Why The Hydrogen Future Needs Electric Cars

Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 by Ross in New Technologies

Electric cars are the best thing to happen to the future vision of a hydrogen economy since the invention of the hydrogen fuel cell.

Many commentators are declaring the hydrogen car dead: funding for hydrogen car development has been slashed during the economic downturn, whilst electric cars have received the lion’s share of funding and bail-out for the failing car industry. With growing numbers of manufacturers promising mass-production electric vehicles within the next two years, the momentum is firmly with the camp concerned with lithium batteries and electric drive-trains.

But hold on: won’t such technologies also feature in hydrogen-fuelled cars too?

One step at a time

The car industry has managed to pull off an amazing re-brand of the hydrogen car. Rather than insist that the developed world suddenly convert it’s entire petroleum-transport infrastructure over to some new-fangled, futuristic technology which most people have never heard of let alone understand, the car manufacturers are bringing the future of transport in by stealth by familiarising people with it one step at a time.

The first step in the process was hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight. Powered by conventional combustion engines, they introduced two key components of future electric and hydrogen cars - energy storage and regenerative braking.

Hybrid cars harness some of the kinetic energy lost by slowing the car down under braking by storing it as electrical energy in a battery pack. When the car accelerates again, the energy stored in the battery is used to drive electric motors which augment the power of the conventional drive-train.

By storing and releasing the energy in this manner, hybrid vehicles achieve better fuel efficiency than they would be able to achieve without the technology. Crucially, though, the marketing of the cars to trendy, environmentally-conscious (and rich) celebrities instantly gave the technology acceptability amongst the general public at large. This wasn’t simply a nerdy high-tech gizmo but a totally useful and practical solution. Toyota and Honda also benefited by creating a window of technology development in which they stole a march on their rivals for the cars of the future.

Electric cars are a step towards the future

Toyota’s step-wise approach to future car development caused many other manufacturers to take note, and those of them who also saw hydrogen cars as the future of transportation started to evaluate their own R&D programmes to see what other intermediary steps could be taken which could result in strong consumer products in their own right.

Having begun to develop appropriate battery technologies for extra energy storage and efficient regenerative braking, the most critical requirement for hydrogen cars was a fully electric drive-train. Hydrogen fuel cells fuse hydrogen gas and oxygen from the air together to form water, and produce electrical energy, so any vehicle powered by hydrogen would need to convert that electrical energy into the kinetic energy required to provide motion.

Here’s where the penny dropped at the boardrooms of the major car companies: we don’t need to choose now between hydrogen cars and electric cars, because hydrogen cars are simply an enhancement to electric cars!

By targeting electric cars first, car companies can develop products which can tap into existing electrical infrastructures, rather than require massive new hydrogen refineries and upgrades to filling stations. Electric cars are a product which consumers can believe that they can use right now rather than in the future.

As a result, the market-readiness of electric cars along with the massive amounts of government money flowing into them makes investors positively bullish about investing not just in car manufacturers but also into the battery companies, drive-train manufacturers, lithium mining companies and just about anyone with an arm’s length of the ongoing electric car revolution.

Chevy Volt - acknowledging electric cars are not enough.

Anxiety about the effectiveness of electric cars to replace conventional petrol and diesel cars largely revolves around their range, and the amount of time it takes to recharge the battery once it runs out of charge. Whilst ideal for urban environments, electric cars make long journeys impractical to the point of near-impossibility. Whilst future battery advances will increase the cars’ ranges over time, there are serious limits to the usage of electric cars that are a long way from being addressed.

Already this problem is publicly acknowledged by General Motors. Aware that the capabilities of fully-electric cars would not be sufficient to convince the average motorist to abandon their old cars, GM designed the Chevy Volt: an electric car which contains a petrol generator as well.

Taking the hybrid fuel car a stage further, the Chevy Volt has a fully electric drive-train which is powered by a lithium battery pack just like other electric cars. What makes the Volt different is that it also contains an onboard generator which burns petrol (or gas if you’re American) to produce more electric energy which recharges the batteries.

The result is a vehicle which can run on just the battery power for enough range for several short trips, but can be refuelled at existing filling stations for longer journeys.

The Chevy Volt therefore has a massive advantage over it’s competitors: fuel up on cheap electricity at home as much as you can, but if you need to go further then you don’t need to wait for hours for your car to recharge!

Hydrogen cars by stealth.

The Chevy Volt represents two important things: that electric cars are not enough by themselves, and that electric cars can be easily augmented with additional on-board energy generation.

In this respect, the Volt is just one simple step short of a hydrogen car. Swap the petrol generator for a hydrogen fuel cell and you transfer straight from a hybrid petrol-electric car to a hydrogen car.

Almost the automotive advances required for hydrogen cars are encapsulated within electric cars: modifying fuel tanks to store hydrogen rather than petrol is the only thing outside of fuel cells which needs changing. For that reason, car manufacturers can pursue electric cars and lose nothing in the technological race for the cars of the future.

Car manufacturers to governments: you decide.

Electric cars are also the car manufacturer’s attempt to pass the responsibility for pollution directly onto national governments. Electric cars only pollute as much as the electricity grid does, leaving governments in charge of the fuel mix which powers their countries’ transport systems.

Faced with already needing to clean up the power supply for existing consumption as a way of meeting international climate change targets, an increase in electricity demand from the transport sector would scupper most nations’ ambitions to reduce carbon emissions - increased demand would likely need to be met with an increase in conventional fossil-fuel power stations over the short and medium terms.

As a result, governments are also banking on electric cars being a short-term solution - a stepping stone towards a more effective future for cars. Despite the groundswell behind electric cars at the moment, the German government recently committed itself to installing a nationwide hydrogen infrastructure, and the highly ambitious carbon reduction targets set by other European nations means that many others are likely to follow with similar commitments.

The pressure suddenly comes down to governments: choose either simultaneously decarbonise and increase national energy generation, find ways of efficiently and cleanly generating hydrogen and creating the necessary infrastructure, or do nothing. That is the choice between oil, electricity and hydrogen for transportation: the costs and resources involved will illicit different solutions from different nations over different time-scales.

Car companies have answered the questions posed of them. Now the rest of the world needs to decide how to rise to the challenge of cheaper, cleaner cars of the future.