Is Toyota's fuel cell module a hydrogen breakthrough?

[Klaralven]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has dismissed hydrogen fuel cells as “mind-bogglingly stupid,” and that is not the only negative thing he had to say.

He has called them “fool cells,” a “load of rubbish,” and told Tesla shareholders at an annual meeting years ago that “success is simply not possible.”

Not everyone has embraced Musk’s battery-or-bust vision of the future, however. In fact, many automakers have ignored his sage advice.

According to a report in OilPrice.com, Toyota Motor Corp. appears to be moving fast in that direction — announcing on Friday it has developed a fuel cell system model that will help the world achieve carbon neutrality goals.

Not only that, but the world’s largest car manufacturer said it is looking to start selling it after the spring this year in a bid to promote hydrogen use.

According to Toyota, the new module — which could be a game-changer in the industry — can be used by companies developing fuel cell applications for trucks, buses, trains, and ships, as well as stationary generators.

The fuel cell system module can be directly connected to an existing electrical instrument provided with a motor, inverter, and battery, Toyota said, noting that the modularization significantly improves convenience.

The “module has achieved a world-class, top level output density per unit volume,” said Toyota, adding that the maintenance requirements are simple and infrequent.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/is-toyotas-fuel-cell-module-a-hydrogen-breakthrough/

[BSdetect]

1. Tesla batteries are dropping in price while increasing in power / weight ratio.

There is little infrastructure for H

Other issues remain

You may never be able to plug into your own H at home which is very handy for BEVs

[Happy Hoosier]

8. All true.... BUT.

The range limits of batteries are hard right now. On a 100% EV, if you drain the battery, you need a charge. Rapid charging can work here, but the infrastructure ultimately cannot be proprietary.

In a Hydrogen powered vehicle, your car wouldn't much care where the H2 comes from.

Of course Musk has a financial incentive to rubbish H2. He's spent a lot of money on battery tech and manufacturing. He reminds me a bit of Edison..... a smart man, but perfectly willing to spin the facts to his financial advantage.

[BSdetect]

13. You can be sure that if H had more potential than batteries Tesla would jump on that if it ever happ

Range anxiety is really a thing of the past now thanks to widespread stations and software alerts etc

[Happy Hoosier]

14. Can you? I don't think so.

Tesla bet on battery tech pretty early. It would be very hard... and expensive... to change horses now. Even if they thought H2 had more potential, it's just not practical to switch right now..... this is beta/VHS wars.

Having said that, I think the H2 is just lagging too far behind. And if car companies can do stuff like agree to some common standards for batteries, quick change operations, common fast charge standards, etc, it would go a long way toward making this a reality. I know I will not invest heavily in a proprietary set-up.

[Cirque du So-What]

2. This is a city bus in my region

What we need is the will to develop a hydrogen infrastructure.

[CentralMass]

6. I am not a big fan of Musk's arrogance but on this one I tend to agree.

Yes, hydrogen is clean but producing it is not efficient or cost effective. Try and and get a real cost of hydrogen used in any of these pilot programs in different cities. They are subsidizing it (giving it a away).
Battery powered electric vehicles are something like 6x more efficient at using energy.
Hydrogen is not a fuel, it is an energy carrier. It takes energy to produce it.

The most cost effective and common method of producing it is by reforming natural gas. A procees that takes energy in the form of steam and one that produces carbon byproducts.
Producing it by electrolysis of water is expensive and inefficient.

[Miguelito Loveless]

3. HFC while potentially useful in some areas

are not economically feasible for passenger cars and trucks. I don['t know how many times this has to be proven.

It takes roughly 50kWh of energy to make a single kg of H2, that will allow a vehicle to travel 40-50 miles, whereas the same energy allows an EV to travel 150-200 miles. A H2 filling station costs around $2 million to build, compared to $200K for a DC quick charger.

Toyota is pursuing the sunk cost fallacy and is determined to bankrupt itself to prove a technology that simply cannot compete with battery electric vehicles.

[captain queeg]

4. When any organization talks about being "world class" I take them less seriously

It is such a meaningless overused phrase.

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. If Toyota is behind it, I'm excited about it.

We should be exhausting every avenue to reduce our dependency on oil.

[Silent3]

7. Always remember that hydogren is not any energy source, just an energy carrier

There not being a lot of free hydrogen right here on this planet (despite it being the most abundant element in the universe), we have to expend energy to create hydrogen fuel. That fuel simply becomes a way to transform and transport one form of energy in one place to another form of energy in another place.

And always with some efficiency loss. The same as with generating, transmitting, and storing electrical energy.

So far, electricity has proven to be a more practicable and efficient energy carrier. But that doesn't mean hydrogen can't catch up and exceed electricity as a carrier, particularly where batteries are part of the electrical system.

There's definitely a perception problem moving forward with hydrogen, however, and it's not just because Elon Musk sneers at it. The promise of the "Hydrogen Age" has been around for a while, and it has burned a lot of investors without great progress so far.

Good to know someone is still working on it, however.

[Klaralven]

9. It appears that trucks, buses and commercial vehicles are the first applications.

Japan, South Korea, Germany and China appear to be in the lead.

[CentralMass]

10. Hydrogen's efficiency problem

https://thedriven.io/2020/06/04/hydrogen-cars-wont-overtake-electric-vehicles-because-theyre-hampered-by-laws-of-science/
"The reason why hydrogen is inefficient is because the energy must move from wire to gas to wire in order to power a car. This is sometimes called the energy vector transition.

Let’s take 100 watts of electricity produced by a renewable source such as a wind turbine. To power an FCEV, that energy has to be converted into hydrogen, possibly by passing it through water (the electrolysis process). This is around 75% energy-efficient, so around one-quarter of the electricity is automatically lost.

The hydrogen produced has to be compressed, chilled and transported to the hydrogen station, a process that is around 90% efficient. Once inside the vehicle, the hydrogen needs converted into electricity, which is 60% efficient. Finally the electricity used in the motor to move the vehicle is is around 95% efficient. Put together, only 38% of the original electricity – 38 watts out of 100 – are used.
With electric vehicles, the energy runs on wires all the way from the source to the car. The same 100 watts of power from the same turbine loses about 5% of efficiency in this journey through the grid (in the case of hydrogen, I’m assuming the conversion takes place onsite at the wind farm).

You lose a further 10% of energy from charging and discharging the lithium-ion battery, plus another 5% from using the electricity to make the vehicle move. So you are down to 80 watts – as shown in the figure opposite
In other words, the hydrogen fuel cell requires double the amount of energy. To quote BMW: “The overall efficiency in the power-to-vehicle-drive energy chain is therefore only half the level of [an electric vehicle]."

[hunter]

11. Car culture itself is "mind-bogglingly stupid."

This planet simply cannot support a personal automobile for every adult. There are simply too many of us.

We need to be reworking our cities, all of them, such that automobiles are unnecessary.

People living urban lifestyles generally have smaller environmental footprints than everyone else. Walking is the best form of transportation.

In the current economy hydrogen fuel is nothing more than lipstick on the filthy natural gas industry.

Dimethyl Ether (DME) is probably a better synthetic fuel. It is much easier to handle than hydrogen or natural gas, having properties similar to propane, and its overall energy efficiency when used in hybrid vehicles is comparable to hydrogen fuel cells.

Using suitable carbon free energy sources DME might be synthesized from carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere or oceans, making it a carbon-neutral fuel.

The biggest problem with hydrogen as a fuel is that hydrogen molecules are so small they leak or diffuse out of most containers. Gasoline doesn't do that.

I haven't been driving much during the pandemic so the gasoline in my car just sits there for months. High pressure hydrogen is always looking for a way to escape.

Owning an older hydrogen powered vehicle would probably be a nightmare. One morning you go out to start your car and nothing, because all the hydrogen has found its way out through a microscopic flaw in the fuel system. Here in the U.S.A. we have plenty of trouble keeping natural gas contained, and that's a much easier problem to solve.

Personally, if someone tried to give me a Tesla or hydrogen powered Toyota I'd refuse it.

[Disaffected]

12. Yeah,

it can be problematic enough containing natural gas (a few buildings blow up each year due to natural gas leaks/explosions). As you point out, hydrogen is much harder to contain and, perhaps most importantly, hydrogen is explosive when mixed with air over a much wider range of concentrations than natural gas (as little as 4% IIRC).

Whatever one thinks of Musk, I think he is correct in this instance of hydrogen vs batteries.