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| Tue, 4th Aug 2020 11:58:00 |
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The Future Lies In : EV? or FCEV? - FuelCellsWorks |
Several car manufacturers made useable fuel-cell vehicle (FCEV) prototypes as long ago as the late 1990s. I remember driving some of them. Their engineers said we might see FCEVs in common use 10-15 years from that time. Well, here we are 20 years on and do we have widespread use of FCEVs? No, it still looks like being a decade into the future.
The future of zero-emission vehicles is often talked of as a race between those two forms of electric vehicle, the BEVs where the power comes from a storage battery, and the FCEVs that generate it in fuel cells.
Only a decade ago, few people really believed BEVs had a future for anything other than short-distance city driving. For mainstream use they would never have enough range, and they would be too slow to recharge. Those assumptions turned out to be wrong. BEVs are becoming commonplace.
The issue is that – as with almost any technology – cost per vehicle can drop only when production numbers rise. This cost-parity milestone depends on making 100,000 of the FCEV per year. Unforuntaltely, there is no demand for 100,000 of any FCEV per year. That’s because nowhere in the world can you find a sufficient hydrogen fuelling infrastructure for consumers to bet on such a car.
There are some enormous potential enablers in the path to a hydrogen economy. But we simply don’t know if or when they will happen, partly because they need Governments, energy companies and technologists all to work together. Imagine if huge quantities of green electricity were generated in remote sparsely populated parts of the world, via solar or wind or wave-power. It’s actually very expensive to install power lines to get that electricity to distant areas of demand.
Turning that energy into hydrogen might actually make more sense. But it would need new hydrogen pipelines or even ships. Also, in many places fresh water is a precious and limited resource, so using it for electrolysis looks like a bad idea. The alternative is to develop technologies, still in their infancy, for electrolysing seawater.
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