Gas Station Owners Push for Hydrogen Fuel Cells in Japan

The gas station industry isn’t just taking a nap while Elon Musk and Tesla are busy making everyone else look bad. The big fuel distributors have an infrastructure that EVs, for the moment, can’t match – and they want to continue to be able to capitalize on that infrastructure in a “green” tomorrow. That means they want a future that involves their filling stations.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Japan, where oil distributors have started to retrofit gas stations to allow them to fill hydrogen fuel cells. The Japanese government is, so far, eager to provide financial assistance to and is considering additional deregulation of hydrogen to make it easier to set up the fuel supply networks for fuel-cell vehicles like the Honda Clarity.

The gas station industry (as quoted in the Japan Times) is quick to point out that electric vehicles need nearly 30 minutes to fully charge (and that’s with a quick-charger), but may only travel 100 miles on that charge. A fuel cell vehicle, by contrast, needs three minutes to refuel with 5 kg of hydrogen (about the same amount of time as a gasoline-fueled car) which would allow it to travel nearly 300 miles.

So, could we expect to see a push towards hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the US funded by gas station lobbies? Probably! “It’s possible fuel cell vehicles might replace electric vehicles,” according to Toyota Motor Corp. Vice Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada, and Toyota seems to know what people want to buy, you know?

I’m not sure I like the idea of continued dependence on an established infrastructure (as opposed to a home charger or home filling station for CNG), but the emissions from hydrogen (basically water) are certainly an improvement over the emissions from gasoline. We’ll just ignore that whole “Hindenburg” thing, then, and keep looking out for those silver linings.

Source: Japan Times.

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Tags: business, fuel cell, fuel cells, gas station, gas stations, h, hydrogen, hydrogen cars, japan, news, oil companies, Toyota

About the Author

Jo Borrás I've been involved in motorsports and tuning since 1997, and write for a number of blogs in the Important Media network. You can find me on Twitter, Skype (jo.borras) or Google+.

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Uncle B

Jo! you didn’t do the math! Electricity to make H2 and the inherent losses in the process, then storing and filling and storing again and consuming (losses) in on-board cells ( more expense, more losses) for electric drive to the wheels – very long path?
Shorter path: Electric to Li batteries, to electric hub drives?
Even better path: Electricity to nano carbon super capacitors – no internal resistance losses, to hub motors and at higher voltages, lower currents, for smaller cheaper capacitors, lighter wiring, and lighter motors? Even “spare” Li batteries on board, with “Upvertors” to charge super-caps? Inductive loops in pavement for on the fly charging? HV and HF of course – and then the Tesla thing? Asians (Chinese) will see this break-away from Western logic and possibly already have?
Check out your P=IR Jo! Then read up on reactive power, capacitor phase shifting to save power and look for Asian and probably Chinese A.C. high voltage low current cheap and dirty solutions?
America sleeps while Pf (power factor) serves them and has from the 1920’s?
- Sten Seemann
  
  Agreed. Currently 95% of available hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, emitting CO2 in the process. That could change, but has not yet. Battery technology is improving rather rapidly though.
- Peter Thomas
  
  That’s is why Solar / Wind is being used… Hydrogen is an energy carrier…
  - RobS
    
    It’s a poor one with far larger conversion and storage losses then electricity stored in batteries, and significantly more expensive.
    - Jo Borras
      
      Yup. That said, since when is the oil industry interested in energy efficiency?
- Mark Penrice
  
  Yep. Electrolysis is a heinously inefficient process. You might get back 20% of the energy you put in (from whatever power source – solar, wind, regen braking, coal, gas, surplus hamsters) at BEST when the H2 is then used in a fuel cell, never mind a combustion engine.
  
  At least, that’s the case with current tech. There are some supposed breakthroughs of late that make it maybe 2-3x more efficient, but that still represents massive lossage. You’d be far better off using a plug-in hybrid.
  
  Industry as a whole prefers to use processes like gas reforming that work on a massive chemical plant scale, themselves use tons of energy (just you might get 25% back instead of 20%… businesses live and die in the tiny margins), and usually an input of some kind of fossil feedstock.
  
  I think the hydro economy could be an awesome thing if it ever got going, and it’s certainly a good way of storing energy cleanly and compactly if you’ve got tons of it going to waste and would never be able to capture all of it anyway… but for most practical purposes there’s a lot of hurdles to overcome yet.
- Jo Borras
  
  You’re back? Oy …
  
  Just a quick point, since you’re (quite obviously) still insane: I didn’t do any math, nor is any math relevant to an article that’s meant to inform readers about a group of lobbyists trying to push an agenda that may be relevant to their interests.
http://xeeme.com/MrEnergyCzar MrEnergyCzar

Is this a joke, cracking water to make hydrogen is a huge net-energy loser… this is the last thing energy starved Japan needs to be doing…

MrenergyCzar
Peter Thomas

Took me about 5 minutes to find the below video and links… Fuel Cells working with municipal wastewater treatment plants producing 3 value streams of hydrogen, electricity and heat all from a human waste! Impressive in my opinion.

“New fuel cell sewage gas station in Orange County, CA may be world’s first”

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/orange_county&id=8310315

“It is here today and it is deployable today,” said Tom Mutchler of Air Products and Chemicals Inc., a sponsor and developer of the project.

2.8MW fuel cell using biogas now operating; Largest PPA of its kind in North America

http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/news-events/news-archive/2012/october/28-mw-fuel-cell-using-biogas-now-operating-largest-ppa-of-its-kind-in-north-america

Germans are in favour of fuel cell cars

http://www.platinum.matthey.com/news-and-events/news-articles/2013/march/21st/germans-are-in-favour-of-fuel-cell-cars
- Mark Penrice
  
  Now THAT’S interesting.
  
  After all if there’s one thing that’s likely to be a growing thing in future, it’s waste heat capture and utilisation.
  
  My own pet theory is that a large hidden contributor to global warming is the heat released both by the generation and the use of supra-“natural” energy itself. All that stored sunlight being released in a short timeframe … and then, more of it being captured by ourselves via renewables than would otherwise be normally, and released in concentrated bursts … instead of going either into plants, or radiating straight back out in to space.
  
  It’s hard to do much about the waste heat produced during the use of that energy (other than switching to low energy lightbulbs and electric motors as much as possible), but there’s a huge amount released during its generation that could be captured and more efficiently re-used instead of just heating the air…
Peter Thomas

Interesting article here… bodes well for the Co2 capture while MCFC (molten carbonate fuel cell) work…

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/515026/fuel-cells-could-offer-cheap-carbon-dioxide-storage/
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Mark Penrice

Sorry Jo … your maths area a bit to cock there.

“5kg of fossil fuel” is what we over here would call “a little more than one gallon of diesel”. If you can make a car that goes 300 miles on that much regular fuel, then you’re sitting on a goldmine my friend.

Multiply that by about ten for the true figure.

If they can make a car go 300 miles on 5kg of hydrogen, that’s pretty good as well. I’m not sure of the efficiency of burning it or using it in a cell, but that seems rather on the high side itself. You can compress it down quite considerably; it may be the lightest gas at atmospheric pressure, but it becomes a lot denser under pressure…

And ignore the Hindenburg. That burned mainly because it was badly designed and covered in highly flammable material (make a huge airship full of chimneys designed so plenty of fresh air can rush in and through … then paint its fabric cover with experimental metal-particle paint derived from rocket fuel… and fill it full of hydrogen, then send it out into an environment where huge sparks from sky/ground potential differences are an everyday occurrence… what could possibly go wrong?). Plus it was made and operated by the Nazis, in an age where “health and safety” meant “learning not to poke yourself in the eye with a stick”. Even something of THAT type, built now, would be designed and operated very differently. A passenger car? No part of one of them other than the presence of hydrogen would be recognisable to someone familiar with the other.
- hydrogen hype
  
  1 Kg of hydrogen has about the energy in 1 gallon of diesel. Fuel cell cars today get a little better fuel economy than hybrids, not much better. The honda clarity is 60 mpge, the prius is 50 mpg. The fuel cell costs much more, and needs fueling infrastructure (government subsidies) much more than plug-in hybrids.
  - Mark Penrice
    
    *checks*
    OK, I’ll grant you that hydrogen has a better energy density per weight, assuming you can extract it with similar efficiency, but it’s not 4.5 or even 3.8x that of liquid hydrocarbon… it’s more like 2.8x; ie 1kg of H2 = 2.8kg of diesel, or maybe 2/3rds of a gallon (as it’s a little lighter than water). So travelling 300 miles on that is still the equivalent of about 100mpg in LHC terms…
    
    But it’s still a case of comparing apples and oranges, as you’ve got all the issues of fuel cell efficiency, the energy invested in producing and then compressing the fuel, etc. I have a feeling the current “well to wheel” equivalent efficiency is pretty shocking.
    
    And I was still contesting the claim that it was “about what you get from regular fuel”… though, unless it’s now been edited, it’s possible I misread it. The text says, on double checking, “the same amount of TIME as fossil fuels”. IE it takes as long to gas up a hydrogen car with enough H2 to travel 300 miles as it does a normal car with sufficient liquid fuel. In which case, argument rescinded, as I’ve misread it and gone off on a total tangent.
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