Welcome to another Two Bit Da Vinci video.
Today we are talking about the future of clean transportation, and whether it will be batteries
or hydrogen fuel cells that drive the EVs of the future.
Both are pure electric vehicles, with electric motors, not a drop of gasoline, and zero emissions.
The difference is in how these unique technologies store their electric potential energy.
It’s no secret that battery electrics like all Tesla Models, the Nissan Leaf, and Chevy
Bolt, have been dominating EV sales, with more battery EV models coming online all the
time.
In contrast, hydrogen fuel cell technology has seemed rather stagnant, with only a few
options penetrating the market.
The two most notable models being the Honda Clarity, and the Toyota Mirai.
So we are going to look into why battery EVs have had so much more success so far, and
if there’s any chance for hydrogen fuel cell cars to turn the tide in the future.
To understand the full story, we have to look at the complete energy life cycle for electric
vehicles.
We’ll look at energy generation, distribution, storage, and consumption.
First, let’s talk about why battery EVs have been so dominant so far, and the answer
really is two-fold.
One, the infrastructure was already largely in place.
A battery EV is just like any appliance in a home and just needs to be plugged in.
The second reason for their success is one company, Tesla, who forged their path to market
against long odds.
Before Tesla, companies weren’t serious about EVs and only made them as compliance
cars, a category of car created not really for making money, but to meet emission and
clean energy requirements.
Tesla massively increased the lithium-ion battery production globally with their Gigafactory,
and also invested in their supercharger network around the world.
Again, because the electric infrastructure was already in place, creating new supercharger
stations was as simple as plugging into the existing grid.
New technology typically suffers from a chicken or the egg problem and this was no exception.
For Hydrogen fuel cell cars, there just isn’t enough sales volume to justify large production
of hydrogen at scale.
For battery EVs, there weren’t enough EV sales to justify large-scale increases in
battery manufacturing.
Tesla changed that by vertically integration their process and ramping up battery production
alongside their automobile manufacturing.
The same just hasn’t been the case for the hydrogen fuel cell car, where no company has
taken the lead to drive the industry forward.
Now let’s talk about the benefits and challenges of each technology throughout their respective
energy lifecycles.
The first step is, of course, is energy generation.
For battery EVs, the energy just comes from the grid, and how clean that energy is, depends
on where you live.
One comment we’ve seen several times is that an electric car is just a coal powered
car, and while that’s a smirk-worthy talking point, is it actually true?
Let's compare the extremes here in the united states.
California has the cleanest grid with 41% coming from renewable resources, 9% from nuclear,
4% from coal, and 34% from Natural Gas.
In contrast, West Virginia has one of the dirtiest grids in the country, with 94% of
its energy coming from coal, 2.5% from natural gas, and about 3.5% from renewable sources.
Coal is the dirtiest energy source by far at 1.142 kg of CO2 emitted per kWh of energy
generated.
Natural gas is much cleaner at only .572 kgs of CO2.
And lastly, burning a gallon of gasoline emits 9.07 kg of CO2.
If we compare a battery electric like a Tesla Model 3 which gets roughly 4.5 miles per kWh,
to a pure gasoline BMW 3 series at 25 MPG, and a Toyota Prius Hybrid at 50 MPG, the results
are pretty interesting.
In California, The Tesla emits .0521 kg of CO2 per mile, while the same model 3, powered
by the West Virginia Power grid, emits .2366 kg of Co2 per mile, a whopping 4.5x increase.
The 3 Series emits .3628 kg of CO2 per mile and the Prius, .1814 kgs per mile.
If we factor 12,000 miles per year, the yearly results are as follows.
The Model 3 in California, is the clear winner here, but interestingly, if you live in West
Virginia, and want the smallest carbon footprint possible, the Prius is actually your best
bet.
These were the grid numbers for 2017-2018, but as insightful as it is to see where we
are, looking at where we’re headed is even more so.
West Virginia doesn’t really seem particularly interested in moving towards renewables.
Their local economy is largely coal based.
But California is moving at breakneck speeds.
The solar make up of the California grid was less than 1% until 2013, and now it's over
10% just 4 short years later.
It’s a similar story for hydro-electric and wind.
Oh, and by the way, this solar figure only counts grid-scale solar production, not individual
homeowners with distributed solar.
So for anyone with a huge solar system powering your EV, your recurring mileage based emissions
are basically zero.
Now, before we switch gears and talk about hydrogen, we wanted to take a moment and say
thank you to all our viewers, all of our subscribers, and especially our Patrons on Patreon.
You guys make this possible, and we are just honored by your support.
These videos, aren’t easy to make, and if you’re interested in supporting us, check
us out on Patreon!
Also, we’re happy to announce that we’re launching our official merchandise store,
so take your swag game to the next level with merch listed below the video description.
Ok, so hydrogen is a little trickier to quantify because there currently only minimal hydrogen
infrastructure in place in most countries.
And this is precisely the problem.
Imagine iPhone sales, before the wireless high-speed internet proliferation of the past
15 years.
Imagine automotive sales before widespread development of interstate highways and paved
city roads.
It’s a similar story with hydrogen, with few customers, and few producers.
Hydrogen gas can be generated in two main ways: 1 is the extraction of hydrogen from
natural gas in a process called natural gas reforming.
The process is basically two steps: first heated water in steam form is reacted with
natural gas, which contains methane, in the presence of a catalyst to produce hydrogen
gas, and carbon monoxide, and relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide.
In a second water-gas shift stage, the resulting carbon monoxide is reacted again with steam
to create more hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
The final steps remove the carbon dioxide and other impurities leaving pure hydrogen.
To understand the problem with this, we need to discuss the topic of Energy- ROI or return
on investment.
It’s just like an ROI on a financial investment.
If you spend $1,000 dollars to make $2,000 then your ROI is 2x.
Coal is king here, with E-ROI values of 80, which means for every unit of energy spent
to prepare coal, 80 units of energy can be extracted.
Oil isn’t what it used to be, and E-ROI levels continue to drop, from 50 in the 1960’s
to 35 in 1990 to 18 in 2005, and 12 in 2007.
As all the easy to reach oil dries up, this value will continue to fall.
Biodiesels are pretty poor at 1.3, but hydrogen from natural gas reforming is less than 1.
That means, the energy present as natural gas before the process, is actually higher
than the resulting hydrogen extracted.
95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States comes from natural gas reforming.
Oh, and yeah, there’s a fair bit of CO2 produced in this process, which doesn’t
exactly make this clean.
[ https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural-gas-reforming ]
The second way is through electrolysis, a process where an electrolyzer splits water
into hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an electrical current.
This sounds great because this could prove to be a truly zero-emission energy source,
but yeah, again, the E-ROI at today's technological levels is below 1.
The most efficient form of electrolysis is using a proton exchange membrane, which results
in an 80% efficiency.
This approach also makes the technology beholden to, however, clean the energy grid it draws
its power from, happens to be.
To be clear, the first method of natural gas reforming, can not, and will not be the answer,
because it emits carbon dioxide, and results in less energy than when you started.
Hydrogen through electrolysis, however, might very well play a roll in the energy storage
story of the future.
Sure, it is currently an inefficient process, but its clean, and offers some key benefits.
Next, let's look at the distribution system for these technologies.
Again the story is simple with battery EVs because they will just leverage the existing
power grid.
The one note here is that if we suddenly shifted every gasoline car to a battery EV, the stain
on the power grid would be substantial.
In just the US alone, in 2017, 28,000 TWh of electricity were consumed, and converting
200 Million cars to EVs would increase that by about 2%.
So let’s look at the economics of these two approaches to EVs.
Starting with electricity, we have a 98% efficiency in charging batteries, and an 80% efficiency
in PEM electrolysis.
The hydrogen extracted from electrolysis isn’t very useful at atmospheric pressures.
To store it in a meaningful way, we need to compress it to about 700x the atmospheric
pressure.
This too requires energy, in fact, about 15% of the total energy available.
Another approach is to cool the hydrogen, which is naturally a gas at room temperatures,
to a liquid, which would make it denser and easy to store.
But this cooling requires even more energy, so highly compressed hydrogen gas is currently
more viable.
So between electrolysis and compression, we’re down to 75% of the initial energy, which the
battery EV is still sitting pretty at 98%.
For production, we have two options, either distributed on site, at the station where
you’ll fill up, or centralized in big production factories.
Costs will be higher on site, due to smaller systems with smaller hydrogen output, but
transportation costs will be nonexistent.
Large production facilities can lower prices with higher outputs but will be forced to
ship highly compressed hydrogen either by trucks or pipeline.
To produce hydrogen at levels to make this technology viable, it’ll have to be offsite
in large commercial operations, much like gasoline currently.
These transportations costs will eat another 20% of the total hydrogen energy, dropping
us to about 55%.
In contrast, grid losses in the transmission of electricity would be around 5%, bringing
the battery EV efficiency, to 93%.
When we factor the losses of converting the energies to DC or AC for the motors and electric
motor efficiencies of 90% we’re left with a pretty decisive blow to the hydrogen fuel
cell car.
Here the battery EV is about twice as efficient as the hydrogen fuel.
For an in-depth look at this in action, check out Real Engineering’s video on “The Truth
about Hydrogen” links will be in the description.
But if all this wasn’t enough, there’s one more problem here, and that is the price
per kilogram of hydrogen.
Prices in the United States are roughly $15 / kilogram for hydrogen.
The Honda Clarity Fuel Cell vehicle gets 366 miles of range with 5.5kg of hydrogen.
That means it would cost about $82 to fill up, and cost about $0.22 per mile to operate.
In contrast, a Tesla Model 3, would cost just $0.05 per mile at 20 cents per kWh.
This incredibly high price is a function of demand and production.
Until some company pushes for the proliferation of hydrogen fuel cell cars, creating a market
for the fuel, these prices aren’t likely to drop.
Elon Musk, from the very outset of Tesla, stated that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were
“Incredibly Dumb” and others like Toyota have eventually agreed.
It would seem he was right, but we’d say, Hydrogen fuel just might have its place.
Hydrogen has a few key advantages, the first and greatest is energy density.
Hydrogen has one of the highest energy densities, at around 39 kWh/kg.
In contrast the 75 kWh Extended range Model 3, stores only about 0.2 kWh/kg.
How does gasoline stack up?
At about 13 kWh/kg.
This means adding range to a hydrogen fuel cell EV is as simple as increasing the size
of the tank, while for battery EVs that would mean hundreds of addition kilograms in weight,
and thousands of dollars in cost.
So Elon Musk might have a point about Battery EVs for personal transportation, but Batteries,
as they currently stand, can never replace gasoline for applications like boats or airplanes,
while, as you saw in the energy density figures, hydrogen very well could.
There is actually a company introducing a brand new semi truck for Europe called Nicola.
No, not Tesla, Nicola, yeah we know, it's confusing.
But this upstart company is preparing a hydrogen fuel cell semi truck that very well might
disrupt the status quo of diesel trucks in Europe.
Details are sparse, but you’re probably thinking, isn’t Tesla building an all battery
electric semi too?
Yes, they are, but this should prove really interesting.
The one very crucial detail that Tesla didn’t reveal, is the curb weight of the truck without
any payload.
This is crucial because most municipalities place weight limits on large cargo trucks,
and the 500-mile range Tesla Semi will probably require about 1000 kWhs of batteries, that
would weight around 13,000 lbs (6000 kg).
This means a Tesla Semi would have less weight available for cargo, which means less profit
per trip, and longer periods to break even.
In this scenario, it's obvious why a hydrogen fuel cell semi might be quite the game changer.
The second advantage is the short refueling times.
For a consumer car, an average fill-up would take about 5 minutes, while a battery EV can
take several hours to fill up.
This one seems pretty obvious, but in a world where not everyone has a garage, and charging
at home isn’t always an option, the hydrogen fuel cell EV might make sense.
Another key benefit of hydrogen is that it doesn’t drain energy as it sits around.
Lithium-ion batteries will slowly drain if let alone for long enough.
This could make Hydrogen a great choice for grid storage since the sun and wind aren’t
always out when energy demands peak.
If thinking about highly compressed hydrogen is conjuring up images of the Hindenberg,
don’t worry fuel cell cars are actually quite safe.
The tanks are highly reinforced, to withstand car crashes, and special vents can safely
discharge the compressed hydrogen before anything bad happens.
So batteries are much more efficient in taking energy and storing it, but it takes very high
upfront capital costs in battery manufacturing.
There’s also the mining of elements like cobalt, which we discussed in our Tesla Battery
Video series.
Hydrogen production wastes more energy than batteries, but the resulting fuel can be stored
in larger quantities for lower prices.
In closing, we wanted to also touch on the different market forces at play, and how both
of these technologies will fundamentally disrupt the future of big business.
First, we have the car manufacturers, who don’t much care if they’re making gasoline
cars, battery EVs or hydrogen fuel cells.
For them, it's just about building what customers want, and making healthy margins.
But then there are the energy utility companies, that provide electricity to us all, and the
oil and gasoline companies.
The utility companies are really sitting pretty in all of this because they are poised to
be at the center of the Electric Vehicle revolution.
Petroleum companies, however, know their time in the sun, is coming to an end.
They rely on supplying a product, that we consumers can’t readily create ourselves.
But with Battery EVs, that’s no longer the case.
So it is no surprise, that companies like Exon Mobile and Shell, are definitely keeping
their eye on hydrogen fuel cells as the solution of the future.
Sure it is possible to run electrolysis from your own solar panels and create hydrogen,
it isn’t really all that practical.
So in a hydrogen economy, the petroleum companies would shift gears and embrace this new fuel
source that they could create and supply.
These market forces play a huge role, in where funding for research and development is prioritized.
The 2020 Olympic Games are coming to Tokyo, and they plan on unveiling a “Hydrogen Society”
as one of their cornerstone showcases.
Japan is pretty serious about Hydrogen and for good reason.
It is an inevitability that battery technology will get better and better, and eventually
have that breakthrough moment where energy densities can compete with other fuels.
The same is true for hydrogen, where extraction methods will continue to improve and get even
more attractive.
How will we store all those renewable forms of energy, batteries or hydrogen?
Hopefully, we’ve made a case for why both can be viable options, and why further funding
and research into both technologies will be a win-win for all of us.
We’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, we realize we have many more videos
to make to dig deeper, and that’s why we ask you hit that subscribe button, the bell
icon, and make sure you don’t miss any of the videos we have planned in the coming months.
We’re Two Bit da Vinci, thanks for watching.