No. 37 | Three drawbacks of hydrogen energy vehicles that are difficult to break through

HI, hello everyone, I'm Chen Deyi. Last week, I participated in the activities of the primary two car branch, during which many people mentioned hydrogen energy vehicles, many people are more optimistic about this market, think that hydrogen energy is more environmentally friendly, but I personally may have different opinions.

Classification of hydrogen energy vehicles

Hydrogen energy vehicles are divided into two types: one is a hydrogen internal combustion engine car, which is similar to the structure of traditional fuel vehicles, but the fuel used is different. Conventional fuel oil vehicles burn gasoline and diesel through the interior of the car, generating heat energy, which is then converted into power. Hydrogen-powered cars, on the other hand, are powered by burning hydrogen.

The other is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, which generates electricity in the fuel cell through hydrogen and oxygen in the air, which is then converted into power.

At present, although the technology of hydrogen energy internal combustion engine is relatively mature, but for the consideration of automatic driving and intelligent networking, electric energy is more in line with the future trend, so the current hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is the main research direction at present.

Three advantages of hydrogen fuel

The reason why hydrogen energy is optimistic about everyone is mainly based on three advantages:

One is to be more environmentally friendly. Hydrogen vehicle exhaust emissions only water, no other pollutants, and does not involve greenhouse gases, which is its first advantage.

The second advantage is that the hydrogenation time is relatively short. A pure electric car can take several hours to be fully charged. A hydrogen energy car only takes 3-5 minutes to fill up with hydrogen at a time.

The third advantage is that hydrogen energy is safe and not easy to explode. This may not be the same as many people's intuition, in many people's impression, hydrogen is easy to burn, this may originate from the experimental class in the school. If hydrogen is to burn, two conditions need to be met at the same time: one is that the concentration of hydrogen is high enough, too low or too high; the other is that it needs to be ignited.

The hydrogen fuel cell does not need to ignite hydrogen, it is the same as the lithium battery, there are positive and negative poles. The positive electrode provides oxygen, the negative electrode provides hydrogen, and an electric current is formed by the action, and there is no flame in the hydrogen fuel cell.

Speaking of which, some people may think of hydrogen balloons, saying that hydrogen balloons are easy to explode. So is the hydrogen fuel tank also easy to explode? Not really! The hydrogen balloon exploded because the material of the balloon was very thin. And the hydrogen tank is very, very thick, even if you hit it with a normal pistol, there will be no problem.

These are the three advantages of hydrogen fuel: environmental protection, short hydrogenation time, and safer fuel.

Three disadvantages of hydrogen fuel

But hydrogen fuel also has three drawbacks that are currently difficult to break through:

First, the way hydrogen is manufactured is not environmentally friendly. Hydrogen energy is very environmentally friendly, but hydrogen energy has no mineral deposits, it is separated from water molecules through chemical reactions. More than 95% of the world's hydrogen is now made from fossil fuels.

There are two ways to make hydrogen: the first is to produce hydrogen through methane and vapor, which produces about half of the world's hydrogen, and this method has a disadvantage, that is, about 7% of the methane in technology will leak into the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of methane is 28 times that of carbon dioxide. Therefore, the use of hydrogen fuel is very environmentally friendly, and there is no increase in greenhouse gases, but in the process of hydrogen production, this gap is filled. In addition, using this method to produce hydrogen, one kilogram of hydrogen needs to consume 11 degrees of electricity.

The second method of hydrogen production is electrolysis, which is direct current is introduced into the electrolyte-filled electrolyte cell to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecules. This method makes 1 kg of hydrogen and consumes about 48 kWh of electricity.

The above two methods of hydrogen production require the consumption of a certain amount of electrical energy, and the current electric energy generally comes from thermal power generation. In addition, even if solar power is used, hydrogen energy is also lost one more time than pure electric vehicles.

Solar energy charges electric cars, and there is almost no loss here. The use of solar energy to produce hydrogen, first consumes electricity, then has to process, compress, encapsulate, transport, and finally about half of the energy will be wasted. This is the first disadvantage of hydrogen: the way hydrogen is produced is polluted and energy lost.

The second disadvantage is the high cost of transportation. Oil is generally transported by tanker trucks, and natural gas is mainly transported by pipeline. For hydrogen, if a hydrogen refueling station consumes more than 10 tons per day and has a supply distance of more than 200 kilometers, it is more cost-effective to use pipeline transportation. However, the construction cost of hydrogen pipelines is particularly high, and the price is 1-2 times that of natural gas pipelines.

Even if someone says it's not bad money, then there is still a safety issue with the hydrogen pipeline, do the residents along the way agree with you to lay it? Are you willing to step on hydrogen under your feet every day?

In addition, even if you have money, the residents along the way agree to lay it, but the hydrogen refueling station wants to sell 10 tons of hydrogen per day, which is almost an impossible target. Generally speaking, 1 kilogram of hydrogen can provide an endurance of 100 kilometers, and 10 tons of hydrogen is equivalent to providing an endurance of 1 million kilometers.

Let's compare the traditional gas station, the general gas station can sell 20-100 tons of gasoline per day, if every 8L gasoline can provide 100 kilometers of endurance, then the gas station sells gasoline every day, that is, the endurance provided is 2-110,000 kilometers. This is 10 times worse than the hydrogen refueling station that consumes 10 tons per day.

This means that the daily business scale of hydrogen refueling stations is 10 times larger than that of the busiest gas stations and 50 times larger than that of ordinary gas stations, which is absolutely impossible at present, so it is unlikely that hydrogen refueling stations will lay pipelines.

The way of transportation can only be transported by traditional canned trucks, but there will be a new problem with transporting trucks: that is, hydrogen is really too light, even if the hydrogen is compressed to a high pressure of 700 atmospheres, it is not very heavy, but in order to withstand such a high pressure, the shell of the hydrogen tank must be very thick.

This leads to the fact that, for example, a truck that pulls only 500 kilograms of hydrogen may weigh up to 50 tons in total. This means that the truck's pulling efficiency is only 1% of this efficiency, which is outrageously low.

The pulling efficiency of traditional fuel vehicles is generally more than 50%, such as 7 tons of tank trucks can pull 3.5 tons of gasoline, while the pulling efficiency of ordinary trucks is generally more than 100%, and some overloads can even reach 500%.

A friend of mine, his truck is 18 tons, nuclear load can pull 34 tons, in the case of no overload has been close to 200% pull efficiency, so the efficiency of hydrogen tank truck transportation is not acceptable to many people, this is the second drawback.

The third disadvantage is a serious imbalance between costs and benefits. By October 2021, a total of 170 hydrogen refueling stations have been built in China, including 5 in Shanghai. At present, these hydrogen refueling stations are generally in a state of loss.

It is understood that the construction of a hydrogen refueling station with a daily hydrogen refueling of 500 kilograms requires more than 10 million yuan, and the annual operating cost also needs more than 2 million, and the cost per kilogram is calculated to be 14 yuan. If you add to that the cost of hydrogen production, the cost of transportation, and a 40 percent tax like gasoline, it costs more than $20 per kilogram.

At present, the price of a hydrogen refueling station in Anting, Shanghai is 35 yuan a kilogram, that is to say, the profit of a kilogram is only a dozen yuan, according to the operating cost of 200,000 yuan per month, it is necessary to sell 500-700 kilograms of hydrogen per day to protect the capital. According to the 500 kg of hydrogen to provide 50,000 kilometers of endurance, this is 2-3 times more than the average 8-parking gas station to come every day, which is currently unlikely.

In addition, at present, hydrogen fuel vehicles are still in the demonstration stage, and the price of new cars is 2-3 times more expensive than that of fuel vehicles or pure electric vehicles with the same configuration, which further worsens the living environment of hydrogen refueling stations. Therefore, at present, the vehicles that come to hydrogenation are mainly commercial vehicle customers such as buses and logistics.

Pure electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been concerned by the market and capital at about the same time before and after, and they have experienced about 16 years from the official certification of models to today. But now pure electric vehicles have received more consensus and investment, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have not been favored by large-scale applications and market capital.

Although the application of hydrogen fuel cells is certainly not limited to cars, but the application of automobiles is very representative, there can never be a greater breakthrough in this regard, which means that the application of hydrogen fuel cells is likely not to be in the mass field, and perhaps in the future in a professional field, it will have more advantages than the traditional way. But it also depends on whether it has made breakthroughs in manufacturing, compression, transportation, and safety.

Well, that's all for this episode, thank you for watching it. If you can still click three times in one click: like attention and forward, then thank you even more! Well, we'll see you next time!

Resources:

Drake. Scientific and technological reference - hydrogen fuel cell: swaddling is difficult to leave