Anybody got comments on this9 Feb 2025 23:11
Hydrogen’s Inefficiencies Compared To Batteries
Nakrani sees a range of reasons why hydrogen isn’t proving to be the right choice even for trucks. “Professor David Cebon from the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight explained the elements of why efficiency of the hydrogen fuel cell stack is so much worse than batteries,” he says. “He shows how if you take 100kWh of electrical energy, by the time you go through the fuel cell process and get it to the vehicle and do the storage and transportation, you're at 23%. So 100 becomes 23 versus EV, where 100 becomes 69. In other words, an EV is three times more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell from a power generation to delivery point of view.”
However, efficiency isn’t hydrogen’s only problem. “The storage issues have not been overcome,” adds Nakrani. “If you keep it as a gas, you must compress the hydrogen to a very high level to reduce the volume sufficiently. You then must put it into a tank that can hold that high pressure system. I haven’t seen the technology that can do it at a cost structure that works. Today, to equal a diesel oil tanker carrying a certain amount of energy, with hydrogen storage compressed by 250 Bar, you would still need at least 20 hydrogen tankers for the same amount of energy. Another option is liquid hydrogen, but this means you need to freeze it to -253C (-423F). Even then, you would still need four of these equivalent tankers to provide the same energy consumption as diesel. The physics of doing that is a disaster.”
There’s another difficulty as well. “The third point is transport,” says Nakrani. “Because of those expensive storage solutions and the requirement of compression, getting it from point A to point B with a cost structure that could have a hope of being competitive is incredibly difficult. The truck OEMs have recognized this, which is why, if you talk to anybody senior in the truck market, they will all say there is a place that hydrogen may play, but it will be very limited. No one is saying it’s dead completely, but now everybody says that the EV will be at least 80 to 90% of the heavy-duty truck volume. Then the problem for hydrogen is, if it's such a niche, the cost will never achieve the economies you need to deal with its inefficiencies.”
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