What happens when a gas station becomes a hydrogen refueling station
Text/Shanshan Xu
After the solid-state lithium battery triggered a wave of investment boom, the hydrogen fuel cell field has also exploded tens of millions of financing news in recent days. Domestic start-ups, including Hydrogen Aviation Technology and Xinchuang Hydrogen Wing, have announced the completion of the latest round of financing.
There is no doubt that traditional lithium-ion batteries are being hit by double-sided attacks from solid-state lithium batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. However, compared with the solid-state lithium battery with both power density and energy density advantages, hydrogen fuel cells seem to be a "niche" product that is marketed hard but does not see the return on investment.
At least in the passenger car market, you'd be hard-pressed to find a car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. Even if you look at the world, the marketing of hydrogen energy has not made much of a splash. Last year, global sales of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles increased by 83% year-on-year to 17,400 units. Compared with the sales scale of 80 million units in the entire car market, there are few.
According to a set of data released by SNE Research, a south Korean market research institute, Hyundai has ranked first in the global hydrogen fuel cell vehicle market for three consecutive years. However, the champion's figure is only "53.5% of the market share with 9300 sales".
In second place, Toyota sold 5,900 vehicles, or 34.2 percent, while Foton (2.1 percent) and Honda (1.7 percent) came in, with the four companies combining about 91.5 percent market share. This data not only shows the small size of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle market, but also reveals the limitations of the number of existing players in the industry.
Hydrogen energy on the car: "Cold in the heights"
In fact, since 2017, various ministries and commissions of the state have successively issued relevant policies to promote the development of hydrogen energy and hydrogen fuel cell industries. Since the end of last year, all parts of the country have issued documents to promote the development of the hydrogen energy industry, including Shanghai's million subsidies for hydrogen refueling stations to provide infrastructure guarantees for the landing of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
However, for the passenger car market, hydrogen fuel cells are still "cold in the heights". Last year, global electric vehicle sales reached 6.5 million, and hydrogen fuel cells are less than three thousandths of the former, and the new domestic car-making forces have focused almost all their energy on pure circuit lines.
As the first and most abundant element in the universe, why did hydrogen lose to lithium? Or you can ask, why in the goal of car companies to achieve carbon neutrality, hydrogen energy with a conversion efficiency of up to 60% is not treated the same as lithium batteries?
In layman's terms, a hydrogen fuel cell is equivalent to an engine that converts the chemical energy reacted by hydrogen and air directly into electrical energy. This involves many factors such as the production and supply of hydrogen, the structure and layout of the reaction device.
In terms of reaction devices, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles currently need to inject hydrogen into hydrogen storage tanks for chemical reactions, but because hydrogen storage tanks are mostly cylinder structures, their volume has certain obstacles to the flexibility of vehicle design. In contrast, some pure electric models have begun to use CTC technology, which integrates the battery cell directly into the chassis, effectively increasing the driving space.
In addition, hydrogen fuel cells can currently only use platinum metal as a catalyst. Platinum is better than palladium in price, and other new energy vehicle companies are gradually turning their exhaust gas catalysts to platinum, making a temporary shortage of platinum. Not only that, but there are also data showing that a Japanese most advanced hydrogen fuel cell vehicle needs about 15 grams of platinum, while a Chinese hydrogen fuel cell commercial vehicle needs about 60 to 80 grams of platinum. How to reduce the use of platinum is also a major challenge for the large-scale landing of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The most critical problem is that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still facing many problems such as imperfect supporting infrastructure and high costs. U.S. auto giant General Motors, which entered the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle space in the last century, had planned to sell 300,000 vehicles by 2015. However, due to the failure to solve the cost of commercialization, this plan was eventually shelved.
Hydrogen energy on the train: when the gas station becomes a hydrogen refueling station
Some people even describe the cost of promoting hydrogen energy vehicles as "sky-high". This includes both the cost of making hydrogen energy vehicles competitive, as well as the cost of infrastructure such as hydrogen refueling stations.
At this stage, the main domestic hydrogen energy vehicle application end in the bus and heavy trucks, the two driving routes are relatively fixed, there is no big requirement for the arrangement of hydrogen refueling stations; passenger cars are different, the purchase population density is high, and the driving route is more unfixed.
If the hydrogen refueling station can be as dense as the charging pile, perhaps the spring of hydrogen energy vehicles will come.
But according to a previous survey by CCTV, the gross profit per kilogram of hydrogen at the hydrogen refueling station is only a dozen yuan, and the annual operating cost is as high as 2 million. This means that most of the hydrogen refueling stations invested and built in China are still in a state of loss. Although hydrogen fuel cells are expected to make up for the lack of charging speed of lithium batteries, it is clear that there is still some time to go before they are widely popularized in passenger cars.
Moreover, the main means of hydrogen production is still fossil fuel combustion, which cannot avoid carbon dioxide emissions, which is contrary to the goals of "carbon neutrality" and "carbon peaking". Perhaps, when a large amount of hydrogen can be prepared by wind energy and light energy, the premise of commercialization of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will be truly complete.
On that day, the new energy vehicle market may stage a more exciting story.