HYDROGEN FUEL CELL CARS
The Real Solution for Transportation
Electric is the Wrong Solution
I won’t buy an electric car because: (A): I keep my cars a long time and don’t want to pay $10K for a new battery in 10 years and (B): I see having a car I can rely on to escape an earthquake with quick fill-ups and no charging time. (C): Plus, they’re much too costly. I buy used cars, and with the battery issue, that’s not an option. Besides, as noted in a prior blog, they aren’t exactly green. (See Is Going Green Good?
) Even Toyota isn’t completely on board.
Battery-electric vehicles “are just going to take longer than the media would like us to believe,” Toyoda, grandson of the automaker’s founder, told dealers gathered in Las Vegas. He pledged to offer the “widest possible” array of powertrains to propel cars cleanly.
Electric cars also need a massive expansion in the numbers of charging stations, not the least because it takes so long to charge the battery. That will cost a lot of money (don’t expect free charging to last).
If you seek to protect the environment, how about a car that burns no fossil fuels, produces almost no pollution or greenhouse gases and gets twice the mileage of a Tesla?
The Solution is Already Here
Hydrogen cars are actually cars with electric motors, just like the current electric cars. The difference is that they use a fuel cell instead of the costly, rare-earth-powered batteries. A fuel cell creates electricity via an electrochemical reaction between a fuel (hydrogen) and the oxygen in the air. Besides providing energy, the cell produces water vapor. This is basically the same process that powers rocket engines. There is a small amount of CO2 emitted, but it’s similar to that emitted by electric cars.
What else, besides gasoline powered cars, are superior to electrics? For one thing, you can drive a fuel-cell car as far as a gas car. The Toyota Mirai, which has the shortest range of hydrogen cars, can go 317 miles on a full tank. Most importantly, it takes the same amount of time to pump hydrogen as to pump gas, which means a given station can process a LOT more cars than a battery charger. And, you’re out in minutes, able to continue your journey quickly.
I’ve done the research. You could easily add hydrogen pumps to existing gas stations, so no need for special charging stations. Hydrogen is pretty easy to produce, either through the reverse process of hydrolysis where you separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, or using steam-methane reforming (high-temperature, high-pressure steam is mixed with natural gas to produce hydrogen). Hydrogen producers might be willing to install pumps everywhere for a cut of the profit.
Imagine how simple this would be for all of us. Clean cars that don’t require all the damage it takes to make the batteries (which don’t recycle at all), cars that go as far as gasoline-powered cars and take minutes to refuel.
Challenges
Right now, these cars are expensive, which is a deterrent. But as we all know, if there is demand, the price inevitably goes down. The car pictured below is one of the lowest range vehicles and is currently around $51K.
Demand has been lowered by several factors. First is the stupid subsidies given for electric cars, mostly awarded to people who could easily afford the full price. Second, government pressure and guilt trips are forcing people to look at these cars, even if they don’t really want them. Many aren’t aware that they are all that green, except that their exhaust is pretty harmless. But the major problem is governments trying to keep us from having access to the fuel. There are a few hydrogen fueling stations in California and almost none anywhere else. And there is no support for creating hydrogen-generating infrastructure, even as it is easier, cheaper and cleaner.
But there’s more to the problem. As an example, California mandates that at least 33% of the hydrogen must come from renewable sources. All the investment is going to battery cars, which aren’t sustainable going forward. Nothing proves that more than the periods this summer where Newsom told the drivers not to charge during certain hours as our flimsy energy grid wouldn’t be able to handle the load.
A Need for Change
We need to do a few things to make this both climate-friendly and sustainable. First, eliminate subsidies for battery cars and charging stations. If you want this, go ahead, but we need more options. Next, start investing government infrastructure funds in hydrogen infrastructure. Offer subsidies to fuel cell car buyers. In the end, hydrogen is the right answer (unless we can find a way to rationally power cars with nuclear power).
We will never be able to build enough green electrical infrastructure to go away from standard power. Every square inch of land that isn’t already committed would need to be covered with solar panels and/or windmills. And then, we have to hope Mother Nature is kind enough to power them. Go hydrogen, go green.
