Nikola Motors Semi Trucks

[ZachF]

Back when the truck

With a required input of a minimum 50 kWh per kg of hydrogen, and the cost of natural gas being 2.7 USD/million BTU, the absolute minimum cost of hydrogen produced from natural gas is 4.7 USD/kg. Right there, Nikola Motor Company has guaranteed a loss 148k USD per truck they sell. And this doesn't include the fueling stations, hydrogen production equipment, engineering, sales, administration, management, etc.

Rocket launchers pay ~$7 per Kg of Hydrogen, and they buy in bulk. The few hydrogen stations charge like $16-17 per kg. There is a huge mark-up with hydrogen compared to other fuels because it is a huge, gigantic, monumental PITA to handle, transport, and store. Providing an at-the-pump cost of less than $2 per kg is pure fantasy.

Back when this truck was a hybrid NG powered truck I thought it was a sensible idea that could greatly reduce fuel consumption from trucking... now its gone into crazy land.

 

[ZachF]

Hydrogen is such a joke.... The Mirai gets 56 miles per kg, at $16.49 per kg, that's a fuel cost of $0.29 per mile, roughly equivalent to a car that gets 8.5 mpg. Considering Semi Trucks average about 6.5 miles per gallon, It doesn't cost much more to push around a giant truck with diesel than a little sedan with hydrogen.

The fuel cost for an average ICE car is $0.07-0.12 per mile, and the Model S about $0.04 per mile (Model 3 will probably be $0.03 per mile). On top of that they have by far the highest capital costs. You'd have to get hydrogen costs down to about $3.50 per kg to compete fuel-wise with normal ICE cars.

 

[TEG]

Some related threads:
Long haul electric trucks
Electric semi-trucks. My vision.

 

[dpeilow]

Bouncing this thread because earlier this month Nikola Motor posted this on Twitter:

So if you do the math, that works out at 2637 kWh per truck fill up.


However, in their launch event they showed this:

...which claims they have 2330 kWh of usable electric energy from their 100 kg of hydrogen.


We already know this is nonsense because no one has a 70% efficient PEM fuel cell. The best I could find last year was 53% (at LHV of hydrogen, which makes the numbers look better than HHV).

If we were to take their data at face value, that would be 88% efficiency from the 2637 kWh upstream electricity, through the electrolyser, compressor, storage and truck fuel cell, to get back to the 2330 kWh they claim is in each truck.


The other problem is that if I take the average efficiency of an electrolyser over its working life (they degrade by about 25%), it's about 70 kWh / kg hydrogen (e.g. Hydrogenics quote 65 to 68 kWh system efficiency beginning of life). This means that their 2637 kWh actually makes 38 kg of hydrogen, not 100 kg.


But it gets better, because they then tweeted:

...so I went off to find some data about their products and found this for their latest high power cell:

A fuel cell system efficiency of 52% LHV - not 70% - which is inline with other manufacturers.


I made some assumptions about a semi-truck using this (Cd for whole tractor-trailer = 0.6, A = 11 m^2, Crr = 0.006, mass = 36287 kg (is 80000 lbs), losses in DC-DC converter, motor and gearing of 90, 95 and 95%) and plotted it for 38 kg of hydrogen:

You can see that the range at the standard truck speed of 56 mph / 90 km/h is about 250 miles or 400 km.


Coincidentally, the Powercell S3 fuel cell is also being used in this truck:

...which, although its duty cycle is probably a bit different and involves less constant speed, also has a range of 400 km on 35 kg. I expect the assumptions are not far of the mark.


So if Tesla's range claim for the Semi is 500 miles and <2 kWh/mile, that means we should probably double the 2637 kWh per fill to get a comparable upstream electricity use figure for the hydrogen trucks, while maybe adding 10% to Tesla's for charging losses. Call it about 5 MWh vs. 1.1 MWh.


What's more, if we take their 349 GWh per day for the whole network at face value, I calculate that to be approximately 40 GWp of wind turbines (taking the US average capacity factor of 36.7%). The installed base in the US today is 90 GWp, so almost half of that for these 820 stations.

Alternatively, it would be something like 2000 km^2 of solar PV situated in Southern California or Arizona.

 

[wdolson]

They may be getting the 3600 KWh either because they are fudging the numbers to look better, or they are taking into account storage loss. Hydrogen will always leak away in storage.

Hydrogen may have some limited uses here and there, but overall it's very inefficient. One place where it looks like making hydrogen makes some sense is in some of the remote Orkney Islands where they have an overabundance of wind power. I guess building long distance power lines between the islands was not practical, so they are using the excess electricity to make hydrogen from sea water and they are shipping that to the mainland. I think some ferries have been converted to run on hydrogen too.

If you have electricity available, it makes much more sense to use it directly.

 

[dpeilow]

They may be getting the 3600 KWh

Where is the 3600 kWh?

One place where it looks like making hydrogen makes some sense is in some of the remote Orkney Islands where they have an overabundance of wind power.

The distance from the mainland to Orkney is about 6 miles. There are already 2 high voltage connectors crossing it. For sure, this is a purely government subsidy driven project.

 

[wdolson]

Where is the 3600 kWh?

My bad, dyslexic moment combined with rounding. I meant 2600 KWh.

The distance from the mainland to Orkney is about 6 miles. There are already 2 high voltage connectors crossing it. For sure, this is a purely government subsidy driven project.

According to the big Hit website, the two islands doing it are Eday and Shapinsay. Eday is about 11 miles from the mainland. I don't know what the politics are.

 

[dpeilow]

Spotted something else that doesn't quite stack up. At the launch event they showed this slide. He says that the tankers can transport "over 10,000 kg, sometimes even more - depends on the size of the trailer - at one time" of liquid hydrogen.

The trouble is I looked into the capacity of liquid hydrogen semi-trailers and two manufacturers quote 66245 litres and 67000 litres for a full size trailer. That's 4689 kg and 4742 kg of liquid hydrogen respectively.

I'm fairly certain roadtrains aren't allowed in the US, so how do they arrive at that number?

 

[dpeilow]

And before anyone says it: No the answer is not slush hydrogen.

 

[wdolson]

Spotted something else that doesn't quite stack up. At the launch event they showed this slide. He says that the tankers can transport "over 10,000 kg, sometimes even more - depends on the size of the trailer - at one time" of liquid hydrogen.


View attachment 346581

View attachment 346583



The trouble is I looked into the capacity of liquid hydrogen semi-trailers and two manufacturers quote 66245 litres and 67000 litres for a full size trailer. That's 4689 kg and 4742 kg of liquid hydrogen respectively.

I'm fairly certain roadtrains aren't allowed in the US, so how do they arrive at that number?

Three trailer road trains are legal in some states, but only in rural areas on interstate highways. Oregon and Idaho allow them and they are relatively common outside major cities on the interstate. Double trailers are allowed in most states, but for most they have to be shorter trailers.

Similar laws to hauling gasoline would probably apply (anything highly flammable). I have seen double tankers for gasoline, though they are usually a long chassis tractor with a built in tank and one tanker trailer. I've never seen a road train with liquid cargo, though it may be legal.

If the Tesla semi lives up to the hype, I think Nikola is in trouble. The rest of the industry will be watching Nikola's early adopters and if the hydrogen supply has any of the problems it's had for hydrogen cars, it will kill Nikola. With the Tesla semi the only question is how fast can you get it charged, not whether you can find fuel for it at all.

 

[dpeilow]

Some interesting tweets from Trevor Milton last night:

Compare this with his company unveiling video:

In the story in CleanTechnica last year: Nikola Motor Company Projects A Disingenuous Vision For Renewable Hydrogen | CleanTechnica , if you do the math on:

The largest station in the world is 1T and that’s here in Phoenix, Arizona,” Jessie Schneider, Nikola Motor Company Executive Vice President of Hydrogen said at Nikola World. “This is 8 times that amount. Just to understand, that’s 150 trucks and 200 cars.

That implies a truck fill of < 50 kg.

Also:

Nikola’s Schneider said that each 8 ton station would need an estimated 17.6 MW of solar generation to make them fully sustainable. That is a hefty goal that would require tens of acres of land beyond the 7–10 acre fueling depots themselves.

If you do the math on that, you can generate 45.5 GWh/year solar electricity in Phoenix, enough for < 2 tons H2 per day.

It's no wonder they need to import the majority of their electricity from the grid, which makes a mockery of the claims above.

Initially, the 8 ton stations would start up with around 30–40% renewable electricity powering them.

For a guy that claims to love BEV, they do have some dubious stuff on their website.

 

[dpeilow]

It's interesting that at NikolaWorld last year, their hydrogen guy said they had 600 miles range and efficiency up to 60%.

That's strange, because they terminate the partnership with their fuel cell supplier, Power Cell, 2 weeks prior to the event, as the supplier was citing unacceptable business terms: Nikola Motors Does Not Plan to use PowerCell’s Fuel Cell stacks in Serial Truck Production - FuelCellsWorks

So they were able to obtain a fuel cell with 8% higher peak efficiency just a couple of weeks after losing access to a prototype that claims the world's highest energy density, which isn't due into production until 2022 and has the backing of Bosch and Volvo?

 

[ICUDoc]

Is my maths right?
$3 per 8 miles is $3 per 12.6km (even if currently $4, let's use best case)
That's 23.8 cents per kilometre (31.7 at $4)
My Model S Dual Motor uses 150Wh/km
At $0.18 per kWh (my average rate- I actually fill it at a lower rate overnight) that's 2.7 cents per kilometre (1.8 at overnight rates).
So per kilometre costs are at least NINE times cheaper than hydrogen??
Maybe I have got the maths wrong?
(This doesn't count wear and tear / degradation - I have no idea about those costs for BEV vs H2 power...)

 

[dpeilow]

Well you are comparing a car to a 40 ton semi truck, but the point stands anyway if you take Trevor Milton's acknowledgement that the BEV truck uses 2.1 kWh/mile (1.3 kWh/km). He's not got a monopoly on $0.04/kWh electricity and it will be easier to supply it to the BEV as well.

 

[the dude]

Nothing adds up with Nikola, the deeper you dig into Milton's claims the worse it looks

The people shorting Tesla should take a look at Nikola, easy money

 

[ICUDoc]

Well you are comparing a car to a 40 ton semi truck, b

Ha!
Serves me right for posting while sleep-deprived.
Guess I should have looked up the Tesla Semi specs
Thanks

 

[dpeilow]

Looks like the tank was 80 kg a year or so ago:

Seems like not only are they working on $3 per kg, they are working on $2 too. Pretty incredible.

 

[miimura]

That hydrogen price is pretty unbelievable. As with all things Nikola, I will believe it when I see it in production and available to buy.

 

[HVM]

Why is their ex. CEO lie about new battery tech, which battery expert call "physically impossible", why is your start-up truck manufacturer also marketing pickups ATVs and jet skis? How many bankruptcies NEL Hydrogen (Nikola's fueling stations provider) has gone through, what happened hydrogen station near Sandvika Shopping Mall last year, what happened to owner of those stations at Norway and Denmark, how many of those are working now? Why Ryder terminated their partnership with Nikola?

 

[the dude]

Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America

It doesn't look good for Trevor