Hydrogen fuel too costly for widespread use: study
A new study says hydrogen fuel for vehicles and businesses is unlikely in the foreseeable future – in spite of government support for private company research.
Concept Consulting director Simon Coates said converting electricity or gas to power a fleet of hydrogen trucks would take more than three times more energy than using electricity and batteries.
His report was jointly funded by Contact Energy, the Energy Efficiency Conservation Authority, First Gas, Meridian Energy, Powerco, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
But Andrew Clennett, the chief executive of hydrogen research firm Hiringa Energy, said he was disappointed with the report and hoped it would not influence government policy.
Clennett said the report was overly negative and failed to take into account the wider picture – that hydrogen energy would help enable development of clean energy technology.
Hiringa worked with hydrogen vehicle importers and local fabricators and expected to have a pilot trial under way in 2020.
The cost of hydrogen-powered heavy vehicles is about double that of conventional trucks.
The latest research in China was making progress on reducing the cost of hydrogen fuel cells, Clennett said.
One thing Clennett and Coates agreed on was that electricpowered heavy trucks were not likely to be cost effective because of the long charging times and the weight and size of batteries.
The Concept report explored the benefits to the environment, which depended on how hydrogen was produced. For example, Taranaki-based Pouakai NZ was researching the use of natural gas to produce hydrogen, involving storage of the greenhouse gases that are released.
Other ‘‘green’’ technologies such as wind or hydroelectric power were neither cost effective nor reliable, the report said.
Hydrogen could have potential to decarbonise some on-site freight transport, but in most cases it would be cheaper to use electricity or natural gas directly rather than convert it to hydrogen, the Concept report said.
‘‘[I]t is relatively unlikely that high-power battery charging and hydrogen fuelling infrastructure will both be deployed at a scale needed to change over New Zealand’s heavy transport fleet. The network economies of transport strongly suggest that one technology will emerge as the dominant technology,’’ it said.
About 75 per cent of hydrogen production costs came from energy and network costs, with the balance from operating and storage equipment, the report said.