Monthly Archives: September 2018

Hydrogen is Moving!

A hydrogen refuelling station arrives in Abergavenny

A hydrogen refuelling station arrives in Abergavenny

I’ve written a number of blogs over the years about hydrogen fuel cell technologies, most recently just a couple of weeks ago. It’s a technology that is moving so fast that another blog on the matter is called for.

It is clear governments are not on track to meet the goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Progress on decarbonising the electricity sector is being made, but on transport, heating and cooling very little progress has been made. The transport sector may switch from fossil fuels to battery and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles very rapidly. If the technology is better, cheaper and cleaner it could be very rapid indeed. Hydrogen has several advantages over battery electric vehicles, especially where longer range or heavier vehicles are needed.

The World Hydrogen Council has quadrupled in size over the last eighteen months. Currently much of the hydrogen used in industry is derived from fossil fuels, but the World Hydrogen Council is envisaging a huge scaling up of hydrogen use at the same time as the switch to creating it all from renewable energy sources.

A year or two ago there was very little by way of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure. It is now being deployed at a great rate. Locally Riversimple and McPhy have just brought the first hydrogen refuelling station to Abergavenny, which is exciting for me as our car sharing club will be using this facility by next spring.  Also this week ITM Power and Johnson Matthey have opened a public refuelling station in Swindon, ITM’s seventh such station in Britain. Air Liquide have just opened their tenth refuelling station in Germany. The big news however is from Nel ASA who have just opened a factory in Herning, Denmark, which will produce 300 hydrogen refuelling stations per year, initially I think mainly for deployment in Norway, Denmark, Germany and USA. They have been contracted to supply refuelling stations for the Nikola Motor Company, whose big hydrogen fuel cell trucks should be in production by 2021. South Korea expects to have a thousand hydrogen fuel cell buses on the road by 2022, with 310 refuelling stations. Norway plans to have a thousand hydrogen trucks in use by 2023. These are all encouragingly short timeframes.

Last week the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell train started operating in Germany. It was built by Alstom, who now plan to start production in UK. ABB and Ballard Power Systems are looking to a future where global shipping switches from diesel to hydrogen fuel cell technology. Bring it on. The planet is in need of a very rapid energy transition.

Life After Fossil Fuels

Oil: do we need it to keep modern civilization running?

Oil: do we need it to keep modern civilization running?

A decade or so ago I started running evening classes called ‘Global Problems: Global Solutions’. We tried to envisage solving multiple mega problems simultaneously, from climate change to hunger and poverty. It still seems to me the possibilities of creating a better future are almost limitless.

One of the key concerns of people coming to these events was how life might look without fossil fuels. Some people were most worried from a resource scarcity angle. They saw Peak Oil as a big problem. Others were more worried from a planetary pollution perspective, and for them Climate Change was the biggest worry. Many people seemed to think that as oil is the basis of so much of our global economy we would have to do without many of the oil derived products, and much of the productivity and prosperity that oil has made possible. Many of these people thought that it would be the horse and cart that replaced the car, that global food supplies would massively decrease and that cities would collapse due to lack of food and energy.

I tended to put forward the case that the transition to virtually 100% renewable energy for all humanity’s electricity, transport, heating and cooling would be possible, and that recycling and resource substitution would be possible for most types of industrial production. We could at least in theory move to a circular economy where pollution was minimized and efficiency maximized, and for it all to be based on renewable forms of energy.

Looking back over the last decade it seems to me that the improved technology has led to falling costs of renewables to such an extent that this transition should be even easier than even I predicted. What we didn’t see coming a decade ago was the re-emergence of overt racism, ultra-nationalism and fascism. The likes of Trump, Orban and the Brexiteers care not a jot about climate change, the plight of the poor or any of the other problems we considered in our evening classes. They represent a denial of scientific reality, and simple human compassion, on a scale I’d never have envisaged seeing in any democratic state. They act to protect the ultra rich and the fossil fuel industries.

Now we have the rather bizarre situation of much of the global financial community understanding the risks associated with climate change and backing a lot of ideas put forward by Green activists and environmentalists, most of whom are quite critical of the concepts like capitalism and endless economic growth. Opposing them are a lot of right wing politicians who in theory support capitalism and growth, but who now endlessly have to intervene in the market to protect the economic interests of those who profit from the pollution.

Hydrogen: Trucks

J.B.S. Haldane. In 1923 he predicted that hydrogen would be the fuel of the future.

J.B.S. Haldane. In 1923 he predicted that hydrogen would be the fuel of the future.

A Nikola hydrogen powered truck. By 2023 a number of companies, including Nikola, Toyota and Riversimple, expect to have fleets of hydrogen vehicles on the road.

A Nikola hydrogen powered truck. By 2023 a number of companies, including Nikola, Toyota and Riversimple, expect to have fleets of hydrogen vehicles on the road.

From the 19th Century onwards people have been predicting switching from coal to hydrogen as the energy to drive industry. As cheap oil and gas were developed the prospect of making hydrogen from renewable energy was put on the back burner. Enthusiasts talked of ‘the hydrogen economy’ and lots of interesting experimental projects were developed. Over the last century fossil fuel usage has skyrocketed, destabilizing the global climate and creating urban smog. Now the need to switch to a cleaner basis for the global economy is more urgent than ever. Using solar and wind power to split water via electrolysis into oxygen and hydrogen means that cheap surplus clean energy can be conveniently stored and used to generate electricity when required, to directly drive industry or, and perhaps most importantly, in our transport infrastructure.

There is much debate about whether battery electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell ones will predominate. Both will have a role to play. Both are essentially forms of electric propulsion. Battery electric vehicles are currently more widely deployed, but they have three major disadvantages. The batteries are heavy, slow to charge and have end of life recyclability issues.

On this blog I’ve written several times about prototype cars, trucks, trains and ships using hydrogen fuel cells. Some cities have deployed fleets of a few dozen hydrogen fuel cell buses, but nowhere has yet seen the large scale transition from diesel to hydrogen. That may be about to change, and the change may be very rapid, in the key long distance trucking sector.

A race to bring the first mass produced hydrogen fuel cell trucks onto the market is opening up, with Toyota and Nikola Motors competing for the key North American market. California alone is expecting a thousand hydrogen refuelling stations and a million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to be on the road by 2030. Many of those refuelling stations will have onsite hydrogen production from local renewables. For example Toyota are partnering with Shell to build a biomass based hydrogen facility at the port of Long Beach in California.

Compressed and liquefied hydrogen will also be transported by pipelines and tankers from where electricity can most cheaply be generated to where energy is most in demand. This might include utilizing Iceland’s geothermal, Norway’s hydro or Moroccan solar to supply the major cities of Europe. Japan and South Korea are power hungry and energy resource poor places and could in theory be supplied from Australia with solar used to produce cheap hydrogen. Western Australia has just established a Renewable Hydrogen Council to research just such opportunities.

In 1923 Haldane predicted a hydrogen economy. By 2023 we might have made a good but rather belated start.