mux said:
GRA said:
That price is well below the average price of the used Mirais he was tracking, but what I want to know is how did it wind up in Chicago?
They tend to pop up in a few isolated locations because there are filling stations there - there are two 'industrial' (but open to the public) H2 stations in the Chicago area.
As for H2 from electrolysis at $4/kg, there is theoretically a path. You need about 50kWh/kg in electric inputs, which at current solar PPA-type prices is about $1-1.50 excluding T&D costs. Add those and you're definitely below $2 in electricity inputs. At high volumes, logistics/retail margin should be fairly similar to LNG/LPG at ~$0.50/kg. The only unknown in the long term is electrolysis/purification/pressurization equipment cost. Right now that's in the low single-digit dollar range per kg. If it drops well below $1/kg in the future, $4/kg H2 is possible.
They're not talking about $4/kg. H2 necessarily via electrolysis, although that's one possible pathway. They're also exploring thermochemical or photochemical production. One of the ways to reduce H2 retail cost is to remove the cost/energy of pressurization, which IIRR is around 5kWh/kg. to 700 bar, via a switch to adsorption/nanotube storage at low pressures. The on-vehicle storage weight goes up, but it doesn't have to be cylindrical to handle high pressures, so you can use odd-shaped tanks (and use a skateboard design just like a BEV). IIRC, the problem with adsorption storage is that while it's easy to get the H2 in, it's a lot more difficult to get it back out. Nanotube storage is such leading edge stuff that no one knows what will be possible/commercial. Here's one link that reports a lot of the research:
https://www.greencarcongress.com/hydrogen_production/ Naturally, most of these will never be commercialized.
mux said:
The reason I personally don't see this ever happening is the scale factor. Hydrogen for vehicle fuels is not a mainstream prospect - it's hard to conceive of any possible future where HFCEVs are cheaper than BEVs, in fact now already BEVs outperform FCEVs on basically every relevant metric and cost trends are predictably favourable towards BEVs. You need a LOT of volume to recoup the equipment cost of hydrogen production and distribution. This is a chicken and egg issue for hydrogen, and by and large you're not going to fix that by using hydrogen elsewhere. The equipment costs to recoup are in vehicle-specific parts like pressurization, high-pressure storage and dispensing stations.
I disagree with you
there. FCEVs still have greater practical range, especially in cold conditions, and more rapid refueling than any available BEV (even those costing thousands more), despite BEVs being at least 5 years ahead of them in development and FCEVs being built in relatively tiny numbers. That fueling is currently divorced from housing is an advantage in locations and countries with large numbers of people living in high-density housing (although a disadvantage for people who own a detached, single family home with a garage, but that's not how most of the world's car owners live). New H2 station costs in California have already come down considerably thanks to both economies of scale (more stations using the same equipment, with larger capacities thus lower cost per car served) and the usual design improvements, both of which still have a long way to go before this is a mature business ala' gas stations. And existing gas stations are where most of the H2 stations will go, given virtually the same business model.
mux said:
A $3M dispensing station, including capital costs and maintenance, will have to serve about 10M kg of hydrogen over its 8-year lifespan to cost as much to operate as a gasoline pump (about $0.10-0.20/gal-equiv). That is 1000 vehicles per day receiving a full tank of hydrogen. There are almost no hydrogen stations right now, and the ones that exist serve maybe 10 customers per day.
You're behind the times. There are more than 40 stations in California despite the construction standstill most of the past year owing to the drop in fuel supply (owing to an explosion at the main Norcal production facility), and other countries are also building them in even larger numbers. As noted above costs have come down, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Some of the first gen. California stations (180 kg. capacity) are already requiring more than one tanker delivery a day to meet demand, with a typical fill being 3-4kg. IIRR, the new stations in Cycle 2 were required to have at least 300 (360?) kg. capacity, but First Element is building them with 500kg., using liquid H2 delivery to cut down the number of delivery trips. See
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/AB8_report_2019_Final.pdf for the most recent report on California stations.
mux said:
Even if we completely ignore capital and maintenance costs, every fill-up costs $100 in bare equipment costs. We need 100x the hydrogen stations to even start thinking about mainstream adoption and we need those costs to go down about 100-fold, so we need 10.000x the number of hydrogen vehicles to be in the order of magnitude of scale to think about $4/kg H2.
And what do we have then? (High) Gas price equivalence. Not even BEV price equivalence!
No one is claiming that H2/FCEVs are suitable for mainstream adoption yet. But then, neither are BEVs. And no one is making a profit off QC stations either, which is why both they and H2 stations are still dependent on subsidies to get built. Public L2 might or might not be profitable, but given the slow rate at which they're being built even with subsidies, the odds are against it.