What happened to the hydrogen fuel cell dream?
Toyota recently announced it’s doubling down on its investment in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, with the intent of developing lower-cost FCEVs (fuel cell electric vehicles), as well as larger trucks and buses, for mass-market distribution.
The company already offers a fuel-cell version of its Mirai passenger car, which is scheduled to be updated in 2020, but on a very limited basis and only in small, selected markets. Ditto for fuel-cell variants of Honda’s Clarity as well as Hyundai’s Tucson — the first FCEV offered to the public in Canada, in 2015 — and its new Nexo. Twenty-five examples of the latter have reportedly been scheduled for the Canadian market.
And Mercedes-Benz just announced a trial test of GLC fuel cell hybrids in Germany.
All of this might seem to suggest that FCEVs are the way of the future, except that they were deemed as such 20 years ago. Now, here we are two decades later, with less than a handful of examples marginally on the market, and we’re still talking about them in the same future context.
Flashback 20 years. Canada’s Ballard Power Systems was a pioneer in fuel-cell technology and a hot stock tip, soon to get hotter. Mercedes-Benz was heavily invested in developing fuel cells for vehicular use and General Motors, along with most other major automakers, would soon follow suit.
Acouple years later, GM solidified the fuel cell dream with its groundbreaking AUTOnomy concept car — a conceptual blueprint for a bevy of fuel-cellpowered concepts and prototypes that would follow.
Within the decade, FCEVs would be well on the way to replacing internal-combustion engines as the vehicular powertrain of choice, we were told, not just by GM but by multiple players in the fuel-cell game.
So, what happened? Are fuel cells still the power plant of the future? Or is the fuel-cell dream dead? Let’s consider some of the factors involved.
The first is hydrogen. It is the most abundant element in the universe, so there’s no shortage of supply, but its problem is it doesn’t exist on its own. It’s always part of a compound substance, such as water (H2O) or various hydrocarbon materials (e.g., C3H8 = propane).
To separate the hydrogen from one of those compounds requires energy — in some cases, a lot of energy. It can be extracted from water by means of electrolysis, which entails passing an electric current through water. If the electricity used is generated by renewable means — and that’s a big if — it makes good environmental sense.
But it’s not. Currently, almost all commercial hydrogen is produced by reacting natural gas with high-temperature steam. So, not only is energy required to generate the steam, the raw material consumed in the process is a fossil fuel.
In its favour, hydrogen can store more energy than a battery of equivalent weight. But it does have to be stored at high pressure, which requires the use of specialized fuel tanks, typically made of expensive carbon fibre.
Perhaps hydrogen’s greatest attribute is that it would require virtually no disruption of drivers’ established habits. FCEVs would be refuelled in the same way as gasoline-fuelled vehicles, and in about the same time.
The other part of the equation is the fuel cell itself. In concept, it acts like a battery that is recharged by constantly feeding it hydrogen. In fact, rather than storing electricity like a battery, it generates electricity by chemically reacting hydrogen with oxygen.
Individual fuel cells are very small, with low electrical output, so they are stacked together — typically 300 to 400 in an automotive fuel cell — to create a complete “fuel cell” as we know it.
In addition to electricity, a fuel cell’s only output is water, which is what makes it an ideal “zero-emissions” power plant, in principle.
Its biggest problem is cost. It’s a very sophisticated device to manufacture and its chemical reaction requires the use of expensive materials, including platinum and titanium.
On the surface, FCEVs would seem to offer an optimal compromise between gasoline-fuelled vehicles and battery-elec- tric vehicles (BEVs). They offer all the attributes of BEVs but they can be refuelled in a similar manner and in about the same time as conventional gasoline-fuelled vehicles. That’s a huge advantage over BEVs, at least at present, as recharge time is a major deterrent for many people, at least at present.
In addition, FCEVs offer driving ranges between fill-ups that exceed those of BEV recharges and are close, if not yet equal, to those of most gasoline models.
Their two big challenges are cost and lack of infrastructure — both areas in which BEVs have made significantly more and quicker progress over the time period.
The game is not over, but the momentum has definitely swung the other way.
Realistically, it may be too late for FCEVs to overtake what is becoming a BEV juggernaut. Hydrogen, it seems, may forever remain the fuel of the future.