Hydrogen availability

[GT119]

RemarkLima said:

GT119 said:

I am aware of the overlap between chemicals/plastics and liquid fuels but I’m going to leave that for someone else to deal with!

Regarding the issue of hydrogen infrastructure, my take on this is that it makes a lot more sense for these to be solely dedicated to commercial applications, kept well away from consumers.

The equipment design for both the vehicles and the infrastructure, the number of infrastructure installations, and the usage/maintenance protocols can all be optimised at a much more cost effective scale.

For the UK at least, given the downward trends I mentioned earlier about annual mileages and probably speed limits as well, I think there is a very strong possibility that in 2040 an EV can be built at a size, range and price point that will satisfy the 99%. Until then, ICEs can cover the shortfall.

The question is whether and how we cater for the 1% after that? A nationwide ‘fit for passenger car purpose’ hydrogen infrastructure strikes me as a wrecking ball to crush a nut.

Surely transport, and long haul stuff will just move to bio-diesel or something of that ilk? Then key hubs maintain a filling infrastructure as before just with E100 or B100?

And although ICE will be banned from sale, there'll still be a large number around to require fuel - it could just be 100% green (maybe mono-culture deforestation, species crushing to get it made but...). Would the production and distribution of hydrogen be any different to bio-fuels?

I was trying to give hydrogen some sort of look in!
I should have started with "If hydrogen is to be adopted at all, then..."

Your statement that there will still be a large number of ICE vehicles probably needs thrashing out.

If these are being used for reasonable milages then some form of subsidy mechanism is helping people to afford the cost of fuelling them, as they will be consuming multiple times the energy required for the same journey in a BEV. By that point there would be a wide variety of new and used BEVs to choose from, so unless you are driving the ICE for pleasure or as a protest against technology, and are prepared to pay through the nose for that, why would you? If can choose between a fuel bill of say £400 or £2000+ p.a., for the same monthly rentals or purchase costs, I can't imagine there will be many takers for the latter.

Personally I hope that there will be still be fuel available for those who want to continue to run petrol cars, as a hobby if you like. As for diesel, well it can die an ugly death for all I care.
This does somewhat rely on having petrol stations dotted around like now, will they stay in business though, hopefully as petrol station mini marts with maybe flash and dash BEV chargers on site as well.

[leef44]

rscott said:

anonymous said:

[redacted]

If we build a hydrogen infrastructure, then it either needs local production, with huge power demands at filling stations, not so different from the requirements for charging stations, or large production facilities and distribution by road. That'll lower the total efficiency and raise costs..

I think this is why we find that hydrogen vehicles are planned in Netherlands, Middle East, China, Texas/Louisiana region. They have the hydrogen infrastructure.

It's much more challenging a proposition for the UK.

[anonymous-user]

leef44 said:

I think this is why we find that hydrogen vehicles are planned in Netherlands, Middle East, China, Texas/Louisiana region. They have the hydrogen infrastructure.

It's much more challenging a proposition for the UK.

This is a good point to remember, though - the UK is a tiny little market on a global scale. If other countries go with hydrogen in a big way (and Germany already has hundreds of hydrogen filling stations, with more planned) - we are just passengers.

We always forget that we are a small and densely populated country, so BEV works better for us than it does for France, for example - which is vast and empty, with huge swathes of it relying on very ropey electric supplies.

The arguments about efficiency are moot if you have an abundance of renewable electricity - convenience and taxation drives adaptation.

[GT119]

Landcrab_Six said:

leef44 said:

I think this is why we find that hydrogen vehicles are planned in Netherlands, Middle East, China, Texas/Louisiana region. They have the hydrogen infrastructure.

It's much more challenging a proposition for the UK.

This is a good point to remember, though - the UK is a tiny little market on a global scale. If other countries go with hydrogen in a big way (and Germany already has hundreds of hydrogen filling stations, with more planned) - we are just passengers.

We always forget that we are a small and densely populated country, so BEV works better for us than it does for France, for example - which is vast and empty, with huge swathes of it relying on very ropey electric supplies.

The arguments about efficiency are moot if you have an abundance of renewable electricity - convenience and taxation drives adaptation.

I agree with all that except for the last sentence, you seem to be suggesting that renewable energy is free, efficiency will ALWAYS be at least part of the equation, amongst the other things you mentioned.

[RemarkLima]

GT119 said:

Personally I hope that there will be still be fuel available for those who want to continue to run petrol cars, as a hobby if you like. As for diesel, well it can die an ugly death for all I care.
This does somewhat rely on having petrol stations dotted around like now, will they stay in business though, hopefully as petrol station mini marts with maybe flash and dash BEV chargers on site as well.

I think there will be, things like historic racing, classics etc will drive a demand for it... But it'll be more likely you'll need a 50 gal drum in the garage which you order when needed.

Having travelled through South East Asia, and buying 2 litres of petrol for a moped behind the country of a shop (in glass bottles!)... Or having a chap fill you up from a hand pump in a 50 gal drum whilst smoking a roll up makes me think, for an enthusiast, having to fill up yourself isn't a great hardship.

It's my thinking anyway, could be very wrong tho ;-)

[rscott]

Landcrab_Six said:

leef44 said:

I think this is why we find that hydrogen vehicles are planned in Netherlands, Middle East, China, Texas/Louisiana region. They have the hydrogen infrastructure.

It's much more challenging a proposition for the UK.

This is a good point to remember, though - the UK is a tiny little market on a global scale. If other countries go with hydrogen in a big way (and Germany already has hundreds of hydrogen filling stations, with more planned) - we are just passengers.

We always forget that we are a small and densely populated country, so BEV works better for us than it does for France, for example - which is vast and empty, with huge swathes of it relying on very ropey electric supplies.

The arguments about efficiency are moot if you have an abundance of renewable electricity - convenience and taxation drives adaptation.

Hundreds in Germany?

The h2.live website lists 135 in all of Europe and 26 of those are out of service. 6 of the 10 British ones aren't working at present.

50% of their French hydrogen stations are currently out of action. The other two are working though. Compare that to 24,500 EV charging points in France. That's a massive deficit for hydrogen to tackle.

[anonymous-user]

rscott said:

Landcrab_Six said:

leef44 said:

I think this is why we find that hydrogen vehicles are planned in Netherlands, Middle East, China, Texas/Louisiana region. They have the hydrogen infrastructure.

It's much more challenging a proposition for the UK.

This is a good point to remember, though - the UK is a tiny little market on a global scale. If other countries go with hydrogen in a big way (and Germany already has hundreds of hydrogen filling stations, with more planned) - we are just passengers.

We always forget that we are a small and densely populated country, so BEV works better for us than it does for France, for example - which is vast and empty, with huge swathes of it relying on very ropey electric supplies.

The arguments about efficiency are moot if you have an abundance of renewable electricity - convenience and taxation drives adaptation.

Hundreds in Germany?

The h2.live website lists 135 in all of Europe and 26 of those are out of service. 6 of the 10 British ones aren't working at present.

50% of their French hydrogen stations are currently out of action. The other two are working though. Compare that to 24,500 EV charging points in France. That's a massive deficit for hydrogen to tackle.

Again look at how few BEV charging points there was when Tesla started out, working in the market where well established ICE fuels dominated and had total convenience.

Then consider the number of hydrogen filling stations will never have to match the number of BEV charging points because of the superior speed of hydrogen filling, the better throughput rate and the pattern of the throughput in comparison with BEV charging.

[gangzoom]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Actually look at SLOW EV rapid chargers have been to roll out, planning permission, electricity supply etc.

How easy will it be to get planning permission for a hydrogen fuel station that requires equipment to pump/store hydrogen at 10,000PSI?? Would you object if someone starts building one next to your house?

Again this thread exists about the OP cannot get any fuel for their hydrogen car.

[Heres Johnny]

gangzoom said:

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Actually look at SLOW EV rapid chargers have been to roll out, planning permission, electricity supply etc.

How easy will it be to get planning permission for a hydrogen fuel station that requires equipment to pump/store hydrogen at 10,000PSI?? Would you object if someone starts building one next to your house?

Again this thread exists about the OP cannot get any fuel for their hydrogen car.

The roll out of electricity charging has largely been because of issues with the electricity supply.

I imagine many petrol stations could add hydrogen relatively easily (albeit at a financial cost) if they wanted to. It’s not a million miles away from LPG.

The model in terms of stock replenishment and distribution is much closer to traditional fuels. That said, not many seem to want to.

[gangzoom]

Heres Johnny said:

I imagine many petrol stations could add hydrogen relatively easily (albeit at a financial cost) if they wanted to. It’s not a million miles away from LPG.

Is LPG stored at 10,000 PSI, and what kind of safety equipment is needed for hydrogen refueling versus petrol/LPG? Isn't the financial cost of conversion over £1 million? How many petrol stations can actually be converted?

Just checked, LPG is at 100PSI, my bike tyres are pumped up to higher pressure than that. A gas compressed to 10,000PSI is a totally different problem versus a gas stored at a pressure a rubber inner tube can contain.

Edited by gangzoom on Thursday 29th October 07:16

[Heres Johnny]

gangzoom said:

Heres Johnny said:

I imagine many petrol stations could add hydrogen relatively easily (albeit at a financial cost) if they wanted to. It’s not a million miles away from LPG.

Is LPG stored at 10,000 PSI, and what kind of safety equipment is needed for hydrogen refueling versus petrol/LPG? Isn't the financial cost of conversion over £1 million? How many petrol stations can actually be converted?

Just checked, LPG is at 100PSI, my bike tyres are pumped up to higher pressure than that. A gas compressed to 10,000PSI is a totally different problem versus a gas stored at a pressure a rubber inner tube can contain.

Edited by gangzoom on Thursday 29th October 07:16

Where do you get £1m from? And how much do you think a petrol station refit costs anyway?

This article which is now getting old (and techniques will have improved so I imagine this is pessimistic) forecast the cost for compression distribution (via trailer) and storage to be around £1 a kg which is about 60 miles of range. Rough maths, the cost of CSD is under 2p a mile by their estimates.

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/58564.pdf

Maybe a little less shooting from the hip and a bit more research to substantiate beliefs.

[98elise]

GT119 said:

Ha ha, I forgot to add probably the most contentious factor for future scenario planning.....reduced vehicle speeds. Energy consumption is exponential to speed, for the same journey, we can knock probably 25% off the energy consumed with just a 10% reduction in speed. Anyone up for that?

Peak efficiency for a Tesla is about 25mph! You can drive to the Alps on a single charge, as long as you don't mind the 24hr drive

[gangzoom]

Heres Johnny said:

Where do you get £1m from?

$1-2million initial capital costs.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/03/f3...

Seem about right, $40 million investment to fund 36 fuel stations.

https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/breaking-story-cal...

Edited by gangzoom on Thursday 29th October 10:27

[GT119]

RemarkLima said:

GT119 said:

Personally I hope that there will be still be fuel available for those who want to continue to run petrol cars, as a hobby if you like. As for diesel, well it can die an ugly death for all I care.
This does somewhat rely on having petrol stations dotted around like now, will they stay in business though, hopefully as petrol station mini marts with maybe flash and dash BEV chargers on site as well.

I think there will be, things like historic racing, classics etc will drive a demand for it... But it'll be more likely you'll need a 50 gal drum in the garage which you order when needed.

Having travelled through South East Asia, and buying 2 litres of petrol for a moped behind the country of a shop (in glass bottles!)... Or having a chap fill you up from a hand pump in a 50 gal drum whilst smoking a roll up makes me think, for an enthusiast, having to fill up yourself isn't a great hardship.

It's my thinking anyway, could be very wrong tho ;-)

Yeah you are probably right, Amazon delivered, by drone. I can't imagine all the owners of ultra-rare cars would be happy with a £20million car they can't fuel. I don't think long term storage is any good either as it goes off after about 6 months I believe.

[RemarkLima]

GT119 said:

RemarkLima said:

GT119 said:

Personally I hope that there will be still be fuel available for those who want to continue to run petrol cars, as a hobby if you like. As for diesel, well it can die an ugly death for all I care.
This does somewhat rely on having petrol stations dotted around like now, will they stay in business though, hopefully as petrol station mini marts with maybe flash and dash BEV chargers on site as well.

I think there will be, things like historic racing, classics etc will drive a demand for it... But it'll be more likely you'll need a 50 gal drum in the garage which you order when needed.

Having travelled through South East Asia, and buying 2 litres of petrol for a moped behind the country of a shop (in glass bottles!)... Or having a chap fill you up from a hand pump in a 50 gal drum whilst smoking a roll up makes me think, for an enthusiast, having to fill up yourself isn't a great hardship.

It's my thinking anyway, could be very wrong tho ;-)

Yeah you are probably right, Amazon delivered, by drone. I can't imagine all the owners of ultra-rare cars would be happy with a £20million car they can't fuel. I don't think long term storage is any good either as it goes off after about 6 months I believe.

Diesel has a winter and summer mix, and I think petrol does... And petrol the RON starts to drop, hence will go off... But I'm sure if there's demand, there'll be extra long life fuel, or something similar. And a sealed drum without air to help.

And those with cars, will have garages and the means and way to store and use the fuel - or just get "their man" to sort it out I think the horse analogy will be closer and closer all the time!

[Gary C]

RemarkLima said:

Diesel has a winter and summer mix, and I think petrol does... And petrol the RON starts to drop, hence will go off... But I'm sure if there's demand, there'll be extra long life fuel, or something similar. And a sealed drum without air to help.

And those with cars, will have garages and the means and way to store and use the fuel - or just get "their man" to sort it out I think the horse analogy will be closer and closer all the time!

We use winter grade fuel in our marine diesel engines. We only order tankers during the winter when its available, but it sits in the tanks for several years before its used and it works fine.

But petrol, I am concerned. When we move next I will be looking for a house that I can put a fuel tank somewhere so I can keep the Carrera running.

[gregs656]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Again you seem to be wanting to have this both ways.

You have spent pages and pages arguing the electrical infrastructure is too difficult, and now you are suggesting we can't judge the state of the hydrogen infrastructure because look how much the electrical charging infrastructure has grown in a relatively short time frame when it is it not even the fuel of choice.

[Mikehig]

Landcrab_Six said:

50 charging stalls is a real exception - go and ask the DNOs for that capacity in the UK. When they've picked themselves up the floor, they'll give you a figure that makes the furlough bill look reasonable.

It all sounds really simple - plug in at home, stick a dozen charging posts in the supermarket car park. But when you engage the DNOs to embark on these projects, it starts to become prohibitively expensive. Which is why some of the commercial charging networks are starting to ramp up costs to somewhere near equivalent to a 60mpg diesel.

As things stand, it's tax incentives and subsidies that are keeping the BEV revolution going.

Agree completely! There was a report recently by a highly-qualified electrical engineer who confirmed your point: the majority of local electrical infrastructure is nowhere near man enough for the loads of going all-electric. Worryingly he stated that much modern cabling etc is less robust than older stuff because of corner-cutting.
I put up the 50 stall example solely as a hypothetical to see if VK could explain how the hydrogen equivalent would look. (I haven't caught up with recent posts).

[Mikehig]

GT119: "- A large reduction in grid load due to reduced fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution. The numbers here are pretty big and are likely to be measured in GWs. This would be where they are making the most energy savings in an 'overnight switch' scenario. It could be as high as a 50% offset of the total new EV demand. If that is the case, 10% increase in total demand is a pretty good number to work with."

This point has come up a few times. Please could you provide some sources?
It puzzles me because I've had a fair bit of involvement with petrochem over the years and all the major installations had their own, onsite power generation - often CHP. For their scale of demand this was much cheaper (and more efficient for CHP), could potentially use by-products and gave security of supply with grid back-up for essential services.

[GT119]

Mikehig said:

GT119: "- A large reduction in grid load due to reduced fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution. The numbers here are pretty big and are likely to be measured in GWs. This would be where they are making the most energy savings in an 'overnight switch' scenario. It could be as high as a 50% offset of the total new EV demand. If that is the case, 10% increase in total demand is a pretty good number to work with."

This point has come up a few times. Please could you provide some sources?
It puzzles me because I've had a fair bit of involvement with petrochem over the years and all the major installations had their own, onsite power generation - often CHP. For their scale of demand this was much cheaper (and more efficient for CHP), could potentially use by-products and gave security of supply with grid back-up for essential services.

I purposefully stated up to 50%, because in all honesty it is very difficult to get the full picture for the well-to-tank value for passenger cars. You were referring to petrochemical installations in isolation I guess, however the analysis needs to take into account extraction, refining and distribution. It most likely varies country-to-country as well. Then there is the argument about the by-products used elsewhere which complicates it even further.

The majority of information on this topic seems to come from the US, and the most famous quote is probably Elon Musk's claim that it takes 6 kWh of electricity to produce 1 US gallon. Convert that to imperial gallons, and it's about 7 kWh. Given that 7 kWh will move a BEV around 24 miles, if your 'gas guzzler' only does 24 mpg then its a 100% win to switch to BEV, i.e. if you can divert all of that 7kWh towards a BEV and there is no net increase in load on the grid to switch from a 24 mpg ICE to a BEV. There will be a small loss for the BEV case associated with charging efficiency, and you could also argue that the grid T&D losses will be a bit higher at a typical BEV charger station that at a refinery feed, but these won't change the ballparking we are trying to do.

In practice we probably don't achieve more than 48 mpg as an overall average for ICE cars in the UK, but for arguments sake, let's use that number, so I picked 50% as a top end value for the offset.

Now, the key question is, how real is Musk's claim. It's not clear to me whether he was talking well-to-tank or just in the refinery itself. Given his vested interest, we obviously need to take the claim with a pinch of salt. Other sources I found list it as 4 kWh per US gallon, and I recall reading somewhere that it was 2kWh in the refinery, but the lower claims tend to come from parties who have a vested interest to protect petrochem. So what is the right value to use for the UK?

Maybe cutting Musk's claim in half would be the best way to look at, so this would free up 1 GW of electricity for every 13 million ICEs we take off the roads, or 3 GW if all 40 million are replaced with BEVs.

So my statement that it's likely to be measured in GWs seems reasonable.

And if it is the case that refineries in the UK are producing all that electricity on-site, then it seems reasonable to me to assume that these generating resources could be redeployed to export power to the grid rather than for on-site processes.

Edited by GT119 on Thursday 29th October 19:40