toyota recently teamed up on hybrids, diesels, and fuel cells, and a triple alliance between Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan is working towards selling an affordable fuel cell car by 2017. Automakers seem to believe in fuel cells more than electric cars these days.

While the commission’s tasks haven’t been fully fleshed out, one possible problem for them to solve is the lack of hydrogen fueling structure. While independent companies have talked about “hydrogen highways” running up and down the coasts, the saturation will have to be much denser if fuel cell vehicles are to take off. Right now the only hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the road is the Honda FCX Clarity, and you can only lease that. But if you build it, will the fuel cell cars come?

Automakers have teased the idea of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for most of the last decade. Could this change in government policy be the push fuel cell vehicles need to finally come to market?

Source: Automotive News

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About Christopher DeMorro

Chris DeMorro is a writer and gearhead who loves all things automotive, from hybrids to HEMIs. You can follow his slow descent into madness and non-nonsensical ramblings on Twitter @harshcougar.

  • Jason Carpp

    Who the hell does this guy think he is? Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may be a good thing, maybe it’s not. But why the hell does he have to push it on the rest of us? Shouldn’t that be our decision to make?

  • http://www.facebook.com/keith.malone Keith Malone

    Mercedes is currently leasing its B-Class FCELL in California, too. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Bruce-Miller/100000952005408 Bruce Miller

    Here’s betting that the newer carbon nanotube super capacitor energy storage systems will work out more efficient and safer? H2 is hard to store. leaks through damn near anything, is very costly toproduce, losses huge amount in Heat energy to make and use – where electic storage as in supercapacitors loses nothing source to transfer to motor? not even having the “internal battery resistance” to overcome as in lithium cells?Works at higher voltages, can be DCpulse controlled for very high efficiencies, and can be sourced from Solar, Wind, Wave, Hydro, Tidal Geothermal, Biological, reactor heat, coal oil. natural gas, even a bicycle pedal unit!
     

  • Chuckstone100

    This is a reminder of the battle to use methanol in the 1980s. “If there are stations the customers will come”, does not seem to work. The decision to buy a vehicle and then find a fuel source is not an automatic thing. 

    First you must realize that “BIG OIL” will not leave the market they have owned and controlled until the oil is all gone, plus a year with no oil based fuel, and the violence shown by the vehicle owners with no fuel to run on.

    In the mean time it has been 40 years since the oil crisis of 1973 and then the crisis of 1979. People were shooting at each other in the gas stations in Los Angeles, and no alternative was at hand. That was when Bob Moretti, Speaker of the California Assembly called me to find an alternative to gasoline. We did a lot of research and found methanol alcohol was the best we knew how to use with the gasoline vehicle technologies of the 1970s. These were carburetor engines with minimum use of computer technologies. The methanol could be made from city garbage, agricultural waste, cow manure, and almost any biomass. We could grow fast growing trees on marginal lands with little care or labor. Poor grade coal could be combined with the waste and biomass and the methanol product could be processed from that material in one hour. 93 cents per gallon was the price of the methanol. (See youtube film “93 cents a gallon”.)

    We built the first test vehicle and it became the cleanest car ever tested in California. We passed 6 laws to allow an experimental program by anyone,  The we built 500 experimental unit in half a dozen test fleets and found success for the fleets.

    Then ethanol became the choice and 30 processes operated by farmers were the new answer. The price of corn sky rocketed and the ethanol price was soon well over $3.00 a gallon.

    Behind the scene are bureaucrats sucking money. greed on the part of farmers, and “BIG OIL” spending money to control the politics. The automotive Industry built 60 million “Flex Fuel” vehicles that can use gasoline or ethanol automatically, but not the cheaper methanol.

    And yet there was actually an experimental program underway by “BIG OIL” to start using methanol after 2013. This was known a a secret “Project 5″ known only to the 5 participating “BIG OIL” companies. They produced a report that we got a copy of and it tells how they (BIG OIL) will control the methanol just as they control oil based fuels.

    Do not be fooled that any new fuel approach will ever make it to real production as long as oil is making such big profits from their oil and refinery interests. Environment be damed, they just want more profits and they don’t care a bout damages, real or not.

    Remember it has been over fifty tears that USDOE and California’s Energy Commission have spent million of your tax dollars and have no real results to show for it. Where is the “BEEF” BIG OIL?

  • Andrejacques

    Bad idea! Big oil companies are behind that. You need a lot, a lot of electricity or oil products to do H2. It’s not efficient, it’s expensive and no distribution points. You can’t store a lot of H2 so the range is not there. Batteries and chargers are evolving very fast and it’s not expensive to install a charging point. They speak about H2 for a decade … too late!

  • http://neilblanchard.blogspot.com/ Neil Blanchard

    I don’t think we can give up on electric vehicles just yet.

    The ironic thing about hydrogen fuel cell cars is – they are really electric cars with a hydrogen fuel cell as a range extender.  The Honda FCX Clarity (the car in the image in the article) has a shorter range than the Tesla Model S.

    Another major problem with hydrogen fuel cell cars is that even though fuels cells now last about twice as long as they used to – their life expectancy is only ~75,000 miles.  And they are *not* inexpensive.

    Using electrolysis, it takes more than 3X as much energy to split water than you get out of the resulting hydrogen.  Hydrogen is very caustic, and it leaks through most materials.  Filling stations cannot have roofs (because if the hydrogen leaks, it cannot be trapped) – so they won’t work anywhere it snows.  And compressing hydrogen to 10,000PSI is a non-trivial task.  It can limit the number of cars that can fill up to 15 or so PER DAY.

    My favorite quip:

    Show me an affordable and practical hydrogen car, and I’ll park it next to my unicorn.

    Neil

    • http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com/ John Bailo

      Hydrogen and electricity are nearly the same think..the improvement is that standard chemical batteries are heavy and lossy.  Even in a Prius hybrid, the battery adds 700 lbs to curb weight.

      75,000 is about the replacement cycle for many parts costing $1000 to 2000 like the transmission or clutch.   Fuel cells are very simple and could easily reach that price.   In fact, overall a fuel cell car should be cheaper than an ICE with so many fewer moving parts to assemble.

      Embrittlement is a function of using the wrong non guidelined materials.  Hydrolysis can use renewable resources like wind and solar where super efficiency isn’t a bother, but there are rapid breakthroughs in catalysts and in technology for direct conversion known as artificial leaves.

      • http://neilblanchard.blogspot.com/ Neil Blanchard

         Huh?  The Honda FCX Clarity has a 4kWh battery.   The Leaf battery weighs much less than 700 pounds, and the Prius battery is just 1.3kWh vs the 24kWh Leaf.

        I got 164,000 miles on the only clutch I have ever had to replace.  The fuel cell in the FCX Clarity is reputed to cost $250,000.  Filling it with hydrogen costs about $70 – to drive just 240 miles.

        Right, renewable energy can be “wasted” without polluting – but we should just charge EV’s with it instead and go at least 3X farther.

        With a high efficiency car, electric cars can go 300-400 miles at least.

        Neil

        • Toes

          Recent DOE paper indicated fuel cell stack cost currently in the range of $47/kw instead of the original approximate $280/kw with a goal of achieving $30/kw by 2017 or so. The battery currently used in the Chevy Volt would also work in the initial fuel cell cars as well as most of the other parts or at least the tech to (further) develop fuel cell car parts.  Natural gas cost Utilities $2 and large scale trucking companies in the range of $0.50/equivent gallon for LNG so hydrogen reformed from natural gas (off-the-shelf tech) should be just as cheap except that fuel cell cars would get 2 – 3 times the mileage but evenually 4 – 5 times the mileage.

          • http://neilblanchard.blogspot.com/ Neil Blanchard

             I’ll believe it when I see it.

            Meanwhile, hydrogen costs a lot more than diesel, and it’s availability is next to nil.  Talk about needing to has a whole new infrastructure!

            I’m still convinced that hydrogen belongs in the Unicorn Corral.

            Neil

        • http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com/ John Bailo

          Modern fuel cell cars can use an ultracapacitor.  You only need to store as much energy as would be returned from regenerative braking.

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  • Marc P.

    Unless you find a way to make hydrogen efficiently and without using fossil fuels, this is one BIG dead end !

    • http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com/ John Bailo

       Electrolysis and artificial leaves are just two.

      • Marc P.

        Artificial leaf is interesting but no where near exiting the laboratory setting ( http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-leaf-faces-economic-hurdle-1.10703 ).  Electrolysis requires more energy than the process gives…

        We’re still back to square one.

        Sure … IF we can find an efficient and environmentally responsible way of making, storing and using H2, of course…  why not !

        We just ain’t there at this time !

        Other technologies look more promising and practical at this time.

        • http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com/ John Bailo

          I really don’t understand the complaint.

          What exactly are you comparing hydrogen to?   Gasoline?  Gas is produced from crude oil which has to go through many costly steps of refinement.  In the end they have to use hydrogen to boost the octane up to usable levels.Natural gas…a good option, but also a good source of hydrogen.  CH4.   And hydrogen leaves only water as a by product.And say hydrolysis is 70% efficient…if you use solar or wind when its off peak then who cares!   That energy would be wasted anyway!  And with solar the cells are so cheap if you add 30% more to your farm, big deal.

  • Toes

    Electric cars didn’t make it so we’re moving
    on to fuel cell cars.  Cost of fuel cell
    stacks have been greatly reduced but much work remains and GM’s Chevy Volt is
    proving the concept and has gotten necessary ancillary parts into production with
    the mission of reducing ancillary parts cost. 
    But when the time comes, the government may have to help with fueling
    station construction.

    Ethanol (corn or first generation) replaced MTBE
    oxidizer in gasoline that was polluting ground water.  A plan was to transition to E85 with second
    generation (cellulosic) ethanol but the cellulosic technology has taken more
    time than anticipated to develop and currently larger production plants are
    under construction to further prove the various systems required to collect,
    store, and process the material, etc., and in the future second generation
    ethanol could be reformed to produce renewable hydrogen for fuel cell
    transportation systems.

  • RobS

    Batteries have a few issues so lets back a technology which costs about 5 times as much, uses 3 times as much energy to achieve the same range, has a shorter lifespan then current batteries and uses a fuel which is both massively explosive, incredibly difficult to distribute and store and requires a whole new nationwide distribution network which the EV already has in the grid. You have to be completely oblivious to all common sense, knowledge of physics and engineering to even think for a second that fuel cells are a practical solution for personal transportation other then buses etc.

  • http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com/ John Bailo
  • Barbara Moore

    I can see this will follow the path of argument as to which one option is the best. No one solution works for all.  So let’s keep our eye on the vision of energy independence, improved efficiencies for each option etc.  Funny idea someone had when I was a little girl – “within 10 years, we will put a man on the moon”……Just a reminder that GM fuel cell vehicles have now been on the road for 6 years and have accumulated over 2 million miles of real world driving.  Let’s see if the infrastucture progress can accelerate into a profitable business.

  • T Adkins

    So let me get this right, electric cars are not working well enough now but they might in the near future. So we will put battery electric on the shelf and throw money at the near future of electric cars powered by hydrogen.

  • http://twitter.com/Artstrada Artstrada Magazine

    Gas sellers deliver propane.. they can deliver hydrogen until the infrastructure supports better.. also, keep improving the hydrogen vehicle ranges and once you have them in the 500 mile per fill up range, you will decrease the demand for numerous hydrogen  replenishment

  • DSNI

    Electricity is already wired into human infrastructure almost everywhere. Isn’t it a lot easier to just tap into it?

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