FOCUS: ev market
The alternative alternative
HYDROGEN
— will trucking demands give Hydrogen the boost it needs? Mark Bursa All the talk may be of battery-electric vehicles, but Hydrogen remains the elephant in the room. It has some very major advantages – range is not an issue, and recharging is no more difficult than filling up with LPG. And it has disadvantages. The fuel cells required to turn Hydrogen into electricity are very expensive. Only a couple of car makers are committed to the technology – mainly Hyundai and Toyota, and both have hedged their bets to some degree by backing EV technology too. Perhaps the biggest issue is extracting the Hydrogen itself. This has traditionally involved using fossil fuels, and critics say the process is inefficient, using more energy than it creates. However, that might be about to change. And the prime driver behind hydrogen is the commercial vehicle market. Cars make up 44.3% of EU transport emissions, but light- and heavy-duty trucks contribute a sizable 27.9% as well. And it’s not so easy to develop battery-electric heavy trucks. Batteries are heavy, and you’d need a lot of them to move a 44-tonne artic. That would compromise the payload, making the vehicle inefficient. Which is where hydrogen – the lightest substance on the planet – comes in. A group of seven truck makers, including Volvo, Scania, Ford and Daimler, agreed last month to stop selling diesel-powered trucks by 2040, a decade earlier than previously planned. And Shell has now teamed up with a group of truck makers including Daimler, Volvo and Iveco, as well as Austrian oil and gas firm OMV, to develop a programme called H2Accelerate, designed to make Hydrogen the fuel of choice for road freight vehicles. The program seeks to synchronise investments in early-stage hydrogen truck and fuelling infrastructure to enable the 2020s to become a “decade long scale-up”, with a view to thousands of Hydrogen-powered trucks being manufactured and a European network of refuelling stations by the second half of this decade. The trade body Hydrogen Europe expects 10,000 hydrogen trucks on Europe’s roads by 2025, rising rapidly to 100,000 by 2030. “The prize is clear. By boosting scale in a big way, hydrogen-fuelled trucks will need to become available to customers at or below the cost of owning and operating a diesel truck today,” said Elisabeth Brinton, EVP for Shell’s New Energies unit, in a statement. “This means truck customers will need to have access to a fully zero-
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Hyundai Nexo SUV at the hydrogen filling station, Cobham Services M25
emissions vehicle with a similar refuelling time, range and cost range compared to the vehicles in use today.” Martin Lundstedt, president and CEO of the Volvo Group, said Hydrogen and batteries would both form part of the solution. “In the future, the world will be powered by a combination of batteryelectric and fuel-cell electric vehicles, along with other renewable fuels to some extent,” he said in a statement. For car producers, the announcement is good news. Not only will infrastructure become available – analysts believe Hydrogen could be a useable fuel for all users with as few as 100 filling stations in the UK – the demand for fuel cells for trucks will bring down the cost of those pricey fuel cells for car makers. And the fuel cell cars that are on the market are very impressive. We tested the Hyundai Nexo SUV last year, and its 414-mile WLTP range is unlikely to cause range anxiety. And its ability to be refuelled in no longer than a petrol car gives it a major advantage over a BEV. Toyota, the other main player in the HEV sector, has recently revealed a secondgeneration Mirai, which looks extremely impressive. It has a much smaller fuel cell stack than the
New Toyota Mirai
Mk1 Mirai, weighing half as much, yet it delivers more performance and range – Toyota estimates 400 miles on a tankful of H2. And while the price is still high and volumes low – Toyota sold 11,000 Mk1 Mirais worldwide over five years, including 180 in the UK, but is looking for a ten-fold increase with the new model over a similar timeframe. The car is likely to cost around £50,000, which is a lot less than the £66,000 price tag of the Mk1, and but it’s easy to see a downward curve there as volumes rise. The other key to hydrogen adoption is “green hydrogen”. This involves making hydrogen through a chemical process known as electrolysis. This method uses an electrical current to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water. If this electricity is obtained from renewable sources, it would produce energy without any CO2 emissions. It’s not a cheap process at the moment, but the technology is real. In Spain, Iberdrola is building a plant producing green hydrogen for industrial use in Europe. The Puertollano plant in Ciudad Real will consist of a 100MW photovoltaic solar plant, a lithium-ion battery system with a storage capacity of 20MWh and one of the largest electrolytic hydrogen production systems in the world (20 MW). With an investment of €1.8 billion until 2027, it will produce 15,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year. The laws of supply and demand apply. The need to power those thousands of heavy trucks is likely to focus the minds of energy companies into making hydrogen in the cleanest and cheapest way possible. And that’s good news for the hydrogen car market.
DECEMBER 2020
