Will Tesla consider making Hydrogen cars? 500 miles refueling in 3 minutes?

[PopSmith]

I just wonder if using H2 and Fuel Cells instead of a large capacity battery (300 to 500 miles range)
would be more economical and practical?

From the California Fuel Cell Partnership (PDF here):

Under the cash flow support model, the total funding needed to expand to 68
stations, and support operations and maintenance for all stations is estimated at $65 million.
The traditional capital buy-down model identified a similar overall funding need of $67 million.
These models take into account a mix of existing and new stations, varying station sizes and
a cumulative capacity to support approximately 20,000 vehicles.

$67M in fuel cell filling stations which can only support 20K vehicles (and only in California). That same amount of funds would install 191 solar-powered Supercharging stations (at $350K a piece), or about enough to put 4 Superchargers per contiguous State. (Which is about enough to cover Tesla's coast-to-coast plan.) Keep in mind, too, that most EVs are "filled-up" at night, in the owners garage and not every week at a Supercharger.

 

[stopcrazypp]

From the California Fuel Cell Partnership (PDF here):
$67M in fuel cell filling stations which can only support 20K vehicles (and only in California).

$67M is only the public funding. The actual total amount will be more than that that ($103 million+) because the terms of the CA public funding is that it can only provide a max of 65% of the total project costs.

 

[Doug_G]

Referring to a fuel cell/solar setup as 'only slightly valid' is a bit silly considering that's the system nature uses. For what's supposed to be a group of forward thinking advocates of new technology, I'm hearing a lot of doom and gloom about something that's really still just stuck in it's infancy and hasn't had a chance to ramp up. Any of this sound familiar?

No. BEV technology is available now and it works. It was available a decade ago but was literally crushed (EV1).

Hydrogen isn't ready for prime time, and may never be. It's been ten years away for decades, and may always be "the fuel of the future". There are immense barriers to implementing hydrogen - some basic physics, some engineering, some economic.

• Hydrogen is not very dense, so you either have to use cryogenic storage or extremely high pressures. Doing either wastes large amounts of energy, and you still have problems with large bulky storage tanks.
• Hydrogen is a tiny molecule that finds the tiniest leak. In fact it moves through the very metal of the tank. And it damages metal, making it brittle.
• Hydrogen requires 1/10 the energy to ignite as gasoline. It is explosive in air in mixtures of 4% to 75% - this an order of magnitude worse than anything else. It's a pretty dangerous material.
• Practical fuel cells used in vehicles contain platinum, which is very expensive. Fuel cells are easily damaged by trace contaminants in air such as CO, so they have limited lifetimes.
• Hydrogen is not economically produced by hydrolysis, as the process is very inefficient. Deriving it from natural gas doesn't do much for sustainability.
• Some of the above problems might be solved by some kind of engineering breakthrough... or such breakthroughs might actually be impossible due to basic physics.
• Existing fueling stations can't handle very many cars per day.
• The economics of rolling out hydrogen fueling stations is horrendous.

I believe that hydrogen may actually have a market in certain niches. It would be pretty hard to switch long haul trucking to BEV technology, but hydrogen might do the job. More likely they'll continue to use ICE technology while the rest of the fleet moves to BEV.

 

[anticitizen13.7]

Hydrogen introduces many annoyances. A BEV can be charged at home with minimal infrastructure changes in most cases. FCEV requires either an electrolysis system and H2 tank or natural gas reformer for the convenience of home fueling. The cost of commercial production, distribution, and fueling would be astronomical.

That doesn't even take into account energy losses from compression and storage. I just don't see fuel cell electrics working out in the long run.

 

[gameon]

Hydrogen is not going to work, and Elon knows about it before going towards EV route.

GM killed EV1, and that was big mistake Elon mention in his interview.

 

[Grendal]

Hydrogen might work for the trucking industry.

For personal transportation, you really only gain one advantage. You get the convenience of a pump. Is it really worth it just for that? The answer can only be no. With the introduction on the new Supercharger then hydrogen really becomes a moot point.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Hydrogen isn't ready for prime time, and may never be. It's been ten years away for decades, and may always be "the fuel of the future". There are immense barriers to implementing hydrogen - some basic physics, some engineering, some economic.

All of this(and far worse) has been said about battery-based transportation.

Hydrogen is not very dense, so you either have to use cryogenic storage or extremely high pressures. Doing either wastes large amounts of energy, and you still have problems with large bulky storage tanks.

Says who? You don't have to do anything. The idea that we won't come up with more efficient ways of splitting water and/or storing such a simple element is irrationally negative IMO. Are we not posting on a site dedicated to a man who can resupply the International Space Station for 1/10th the cost of NASA?

• Practical fuel cells used in vehicles contain platinum, which is very expensive.
• Hydrogen is not economically produced by hydrolysis, as the process is very inefficient. Deriving it from natural gas doesn't do much for sustainability.
• Some of the above problems might be solved by some kind of engineering breakthrough... or such breakthroughs might actually be impossible due to basic physics.

Sounds similar to the solar deniers 15 years ago. Once we have a real reason to ramp up R&D(real demand), fuel cells will likely go the way of solar panels.

• Existing fueling stations can't handle very many cars per day.
• The economics of rolling out hydrogen fueling stations is horrendous.

Say we went the route of highly-stable solid state hydrogen storage.....wouldn't you simply get your fuel at Whole Foods? Or more likely from your solar-powered garage system? Everything is decentralizing, no reason to think a post fossil fuel transportation method can't be mostly "fueling-station-free".

 

[Doug_G]

All of this(and far worse) has been said about battery-based transportation.

True, but they were wrong. That doesn't mean they are wrong about hydrogen. You can't "reason by analogy" as Elon puts it.

Says who? You don't have to do anything. The idea that we won't come up with more efficient ways of splitting water and/or storing such a simple element is irrationally negative IMO. Are we not posting on a site dedicated to a man who can resupply the International Space Station for 1/10th the cost of NASA?

You currently do have to use cryogenic or high pressure storage for hydrogen, in order to get sufficient fuel onto a vehicle. The only other possibility is to come up with some kind of miraculous new technology. We don't know if another technology (solid state storage?) is feasible at this point. A technologically and economically feasible solution requires some kind of breakthrough, which isn't inevitable.

Sounds similar to the solar deniers 15 years ago. Once we have a real reason to ramp up R&D(real demand), fuel cells will likely go the way of solar panels.

15 years ago solar wasn't really economically feasible, but it was pretty apparent things were steadily improving on that front. I'd say that 15 years ago solar looked very promising, and only an idiot would dismiss it.

Hopefully fuel cells will improve to a point where they are economically feasible and reliable. I don't think that is a given right now... and even if that problem is solved, there are still plenty of other problems.

Say we went the route of highly-stable solid state hydrogen storage.....wouldn't you simply get your fuel at Whole Foods? Or more likely from your solar-powered garage system? Everything is decentralizing, no reason to think a post fossil fuel transportation method can't be mostly "fueling-station-free".

Sounds great. I hope that happens. But you still haven't solved the problems of extracting hydrogen efficiently and sustainably, or rendering an extremely volatile gas safe.

I'm not saying that a hydrogen economy isn't possible... I'm just saying that there are too many areas that require major breakthroughs.

In comparison, BEV technology is obviously feasible (we're doing it now) and getting better rapidly (costs are coming down, performance going up).

 

[WarpedOne]

The best way to pack and distribute hydrogen is to let it react with carbon and oxygen to form long molecules that are liquid at standard pressure and temperature.
There is a common name for a mixture of such molecules with different lengths - oil.
When we ran out of natural oil we can use those nuclear power to "cook" artificial oil and feed it into ICE cars.

Using 'pure' hydrogen as a fuel is just stupid.

 

[AWDtsla]

Does anyone remember when fuel cells/microturbines were being pitched to power mobile devices (like a phone or laptop) because of their huge power needs?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

 

[bollar]

Splitting the sea: turning ocean water into hydrogen fuel - Latest News @ UOW

Seems apropos of the discussion.

 

[AWDtsla]

Splitting the sea: turning ocean water into hydrogen fuel - Latest News @ UOW

Seems apropos of the discussion.

Of course no conversion efficiency numbers. Should summarize the article as "someone did something with hydrogen, the end"

Someone would have to demonstrate hydrogen lifecycle efficiency as beating solar->lithium-ion. Which for example biofuels are a miserable failure at. Tesla is doing victory laps with it's energy model, which is incredibly efficient.

It's really as simple as calculating a single efficiency number, anything else is wishful thinking.

 

[derekt75]

Splitting the sea: turning ocean water into hydrogen fuel - Latest News @ UOW

Seems apropos of the discussion.

That would be a neat trick if you could power a home and car on 5 liters of water.

I suppose if you had tons of other hydrogen and heat around, you could fuse the hydrogen in 5 kg of water to power a home, but otherwise, water doesn't contain a whole lot of energy.
Instead of 5 kg of water, you need the constituent 0.6 kg of hydrogen and 4.4 kg of oxygen, and even then, it's a mild stretch to say that would power a home and car.

Regardless, hydrogen seems like a rather difficult to work with energy storage system. Why not talk about ammonia, or methane, or any other type of chemical storage? I certainly hope the future will bring better storage (energy dense supercapacitor?) systems than lithium ion batteries, but I can't see that hydrogen will be it.