This is along the lines of what I was discussing here:

Will BEVs ever succeed as long-distance cars?

I think we all agree that BEVs are nearly-ideal “City Cars”. They're nimble, efficient, and they certainly reduce the amount of pollution emitted within the city even if today, some of that pollution is simply transferred out to suburban fossil-fueled electrical generating stations. And BEVs...

www.vwidtalk.com

I'm fully in agreement with Atkinson that for other than city/suburban use, there are and will continue to be better choices than EVs, from both an environmental perspective and a utility-of-use perspective.

 

I have said it before, it may take 50 or even 100 years but eventually, hydrogen will be the main fuel used for mobility.

 

He seems enamored of hydrogen and e-fuels, which to me makes no real sense. Hydrogen might work in a few niche applications - I just can see it for much beyond this.

 

He makes an interesting point that I hadn't thought about before. If over-the-road trucking decides to convert to hydrogen as the fuel for Compression-Ignition (“Diesel”) engines and every truck stop starts to have hydrogen dispensers, then using hydrogen to fuel either ICEV or HFCEV cars becomes much more practical.

Personally, I still think a shift to artificial liquid fuels is more likely but either way, the result is the same: EVs would still have no place in the long-distance travel arena.

 

My long preferred hydrogen fuel cell is making more sense.

 

And where does the hydrogen come from? These days, it is mostly made from natural gas. Yeah, you could split water, but that costs more.

Then you need to compress and transport it, and you have to consume energy to do both of these things.

 

The cleanest way to produce Hydrogen is to split H2O, combine the H with C from CO2. Note: I wrote cleanest - not cheapest. I'd like to see it become economically viable in my lifetime, but I think my yet unborn grandchildren may see it happen some time in their lifetime. 👏 YMMV.

 

Perhaps hydrogen semi trucks make sense though I would rather expansion and electrification of the railway system. For panel vans and smaller I believe that EV makes more sense and is available now. If you want to split water you need more nuclear power. Though the shortage of potable water has to be considered.

 

If you want to split water you need more nuclear power. Though the shortage of potable water has to be considered.

No. Because the hydrogen can be produced in many places and don't require 24x7 production, there are nearly endless amounts of renewable resources to create hydrogen. Expanded nuclear is definitely the wrong answer here although there are lots of nuclear proponents who disagree (for a variety of reasons).

 

Rowan Atkinson

Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.

I'm impressed he's got BSEE & MSEE. Usually, their field of study is theatre, drama, performance etc.

 

I think engineering meetings are probably a fertile breeding ground for comedy…

 

Not every truck or bus is long distance. We already have electric local busses. At the park and ride station, the "station" has a pantograph of sorts to boost the charge while waiting.

https://www.delaware.coop/press-room/dec-powers-new-lewes-bus-charger

 

The entire discussion of EV vs H2 vs ICE is all going to be overtaken by events. With apologies for being a climate doomer, the catastrophes that will have taken place by 2100 will put all this "personal car" stuff to rest.

 

The things that EV's have going for them are all the ways that electricity can be generated. Including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, wave generators, or nuclear (yes nuclear). OK, throw in hydrogen fool cells if you must. These can all be considered "green". Obviously there is also fossil fuel generators that have dominated to this point. In addition, electricity has a robust distribution infrastructure that is already in place. Tesla has shown that a DCFC network is doable for the times that you need to travel longer distances, while stops can match up with normal travel activities for whatever reason with little down time. On a day-to-day basis home charging works just fine. The gasoline fueling station network is the only infrastructure system that even come close to matching electricity, but think about what it take to make that network function. I'm not a fan of OPEC holding the world hostage. How many years will it take to build a hydrogen fueling network?

BTW engineering meetings can be very comical, mostly because they are lead by senior level engineering managers - face/palm.

 

The only way a fuel cell passenger car can make sense is as a range extender. For daily use hydrogen is not and will not be competitive with charging a battery. A range extender with 50 mile of EV range + fuel cell is a reasonable option.

 

Well, if you consider the most immediate situation with oil you might ask at what price for gas would I be very happy I have an EV and didn’t wait for some other technology? Also, I remember pushing my Datsun 510 down the street on a gas line in the 1970’s. As a NYC firefighter I had a pass to go to the head of the line but didn’t dare as it was worth my life to do so. Be careful with all the complaints as history has a habit of repeating itself. Here is todays news:

Oil prices rise as Saudi Arabia pledges output cuts Oil prices rise as Saudi Arabia pledges output cuts

 

So, I've thought about this a bit more... the ultimate answer is "follow the money" - everyone is investing in BEV technology. That's what governments are encouraging around the world, and it's where most of the biggest companies are putting their R&D money... Almost no-one is investing in hydrogen. I suspect eFuels may have more investment than hydrogen (and they're in their infancy)!

And don't underestimate how fast technology changes. If you remember what battery power tools were like in the NiCd era, or even NiMh, think about the revelation of LiIon. Future tech is coming to the battery space ... whether sodium, sulfur, or solid state, something is coming. And in 5-10 years products will be on the road using these technologies.

So, while it's fun to discuss which technology is better, I think in the long run, the market is placing its bets on batteries. SAS is even selling tickets for their first electric airplane... This Swedish Airline Is Selling Seats for Its First-ever All-electric Flights — Here's How to Book

 

If you remember what battery power tools were like in the NiCd era

My NiCad powered string trimmer was exhausting just from its weight. Li-ion certainly was a breakthrough in tools, cellphones, etc. etc. Here's hoping for the next great thing.

 

Another factor to consider is the long term reliability of the refueling equipment.

Gas and diesel vehicles have tanks (simple), pipes (simple), floats (simple), and a hole in the side of the car (simple). You can refuel them at a gas pump, or with a hand-held gas tank, or by siphoning it out of somebody else's tank. Rust, rain, minor damage due to the car being hit--all these sorts of minor catastrophes can be withstood by the simple technology.

EVs require electrical connectors. We have not yet arrived at the "the connector on my ten year old car is broken" phase, but have certainly seen the broken connectors on charging stations. This system is more complicated and more fragile than the conventional fuel nozzle technology.

Hydrogen is really, really difficult to contain. It can even leak through welded connections. In perfect conditions you can make a plug-in connector work, but get some dirt on there, or drop it and put a small dent in the seal, or let it sit around for a decade and get corroded, and you have a connector that doesn't work any more.

In my neighborhood there are a lot of junky old cars. I cannot imagine them with hydrogen fueling connections, considering their overall condition. All of this is my opinion, although I have also had some heated discussions with hydrogen fuel enthusiasts who say I am full of it.

 

Today, there's one rebuttal letter in The Guardian.

It claims a twenty-year service lifetime for electric vehicles but based on my decades of experience, I think that's a bit much.

 

As you yourself just told us, CANDU doesn't burn spent fuel rods (as are dry-casked at U.S. power plants). So far, nobody knows what to do with all those dry-casked rods.

(By the way, you don't need to lecture me about CANDU. Ages ago, I actually had a little something to do with the system that manages the refuelling of those reactors.)

 

Don’t be pedantic. Instead of using virgin uranium you recycle the old rods. There are other new plants that can use the rods , also usually recycled and reformed,but you required an existing plant in commercial use and i provided it.

 

But nobody except the French does it because its not economically feasible. It sort'a kind'a made sense when we needed plutonium for nuclear weapons but absent that subsidy, reprocessing spent fuel makes very little sense. Meanwhile, the British expect to spend more than £260 Billion cleaning up Sellafield (their nuclear fuel reprocessing site) and we're about to punt on the idea that we can EVER clean up the Hanford Reservation, even for the last proposed $528 Billion budget.

 

So we leave spent fuel rods for our descendants in 30,000 years to deal with?
Back to hydrogen. It is neither cheap or easy to transport. Transporting it by pipeline requires stainless steel pipe. That means new pipelines with all of the NIMBYism . We can’t even get new electrical transmission lines built which is arguably easier to do. For 20 years of my career I testified as an expert witness for eminent domain for roads and bridges. The laws allowed the government to take the land, post a bond for the value we estimated the land to be worth with the court and settle with the owner in court while construction is under way. Utilities, on the other hand, can also use eminent domain but can only start construction after each and every plot of land is settled in court.

 

So we leave spent fuel rods for our descendants in 30,000 years to deal with?
Back to hydrogen. It is neither cheap or easy to transport. Transporting it by pipeline requires stainless steel pipe.

DOE disagrees with you.

 

A good article debunking and ripping to shreds the OP point by point with experts:
“He’s complaining about current batteries and implying we have to wait for better ones. But the current ones will already last the lifetime of the car and the car will emit 3x less CO2 over its lifetime. (Yes, I’m sure about this, because that is my actual field of study.)” said Hoekstra in on twitter.

Debunking Mr Bean's electric tropes: EVs are far better for the planet than ICE vehicles

Experts have debunked Rowan Atkinson's recent article claiming you should keep your old polluting petrol car rather than upgrade to an EV. The Mr Bean actor also thinks hydrogen and synthetic fuels are the future.

thedriven.io

Including:
why hydrogen powered vehicles are completely absurd and have no future.

 

That article spends an awful lot of its words on ad hominem attacks.

And then there's this:

As he pointed out in his recent interview with The Driven, Tony Seba says EVs are already doing five times more kilometres over their lifetime than ICE vehicles and with 2 million km batteries going into mass production next year, a single EV will soon replace 10 ICE vehicles over its lifetime. That’s 10 times fewer vehicles that need to be manufactured.

That must be referring to EVs in very specialized use such as taxi service. 'Cause it's for damned sure that the EVs that you and I drive for our casual use will last about as long as the ICEs that we currently drive and after ten or fifteen years of use (and the same number of miles that we would have put on an ICEV in that same time), all that same stuff like electric window winders and suspension components will break and be economically unrepairable and we'll junk the cars.

That is to say, it is a silly argument to make that a BEV will amortize its embedded energy (or CO2) over a much longer service lifetime than an equivalent ICEV.

I found Atkinson's article much less biased than this rebuttal.

 

Maybe instead of focusing on farfetched concepts like e-Fuel and hydrogen, automakers can step up and support battery tech companies (like Quantumscape and SolidPower) to develop a competitive battery in the West. If they don't do that, they will have to buy their battery technology from China in foreseeable future. They are already invested in these companies, but they should increase their support 10 fold. Without a next gen battery technology they won't be competitive with Chinese manufacturers in a few years.

 

Back the article? I'll note that the first words are "Sadly, keeping your old petrol car may be better than buying an EV." Keeping is the key word. After his paragraphs of Hydrogen and Soild State futuretech, he gets down his core message: ditch your in-town diesel but otherwise keep your current vehicle a bit longer.

That has some wisdom in it. (Also sounds a whole lot wiser than buying a new combustion vehicle.)

 

I find this funny because of how mundane it is. We're comparing methods of generating, transporting, storing, and consuming energy for the purpose of converting it into kinetic energy. That's it.

It only gets complicated when you look at the consequences of each of those 4 steps. The consequences people care about drive them to prefer one energy source over another, but to disregard other sources because of a preference is silly.

IMO if you care about the current and rapidly increasing consequences of generating energy by consuming fossil fuels, then any energy source which results in consuming fewer of them is worth having.

Probably best to have multiple of them concurrently to help saturate different segments of the market? I hope hydrogen succeeds, and BEVs of all types. I also hope we trend towards walkable cities, better public transport, and renewable (or at least non-hydrocarbon emitting) energy sources.

 

Maybe this is way off in the weeds, politics-wise, but the international nuclear fuel situation is a complete mess. Even right now, the US imports a substantial amount of both low-enriched uranium fuel and uranium ore from Russia--despite all sorts of words about sanctions.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the US nuclear industry has made little effort to lower its dependence on Russian LEU. “Industry came out of the gates saying no, we can’t do it. I didn’t see any kind of effort on the part of the US industry to get together and say let’s see how we can do this.”

If Constellation could do without Russian uranium, “the question is why didn’t they just do it?” says Lyman. “They don’t want any perturbation of their Russian supply that could inconvenience them or raise costs. I find that kind of outrageous.” A Constellation spokesperson says the Russian supply contracts were negotiated before the Ukraine invasion, and none have been made since then.

The US nuclear industry has long urged the federal government to subsidize new domestic enrichment capacity, arguing that all the world’s enrichment plants are essentially government-owned enterprises.

Getting more nukes in play will require a massive disruption to the politics and economics and industrial landscape.

 

Getting more nukes in play will require a massive disruption to the politics and economics and industrial landscape.

Another factor now is that while it used to seem that fusion energy was never going to arrive, that situation finally seems to be changing and it's entirely within the realm of possibility that any money spent now on new fission projects (that won't come online for a decade or so) will turn out to be money wasted because fusion power will make fission power a white elephant.

 

Regarding transporting hydrogen over long distances, another method of doing so is to take nitrogen from the air, use that to convert the hydrogen to easily-transported ammonia, and then, at the far end, crack the hydrogen back out of the ammonia and release the nitrogen back to the air.

Green Ammonia To Solve Hydrogen Transportation Conundrum

 

Guys, as an engineer I’m enjoying this thread… but we’re never going to build more nukes* (3 mile island, etc) or hydrogen infrastructure (Hindenburg). What we do have already is an electric grid that brings power everywhere. Now, it needs upgrading and reliability improvements, but that’s just money and time - doesn’t require investing in unproven tech. And our power generation tech is getting greener every day - plus we don’t need to worry about replacing our car or our charging infrastructure when someone replaces a coal plant or a nuclear plant with a wind turbine or a solar panel. So, all we need to do is get smaller, lighter batteries that charge faster… and who wants to make the argument that chemists aren’t going to crack that in the next few years with all the money going into it? (You can already spend six figures for a Taycan that charges on road trips in 15 min or less under ideal conditions; now it’s just a matter of making it cheaper and more reliable to hit those marks - and when have we been unable to do that?)

* Yes, fusion (my favorite technology) could be the perfect answer to everything power-generation wise, but wake me up when it’s commercially viable!

 

Two points:

1. I've said this before, I'll say it again, and doubtless I'll have to say it again later: There AREN'T any lighter-weight battery chemistries waiting to be exploited. There are cheaper chemistries (e.g., sodium-based or potentially, lithium-sulfur-based chemistries), there are probably longer-lasting chemistries and/or structures, and there may be chemistries and structures that support faster recharging but Lithium-based chemistries give us the best possible Power-per-Watt and that's down to the physics and electrochemistry of the situation and is immutable.

2. Separately, and more arguably, I'll say that it's probably easier to build new underground pipelines (or repurpose existing pipelines) to move hydrogen (or ammonia, etc.) than it is to build new long-haul megavolt power transmission systems. Look at how Northern Pass got killed in New Hampshire. Look at the legal troubles around its replacement, the New England Clean Energy Connect through Maine. I don't have a gut feel for the relative number of gigawatts that can move through a pipeline versus a power line but I'll bet it's roughly comparable.

 

Also, I just noticed Bjorn’s conclusion to his Toyota Mirai test…. And I think the title gives away his feelings. (Will go watch it now, but wanted to share.)

 

As I said, not all [yet] rosy in Mirai-land, but at least Toyota tried/is trying. We need trying on many fronts.