This is an excerpt from an interview with modern day Thomas Edison type technology innovator, Elon Musk in which he is slams the viability of hydrogen fuel cell powered cars – Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV). Among other things, Elon Musk is one of the principle drivers behind the return to Thomas Edison’s dream of a battery electric powered economy.
To be fair, Musk probably hadn’t prepared for a debate on hydrogen, but however he still managed to amplify the common myths and misunderstandings around hydrogen as a means of storage for powering electric vehicles.
I have picked out the main points Musk makes below and attempt to undo some of the sophistry and propagating of known myths.
“It’s very difficult to make hydrogen, and store it, and use it in a car”
This is correct, the best practice for the eco system in which we live in for making hydrogen is a costly process but is no longer that difficult to produce via wind farms, PEM electrolyser, hydrogen compressor into a high-pressure storage tank.
“Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, it is not a source of energy.”
The process of making hydrogen is the energy storage mechanism, in fact, hydrogen is just another storage means of potential electrical energy. Same goes with batteries converting electrical energy into a potential of chemical store of energy. With hydrogen it is storing the same electrical energy but as a gaseous form. Neither of these are a source of energy. This is a debate about the inefficiencies of two methods of storing energy.
“So, you have to get the hydrogen from somewhere. If you get the hydrogen from water, splitting h20, electrolysis is extremely expensive as an energy process…”
The math stacks up against hydrogen as compared to capturing the suns solar energy and storing in batteries. But like the hydro dam method, all methods have their direct losses, and associated losses – hydrogen is by far not the best when it comes to conversion inefficiencies.
“If you took a solar panel and use that energy from a solar panel to charge a battery pack directly compared to splitting water, take the hydrogen, dump the oxygen, compress the hydrogen to extremely high pressure or liquify it, then put it in a car and run a fuel cell, it is about half the efficiency, it’s terrible, so why would you do that, it makes no sense.”
Little bit of subterfuge from Musk here, splitting water, take the hydrogen, dump the oxygen sounds like a 3-part process, in fact it’s just what an electrolyser does.
The efficiency argument is a bit meta. As it stands the various methods of generating electricity vary in efficiency from hydro-power to nuclear power.
For the consumer though the price is around about the same.
Efficiency to produce, is more about profits of the producer of electricity, not the consumer.
Electricity to power a car is cheap for the time-being, mainly because energy suppliers haven’t figured out a way of targeting electric car recharging to charge them at a higher premium. I have faith in the evils of capitalism to figure this out eventually.
The end user will inevitably pay prices similar to the cost of powering a combustion engine regardless of how efficient the means of production is.
If you consider the capital cost of production to be the pivot, it is therefore twice as expensive to build the means of collecting the energy to produce the same amount of hydrogen energy storage as it is to just store the suns energy in batteries.
You need twice the collection means than for battery storage. But to be frank, this is a one-off cost though of solar panels and/or wind turbines or whatever the means of collection is.
Once the production infrastructure is in place, the principle inefficiency ends, then moves to the efficiency of the fuel cell.
Also, when Musk says, “dump the oxygen”, he means releasing pure medical grade oxygen into the atmosphere (during the production of hydrogen from water). I am at a loss as to why this is spun as a bad thing to Musk. o2 is what the world is running out of, therefore, this is a tick for hydrogen in that to produce it is to help heal the planet, is it not?
End users do not really care about these *production* efficiencies, take for example the energy wasted in drilling and taking crude oil out of the ground in another country, shipping it to your country, refining it to petrol, trucking the petrol to a gas station, oil security associated wars and associated terrorism, destruction of the ocean and environment, and so on and so forth. Most users do not really care enough about any of that. They go to the pump, petrol comes out into their cars.
When comparing a hydrogen car to an electric car, for the end user there are only two issues they care about. Firstly, is the range of the vehicle must compare to their hydrocarbon burning vehicle, secondly is the time it takes to recharge/refill should be comparable to that of their current climate destroying means of powering their transport.
In a race between hydrogen electric vehicles – Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) and electric only vehicles (EV), hydrogen wins hands down on range. Production model hydrogen cars are relatively new thing, a decade old at best. Toyota released its first test model in 2014. Even the first test models on the market have a 600+ km range and this will only increase as fuel cell technology, the means of high pressure and metal halide technologies improve. Compare that to the 150-540 km range of the 10 very best electric vehicles on the market, Elon Musk’s Tesla Model S 85D being the best at the time of writing this. Electric cars have been in development on and off since 1884.
Secondly and most importantly, if batteries can be recharged in under 3 minutes then the EV competes with FCEV, which can be refilled in the same period it takes to refill a combustion engines vehicle. As it stands many EVs have a 30-minute fast recharge *feature* along with the more common method of trickle charging.
If they cannot be recharged in 3 minutes or less, then they are a less efficient method from the perspective of the end user, and this really is the end of that particular argument.
For defenders of EVs they then often fall back on the lack of infrastructure for hydrogen powered vehicles, one not raised in this interview with Musk, but is just another disingenuous argument, about the same as arguing we shouldn’t build rockets for space tourism because of the lack of available prebuilt launchpads…
“Hydrogen is very low density, it’s a pernicious molecule, like, it likes to get all over the place…”
Apart from designing vehicles that do not seal any natural gasses in – you also have gas sensors which can be used to allow for detection.
Musk uses the very low-density of hydrogen as a negative attribute when it fact it is why it is much safer to use than higher density natural gasses. Hydrogen has a density of 0.07 (as compared to air which is 1.0) and therefore travels upward very quickly, will escape into the air faster than a flame can get to it, this is not the case with LPG which no one has a problem with being used in the likes of LPG cars and even your common BBQ.
“You get metal embrittlement from hydrogen…”
Nickel plated aluminium, amorphous steel, are standard methods of preventing embrittlement. The ASTM standards also exist around embrittlement for this reason; however, more importantly, hydrogen embrittlement is still just a theory. The cases where hydrogen was suspected to be the cause of metal embrittlement have all proven to be incorrect attributions.
Hydrogen embrittlement though is the favourite of people opposed to the lack of unfettered profits from the hydrogen economy, is a real head-nodder for those that think it’s a really clever point.
Not surprised at all to see Musk reaching for it.
“If you get a hydrogen leak, it’s an invisible gas, you can’t even tell its leaking”
Apart from afore mentioned gas sensors, there’s also the invention many decades ago of odourants that are for example added to LPG – a mostly odourless gas to make it detectable to the nose, even if this is not possible, again the hydrogen atom is more likely to escape up into the outer atmosphere than hang around awaiting a flame to ignite it.
“It’s extremely flammable, it has an invisible flame.”
Like petrol, hydrogen is extremely flammable. Unlike petrol vapour which can accumulate at dangerous levels even outside, and can be ignited from up to 10 metres away by the smallest spark, hydrogen characteristics means it travels upward 2 times faster than helium and 6 times faster than natural gas. It is one of two gasses that will go up into the upper atmosphere, helium is the other.
“If you are going to pick an energy storage mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick, you should pick methane, its much much easier, or propane.”
Apart from just how much more dangerous propane and methane (therefore solid oxide fuel cells) are to use than hydrogen is in a vehicle (propane has a density of 1.51 which means it’s vapour will collect on the ground and/or in a confined space), this is where Musk really misses the real point of hydrogen.
Sure, he thinks it’s a really dumb one to pick, he is after all pouring billions of dollars into the battery electric economy – something that has been tried and failed a few times before, but the main point about hydrogen is that when done correctly, it is the world’s cleanest storage of potential energy, and when consumed, it is also the worlds cleanest – emissions wise.
Decarbonisation of emissions should be the number one focus of all automotive vehicle designers rather than just meeting reduction of hydrocarbon requirements. Electric car developers are all about this, which is why it is weird to hear Musk talk about propane and methane as a more viable choice than hydrogen, they are not even in the same category.
Name one clean compound that you can split propane from. There is none. When consumed they both produce greenhouse gasses, hydrogen produces none.
We need to reduce the need for producing these gasses and derivatives.
No means of powering vehicles is as good for the planet as hydrogen produced from water and the energy from the sun, electrolysed via a proton exchange membrane. I repeat, there is no other means that compares to hydrogen. To compare methane and propane is to NOT get this *removal of hydrocarbons from the equation* bit, at all.
There really is not a void of difference between EV and FCEV apart from the means of storing the suns energy.
Efficiency aside, hydrogen still wins now on speed of recharge/refill, and range, and no matter the enhancements in battery technology, hydrogen powered vehicles will always be better for the planet than any other means of storing energy in an electric vehicle.
This debate though between hydrogen electric powered vehicles and electric vehicles will continue to wax and wane between the two methods in the remaining decades left before hydro-carbon powered vehicles run out of cheap fuels.
But let’s be clear about this, this is not about which method is best for the worlds eco-system, climate etc in utilising solar energy, this is about which method is the most competitive for profits of vehicle manufacturers who must make a public show of reducing mechanisms that consume hydro-carbons releasing climate destroying poisonous gasses into the air.
Future generations will eventually get past the ulterior motives and tribalism of manufacturers, to the real practicalities of storing and distributing solar energy, and like the hydrogen car, it will most likely be a hybrid of both hydrogen and batteries, batteries for micro appliances (as is the current use), hydrogen/battery hybrids for portable vehicles, and vanadium redox styled batteries, and/or hydrogen storage for the needs of large capacity storage and buffering of solar energy.
– Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara (@te_taipo)