This week The Economist published a leader and a briefing on hydrogen. I was expecting the worst... instead it seems fairly well-informed, which made for a pleasant surprise. There's even some discussion of the 'hydrogen ladder", and why FCEV passenger vehicles are a dead-end.
After decades of doubts the gas is coming of age
www.economist.com
It is also a delicate one
www.economist.com
Today’s hydrogen business is, in global terms, reasonably small, very dirty and completely vital. Some 90m tonnes of the stuff are produced each year, providing revenues of over $150bn—approaching those of ExxonMobil, an oil and gas company. This is done almost entirely by burning fossil fuels with air and steam—a process which uses up 6% of the world’s natural gas and 2% of its coal and emits more than 800m tonnes of carbon dioxide, putting the industry’s emissions on the same level as those of Germany.
The vital nature of this comes from one of the subsequent uses of the gas. As well as being used to process oil in refineries and to produce methanol for use in plastics, hydrogen is also, crucially, used for the production of almost all the world’s industrial ammonia. Ammonia is the main ingredient in the artificial fertilisers which account for a significant part of the world’s crop yields. Without it, agricultural productivity would plummet and hundreds of millions would face starvation.
[...]
[...]
[...]
Stairway to heaven
Near the bottom of Mr Liebreich’s ladder are fuel-cell electric vehicles (fcevs) used as cars. Toyota, a Japanese automobile giant, has longed to build them since the early 1990s, investing billions in the technology. Official visitors were ferried around Tokyo in such vehicles during the recent Olympic games, and the Japanese government has plans to expand the country’s fleet of fcevs, which numbered just 3,600 in 2019, to 200,000 by 2025. The Chinese government says it wants 1m of the things by 2030.
But as Mr Liebreich and many others point out, this does not seem sensible if the competition is a battery-powered electric car. Fuel cells add to an electric car’s price and complexity while offering no benefit in performance. They are also inefficient. About four-fifths of the power fed into a battery-powered electric vehicle gets used; conversion losses mean that an fcev is likely to manage only half that level of efficiency. A veteran Japanese utility executive whispers that Toyota’s stance makes no sense: “Millions of fuel-cell cars won’t happen. Even Honda gave up. Pride is why Toyota is sticking with it.”
[...]