Fuelling hope for a zero-emission future
Do Trevor Milton’s eighteen-wheelers contain the battery that will revolutionize transportation?
Imagine you want to make a difference in the worldwide mobility business. Your goal? Eliminating tailpipe CO2 emissions and reducing mankind’s reliance on fossil fuels.
You name your company after Nikola Tesla, the quixotic genius who fairly invented modern electricity. You design an electric vehicle unlike any other — streamlined, sporty and, in a segment not always known for style, kinda sexy.
You start your company in the United States where, as pundits have been decrying for years, vehicle manufacturing is dying. Your audacity emboldens critics.
“Your energy storage system is untenable,” say some.
“You’ve never built a vehicle,” deride others.
Most damning, however, are those who note with some veracity that the required recharging infrastructure will be a problem: “There’s no way you’ll be able to drive across our vast country.”
So you create your own charging stations, guaranteeing continent-wide refuelling. You start small, with just a handful, but promise that within a few years no community in North America will remain without service.
Then you make your most audacious move: Offer free charging across this growing nationwide refuelling network for anyone willing to take a chance on your product.
“Not economically feasible,” intone the critics.
You go ahead anyway, breaking ground on the first few stations. You are bold. You are defiant. And most of all, you are proving your critics wrong. You are … Trevor Milton.
Not who you were thinking, right? Indeed, unless you’re in the long-haul trucking business, you probably have no idea who I’m talking about. Well, Trevor Milton is the founder and chief executive of Nikola, a Utah-based startup manufacturer of electrically powered Class 8 semis, who is taking more than a few pages from Elon Musk’s playbook to promote his emissions-free trucks.
Indeed, the only — OK, major — difference between Nikola’s eighteen-wheelers and Tesla’s semis are that they are powered by fuel cells rather than batteries.
“Fool cells?” Those hydrogen-powered contraptions have been roundly ridiculed by no less than Lord Elon as impractical, requiring a — shocking, I tell you, shocking! — expensive refuelling infrastructure.
Now, never mind those exact same criticisms were, just a few years ago, levelled at Tesla’s equally daring plans for a nationwide Supercharger network. But Nikola’s hydrogen-fuelled trucks have one huge advantage: weight.
Hydrogen, when it is compressed to 700 bar — 10,000 psi — has far greater energy density than any lithium-ion battery. One of the untold stories about battery-powered cars is that while the cost of lithium-ion has decreased fairly rapidly (from US$1,000 per kilowatt hour a few years ago to around $175-per-kWh most recently), its energy density has not. This means that in the largest-range electric cars — such as Tesla’s 100D, Jaguar’s I-Pace and the upcoming Porsche Taycan — batteries alone can weigh upward of 400 kilograms.
Multiply that 20-fold for a battery capable of powering a (fully loaded) 36,287-kg semi up to 1,000 kilometres or more and you have one heck of a weight penalty. Unlike a car, which can compensate for the added weight, every kilogram of battery an eighteen-wheeler has to haul around is a kilogram of payload — emphasis on the “pay” — that can’t be stuffed into its trailer.
Estimates vary, but it would be fair to say any battery-powered truck capable of a 1,000km range could see its payload cut by as much as half. That’s a hit truckers simply can’t afford.
So when Nikola suggests that its trucks weigh the same as diesel-powered Class 8s — or, that their entire truck weighs less than just the Tesla truck’s battery pack — the industry takes notice. Factor in that, according to Jesse Schneider, Nikola’s vice-president of hydrogen and fuel-cell development, these trucks can be refuelled in the same 15 to 20 minutes as a diesel-powered semi, and you have an industry’s undivided attention.
And like Tesla, Nikola is planning to build its own refuelling network across North America. Although the immediate plan is for 16 stations — two of which are already scheduled for construction — Nikola has promised there will be more than 700 refuelling depots across the continent by 2028. In Canada, the focus will be on a Trans-Canada Highway infrastructure with stations in northern Ontario, Winnipeg, etc.
And again taking a page right out of the Tesla playbook, refuelling will be free of charge for Nikola owners for up to 1.6-million km.
That’s why Nikola can claim US$8 billion in pre-orders for its Nikola One and Two, the boldest being Anheuser-Busch’s announcement it will replace its entire fleet of 800 diesel-fuelled long-haul trucks with Nikola’s fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) as part of a commitment to reduce its corporate greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent.
This all starts becoming important to the average car buyer once the stations are up and running, because Nikola will also sell its hydrogen to those who drive fuel cell-powered automobiles.
It’s an important breakthrough. To date, sales of Toyota’s Mirai, the Hyundai Tucson and upcoming FCEVs from marques such as Mercedes, have been compromised by the lack of a refuelling infrastructure. If Nikola is successful, one more roadblock to mass fuel-cell adoption falls by the wayside.
Battery EVs (BEVs), with their low cost of recharging and the convenience of powering up at home, will still dominate urban markets. And plug-in hybrids will still be the low-cost long-distance alternative. But with an infrastructure in place, FCEVs will offer a more convenient long-distance zero-emissions future.
Perhaps, this might even be the impetus for automakers to develop the BEV/FCEV hybrids Motor Mouth has long touted. At the very minimum, the truly green two-car household might have both a BEV and an FCEV in the driveway.
Whatever the outcome, it does seem strange that a trucking company might be the saviour the electric-car “revolution” so desperately needs.