Team-BHP - The Future is Hydrogen

German auto giants place their bets on hydrogen cars.

Quote:

Some major automakers, including BMW and Audi re-hedging their bets, calculating that a change in political winds could shift the balance towards hydrogen in an industry shaped by early-mover Tesla's decision to take the battery-powered road to clean cars

Quote:

Global auto hub Germany is in sharp focus. It is already betting billions on hydrogen fuel in sectors like steel and chemicals to meet climate targets, and closely-fought elections this month could see the Greens enter the coalition government and further push the technology.

Quote:

BMW is hydrogen's biggest proponent among Germany's carmakers, charting a path to a mass-market model around 2030. The company also has one eye on shifting hydrogen policies in Europe and in China, the world's largest car market.

Stephan Herbst, general manager of Toyota in Europe:

Quote:

forecasts that hydrogen will power more than 400 million cars by 2050, Herbst said he was confident that now governments had set ambitious carbon-reduction targets, they would push hydrogen alongside battery electric cars.

"We strongly believe this is not a question of either or," he added. "We need both technologies."

Link

Hydrogen is a good alternative and might be better than electric cars overall. As many of you may be aware, Toyota sells Mirai, a hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicle (FCV) in California. It has about a 300-mile range and there are hydrogen fuel stations across California. California also specifies that at least ~30% of the energy used to produce this hydrogen comes from renewables.

Here is some of the information I have collated about hydrogen:

Hydrogen is the lightest element and has a very high energy per unit mass.
Conversely, energy per unit volume is very low because of the low density of Hydrogen even in a highly compressed state. Requires relatively larger tanks and high-pressure vessels compared to liquid fuels.
Liquid hydrogen not only needs very low temperatures but also cavitates easily and can explode. Because of this, it is hard to handle Hydrogen in liquid form. So, Hydrogen is generally used in gaseous form and cooled and compressed to liquid form for storing in high pressure vessels. This needs a lot of electricity and the source of electricity should be included in the life cycle analysis.
Hydrogen is produced in a variety of ways. Here is a paragraph from eia.gov that categorizes hydrogen from different sources: Hydrogen producers, marketers, government agencies, and other organizations might categorize or define hydrogen according to the energy sources for its production, and they use a color code to categorize hydrogen. For example, hydrogen produced using renewable energy might be referred to as renewable hydrogen or green hydrogen. Hydrogen produced from coal may be called brown hydrogen, and hydrogen produced from natural gas or petroleum might be referred to as grey hydrogen. Brown or grey hydrogen production combined with carbon capture and storage/sequestration might be referred to as blue hydrogen. Hydrogen produced with nuclear energy may be called pink hydrogen or clean hydrogen.
All these different hydrogen manufacturing processes require different amounts of energy. The cleanest of them all, the electrolysis process needs water (splits H2O into H2 and O2). For India, with the abundance of Sun, perhaps electricity from PV panels along with water from perennial rivers could be used to produce green hydrogen. The other option with the lowest life cycle emissions is nuclear.
FCVs will be great for India as long as green or pink hydrogen infrastructure is put in place. This requires a lot of good and sustained investment. Most of the country is warmer than 273.15K and so the exhaust water is not going to freeze. Although water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, water that gets put in to the atmosphere becomes part of the global water cycle. So, this may be a solution for ground vehicles. I have not done or seen any analysis of the current fossil fuel use and the amount of Hydrogen needed for transitioning all ground transport to FCVs.
Instead of using Hydrogen in an FCV, it could be combusted as well. This process is not free from creating air pollutants such as NOx which might contribute to ground level ozone and particulate matter.

Europe is going after Hydrogen because the governments are throwing money at it. Some of the ideas that are being proposed are very suspect from a life cycle analysis perspective and they fail simple scale analysis.

Europe is also pushing power to liquids – creating liquid fuels with CO2 recapture from the atmosphere. Using power from coal will increase the overall CO2 emissions. If the power is from renewables such as solar (sun to liquid as it is called), then the lifecycle CO2 will be net zero. However, the air pollutants will still be emitted when the liquid is combusted.

Aviation is going to be relying on liquid fuels for the foreseeable future unless there is a huge breakthrough in battery technology or some other source comes along. Even if a great battery technology comes along, the electricity that will be needed to charge these batteries in a large airport will alone present a major challenge. Calls for entirely new infrastructure.

Cheers!

Hydrogen instead of gasoline or diesel, a new life for the combustion engine?
Top-level companies are betting on it.

Quote:

The automotive sector has not bet everything on the battery electric car. Great giants of the automotive industry see hydrogen as a salvation for the internal combustion engine. A substitute for gasoline and/or diesel that keeps the predominant technology alive for many decades.

Yes, it's possible that the all-electric car will be one of the majority options in just over a decade.

There is a long way to go and manufacturers as important as Toyota or BMW have put the so-called "hot hydrogen" in the spotlight. A solution that will keep the internal combustion engine alive.

Toyota's hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine:

Name: hidrogenosustitutogasolinadiesel2022891961660987026_2.jpg
Views: 329
Size: 33.3 KB

Name: hidrogenosustitutogasolinadiesel2022891961660987026_2.jpg
Views: 329
Size: 33.3 KB

Quote:

Toyota has long decided to go a step further in its commitment to hydrogen and, in addition to continuing to research, develop and market fuel cell vehicles, it set to work to study new options for internal combustion engines. The premise established at that time was clear, to continue using internal combustion engines (ICE) as long as possible but applying hydrogen technology from the Toyota Mirai.

Toyota has developed several vehicles with a hot hydrogen engine for use as test beds in the field of competition. The last of these is the Toyota GR Yaris H2. This model uses a 1.6-liter three-cylinder G16E-GTS engine that has been properly adapted to use hydrogen instead of gasoline. Toyota says the efficiency and performance are comparable to a gasoline-powered engine, but of course, there are the advantages in terms of emissions. They are very low.

Quote:

The progress that Toyota has had in this field has allowed it to lead an alliance of Japanese manufacturers who want to bet on this path. The use of hydrogen in heat engines. An alliance that will focus on commercial vehicles (trucks for example). Nor should we ignore the collaboration established between Toyota and Yamaha to keep the V8 engines alive thanks to hydrogen.

There are many alliances that are being established in a short space of time.

Quote:

The latest to do the same has been Porsche, who has announced that it is working on a high-performance hydrogen engine. The exclusive brand has carried out the first tests in a simulator obtaining promising results. The protagonist has been a 4.4-liter V8 engine powered by hydrogen. It develops almost 600 hp and in the simulator has been tested in a vehicle similar to the Porsche Cayenne.

Taking into account the enormous economic resources that Porsche is allocating to its electrification, that it decides to do this type of research shows that they see hydrogen as a very valid alternative to the 100% electric car.

At this point it is clear that it is possible to adapt an internal combustion engine so that, instead of using traditional and/or synthetic fuels, it uses hydrogen.
However, this is not to say that all the challenges presented by changing an entire industry from top to bottom have been successfully completed. Further research and development is needed to clear up any unknowns related to long-term performance and reliability.

Link

Quote:

Originally Posted by ajayc123 (Post 5383998)

There was a time when turbines were also tried in cars. How much I wish, we could have turbine based engines as well. Why only ICE?

Turbine are simply not a very efficient way to power a car. There are a minimum of three big challenges. It takes time to spool up a turbine and it means that there is a very considerable lack before you can get any torque out of it. In helicopters this is less of a problem because you will already having the rotors going round at the appropriate speed. As you dial in pitch you add power. Won’t work for a car. There is the additional challenge of the turbine and the turbine wheel running at very high RPMs. So you are going to need a complicated gear reduction.

Lastly, you have a lot of very hot exhaust gasses.

They have tried turbine on cars and trucks. Neither application was a succes.

On the matter of hydrogen, there are already lots of power application running directly on hydrogen. Think electrical power units, hydraulic units and so on. In the Netherlands many of the large heavy industries currently running or using natural gas are changing to hydrogen. The Dutch natural gas infrastructure distribution network can handle hydrogen with relative few modification. In addition anybodies gas fired central heating boiler can switch to hydrogen without any problem. In most cases you would not even require a different burner.

So a lot of major upgrade projects have been ongoing in most of Western Europe for several years. Accelerated recently due to the Ukrainian war. The biggest challenge is how to produce sufficient hydrogen in an economic and environmental friendly way.

Jeroen

I have a different take on hydrogen as a fuel. The initial capital costs for the same are high, so are the maintenance costs. As a result, hydrogen as a fuel would only be practical where there was a fixed installation and a large consumption.

The best case scenario for Hydrogen usage is the heavy industry, as a means to replace coal and furnace oil fired power generation system. This is the only area where the heavy investment needed for hydrogen fuel consumption would give reasonable returns.

Automotive sector should double down on better battery tech and if all companies pool their resources into a technology center of sorts, they would all benefit from the fruits of collective labour, be it battery technology, power delivery methods or even charging infrastructure.
Automotive companies could take this basic (feedstock if you will) technology input and put their own additional personal touches to the same and differentiate their product from the competitors. I know it sounds utopian, but I also believe this would be the fastest way to bring in battery advancements.