While battery electric cars have taken the spotlight in recent years in the transition towards net zero, another net zero mobility option has been quietly developed without much attention – the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle.
Despite obvious advantages over battery EVs such as much longer driving range and shorter refueling time, few of us have seen a hydrogen car on the road, let alone considered buying one.
What’s holding back hydrogen car adoption and does it have a future?
Leading expert Prof. Jin Xuan of The University of Surrey helps us answer that question and many others from our live audience in this illustrated talk.
[Apologies that the sound quality is not perfect in places, but the talk is worth watching!]
Hello my name is Nigel Ward and it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the latest in our series of videos these are brought to you by the volunteers of the IET in Su and you can find more of our content on our YouTube channel lots of interesting talks today we’re going to
Be talking about hydrogen electric vehicles and asking the question are they the future of driving or perhaps not so electric cars um have held the spotlight in recent years and that’s really because we’re moving towards net zero for transportation meanwhile uh hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been quietly
Developed without a great deal of attention despite some obvious advantages over battery EV Solutions such as longer driving range shorter refueling time and so on so the question really is what’s holding back hydrogen cars and do they have a future to help us answer that question
We have a leading um academic in the field Professor xinan he uh is focusing his research at the moment on a Net Zero Energy circular economy and sustainable development via digital and Engineering Innovations his research has significantly influenced the early development of energy and AI uh as an interdisciplinary field um all across
The world he’s run he’s won lots of um Awards and prizes for his work and he’s uh the editor and chief um of digital chemical engineering and also the founding editor of energy and AI to respected academic uh journals his main job is associate Dean uh research and innovation in the
Faculty of engineering and physical sciences at the University of Sur and that’s where we caught up with him for his talk my my topic today is on the uh hydrogen electric vehicles today because when when team uh was team uh when when team invited me uh he said uh in in your
Last lecture you talked about the batteries or EVs and then there has been some mentions about the AL alternative options of uh Net Zero transport and why not you come here to talk about hydrogen vehicles and I’m here so uh before I I go to my uh uh next slide just want to
Do a very quick survey uh because today’s weather is really not really not not good so how many of you been driving here to campus oh quite a lot almost everyone so how many of you drive a electric vehicle oh quite a lot quite a
Lot uh but how many of you have ever seen a hydrogen vehicle or okay but how many of you own a hydrogen vehicle none of you okay that’s as expected so I try to elaborate a little uh why Hy we we’ve been talking about hydrogen vehicle for
Decades but why it’s not there yet well that well where hydrogen vehicle has a future or how was the comp competitions if you like compare with hydrogen vehicles and then the normal battery electric vehicles and uh uh hopefully we can uh initiate some interesting discussions at the end so uh I’m going
To start with a a question mark how big is the emissions do you think from our transport sector or in another way of asking like what is the percentage of CO2 emission the transport sector accounts for the overall emission of our economy rough numbers so yes yes so it’s nearly 30% depending on
On when you you you you you you count it or which which part of the world you count it uh but it is significant it’s 30% and within that 30% half of it is a passenger cars and vans and then uh the next largest proportion is trucks and buses uh Marine navigations aviations
And then 1% uh motorcycles and other transport so that’s the data uh back to five years ago 2018 so and we not we we all know that we have the commitment to to Net Zero and if we really want to achieve Net Zero then to be completely
Decarbonized uh so this the black curve is uh where we are now and depending on different scenarios we have uh different decarbonization roots and and if you want to achieve Net Zero we have we have to achieve the inan Target by 203 by 2032 we need to cut the emission
To uh 8 tons you will see a even deeper a steeper curve after that so it is a very difficult Target we probably have to completely change the way how we we take transport and that’s why the hydrogen uh vehicles or the hydrogen as
A few has been on the table to uh to initiate the discussion uh so I try to make my uh presentation a little bit more generic because it’s I we have different so uh forgive me if you’re very probably you a little bit boring
But I will try to uh try to deepen the topic a little bit with with the presentation so if we look at uh the normal way so I think still we have quite a lot of uh uh us driving a a a a transitional IC internal combustion engine that is
Powered up by gasoline or or or diesel and if we look at really how it works use Octon as a example so transitional cars burn the fuel so that’s that’s a chemical equation so you have one mol of the fuel Octon we have to 12.5 molers of oxygen and what you
Generate is 8 mol of n mol water and come up with a bit of heat so the heat is the energy that uh drives the Piston of the internal combustion engine that gives the power of moving the cars and if you look at this chemical reaction
It’s beautiful it is uh it works it’s very efficient but the problem is I mean there are multiple problems here I just point out two of them is you emit CO2 right uh when you burn the f F and so if translate to our daily life the normal
UK car Burns Burns uh 200 g of CO2 when when you travel uh 1 kilometers so that roughly equals to two tons per year so that that that is uh your CO2 emission related to your car driving if you drive a uh internal compostion engine and then
We use heat or we use the internal combustion engine then there’s also the efficient efficieny here we call Caron limit so that’s a thermodynamic limit which means U how smart your engine is that that’s absolute limit that deter your efficiency here and if you look equation that is one minus t code
Over not too parameters as engineer we always want to play around with parameters to to to uh to to to bypass the efficiency or to optimize system but uh the problem here there not much parameter that we can play around with uh to make the efficiency High uh so
It’s a t here you see that only two problem T cold that’s ambient temperature that you cannot do too much with it and t hot is that operation temperature within the engine so arguably you can make uh your engine burn heat uh heater so the the higher the temperature you get higher the
Efficiency limit but if there has to be a limit because of the materials uh limitations and also when you burn the fu in too high temperature and there’s kind of uh associate problem such as nox emission all these things comes up so we have to live with a very low efficiency
Relatively low efficiency possibly below 40% in most of the cases 20 30% so these are the two major issues of our Uh current way of Transport using gasoline or diesel and then people looks at uh hydrogen composion so it’s much simpler you can see within the look at the equations or chemical equations
That’s only two hydrogen molecules react with one Hy oxygen you get two water and heat so that’s uh that’s good because uh we have no Co within that uh equation so that’s a fundamental I think people trying to use hydrogen as a f but if you look at uh that
Equation burns the hydrogen uh you are still generate heat and then use a heat to drive your engine then it cannot bypass the con limit so people start to think is a better way of use energ so how about if we use electrochemical method so electrochemically uh you can
Still have the same almost chemical reaction but instead of generating heat uh you can use you can generate uh electricity so when you kind of react hydrogen and oxygen and if there’s a way that we can release the energy in the molecule the way of electricity and then
We can use the electricity to drive the electric and to to drive the vehicle and the the benefit of do that is you can get rid of that canot limit and there’s almost no limit the only kind of thermodynamic limit you you you want to go with is uh is is the entropy
Associated with that so the overall reaction can be very high efficient up to 95% or higher so so that’s the beauty of of using uh hydrogen electric chemistry that that’s a f mental chemistry of the F cell operation okay so you will see how right because imagine when you put hydrogen
And oxygen together you you you put a fire on that that’s explode and you get heat so that’s a transitional way so in order to generate uh electricity you have to split the reaction into two parts so that’s a beauty of electrochemistry so you want to uh have
The a not side uh and the quel side so the way how Fus cell works uh is you you you get the hydrogen to be dissolved at at to to to be splited at the anod side to generate the hydrogen atoms uh and electrons and then what what what what
Happens is the electrons when once it is generated that’s the uh the yellow dot will go go through the external circuit that is in the form because when you uh when the electron moves that’s a form of electricity and then the hydrogen ions will go through separately with the
Electrons through a so-called Pon exchange membrane to the queso side and then at the queso side that hydrogen ion uh react with the oxygen uh together with the electron that travels through front to T through the external circuit to generate water so through that way you can see the overall reaction is the
Same but if we split that into two two electrodes uh then you can capture the energy in the form uh electricity so that that is the fundamental cell and now we have got to the fundamental science right and with a little bit engineering you can build a f cell car
Okay so this is the miror F probably is one of the most famous so basically that’s the F cell so the F cell is installed in the front part of the car you of course have some hydrogen tank to supply the hydrogen and then uh once the electricity is
Generated it will drive the electric motor to to to to drive your car to drive the wheels so that that is the engineering of the fusil car it’s always easi uh easiest uh to set them to to be done so if we back the history of Fel
It’s almost back to 200 years ago uh invented by uh s Willian go so a British chemist actually a Welsh chemists that’s it’s it’s kind of the the first the very first prototype uh at that time they called it gas battery so what they do is to have uh oxygen gas to
Be sealed in one of the tubes and hydrogen gas to be sealed in in the other uh part of the tube and the insert to electrodes into the tube then suddenly they find Al willing go find that you can generate electricity so they cuted a gas battery so that’s uh
Glove was the father of fuser and you can even find uh uh’s uh status in in the walking part so that it’s not far away from the campus uh in the in the wi SAR area uh so as I said it was invented quite a while ago but
Unfortunately benefit to the uh Space Program back to uh 1960s it’s Fair because you can find probably 100 uh better ways of generating electricity as fusel because not particularly a simple uh process but NASA saws its potential uh because in the space want to have a
Reliable system you want to have a high energy density which that particular applications at that time normal battery cannot fulfill requirement so NASA uh built the first kind of engineering system of fusel and and put that in a space sh so actually fusel is is one of
The power source that send people that send human to the moon so they are very smart so the fuse cell generate electricity to power uh some of the the service modules and then if you still remember the only byproduct from the fuse cell is water so the water can be
Used uh as as a drink for the for the astronauts so it’s kind of a very close uh Smart close design of the systems uh that was uh used by NASA and I think that’s one of the examples that some of the inventions of Technology from the
Space industry lat translate to the Civ uh Civic uh applications so not far away from I mean this NASA space applications and uh people start to think oh can we can we if we can make the Fus that big to to that small maybe we can we can apply
That in the into a a vehicle so the actually F cell vehicle was uh was made by GM uh in the US so it was a van so they called Electro van that is in 1966 so you see it’s not away from too far away from the uh space applications but
Then there kind of a silent uh period because I don’t think the the the the need for Net Zero transport has emerged since uh 2020s so uh in the early 2020s we have the first commercial vehicle that uh that players in this in this field both Japanese companies Toyota and Honda and
Then uh in the 2010s we start to have the mass produced fusel vehicles and Mira was one of the most uh famous ones so if you ask how many fuser vehicles here on road uh on open road in the world so it’s around uh 56,000 uh by today so it’s it’s it’s not
A small number but if you compare with how many electric vehicles on road that’s 18 million okay so then it’s only probably like uh several orders of magnitude uh smaller and then you’re asking why so trying to kind of elaborate to start the discussion on the
Bit more but there there are very strong commercial interests and and the a a range of car makers they investing they they have plan to to develop or to sell fale cars uh in the near future so there has been some futures of fale cars
Okay and trying to kind of uh do some um analysis on comparing batteries and F CES in terms of techn te Oles and then also in terms of economics and The Wider sustainability implication so we published this paper back to two years ago about the future of f cell uh P
Exchange membrane F cells for automotive applications uh in nature so I will try to uh use some of the conclusions from that paper uh to show you some of the insights or what the future looks like for the hydrogen fuse cells uh to start with I don’t want to go into
Too much technical details but just trying to unfold a little bit the technical aspects when we when we put B that’s battery electric vehicle fcv that’s fuel cell electric vehicles uh to see their differences and trying to make some fair comparison uh so the the storage and storage media of course uh
For battery vehicle that’s typically listen on batteries and the latest version of a battery electric vehicle they also use other battery type but listen on is a mem up to date Fel vehicle use as a a storage median and then if you look at the specs the
Specification of a kind of a car the electric the vehicle power sources what what what is the important kind of parameter specifications the first is the energy density because it DET how much how much energy you can carry in your car and then that can translate to
How long you can travel okay with a single charge uh so the energy density actually Fu cell takes the wing so the battery normally has 200 wat hour per kilogram and and the fuse cell has slightly higher and of course then in terms of uh refilling time uh batteries
Always uh takes hours of course now the the the fast charging you can probably charge maybe 50 60% of your battery in 20 minutes it’s it’s improving but still fuse cell is a same as you when you charge hydrogen is the same as when you charge Fu so you you just lift nozzle
And charge hydrogen to a car so that takes only minutes so again F cell Wings to some extent in terms of refueling time and also of the considerations is the low temperature operation so battery has serious problems so those of you drive electric battery probably know
That in winter time your your mileage uh will will will decrease significantly and for f cell it’s not a problem so for f cell the problem for low temperature is really the startup so we have done quite a lot of research trying to develop strategy for f cell vehicles to
Start at a lower temperature but once it is started there’s no performance limitations or or or indications uh and F C have demonstrate working very very well uh up to minus 30° cus so that’s uh that will kind of uh be good for most of the UK climate
And in terms of efficiency here we only talk about efficiency in your car so later on I will show some analysis of the wider uh life cycle Energy Efficiency but in terms of energy utilization in cost battery EV is quite efficient normally 90% Energy Efficiency and Fus are slightly lower but still
Quite higher than the internal combus cost about 60% and in terms of infrastructure of course uh you need charging Point batteries and you need hydrogen stations uh for fusel vehicles to some extent they are both new infrastructure to the current uh to the current uh transport infrastructures but you can see like the
Battery ones are developing much much faster than the hydrogen stations which I will go into a little bit more details later on and this is a quite interesting diagrams about a comparison between battery and the F cells sometimes we argue that one has to win but we know
That the Future Energy will be a mix so zero will be a mix you have to have multiple Technologies to tackle different areas and if you compare battery and F cells seems to be wind winding when you have a smaller uh kind of vehicle size or or or driving range typically of
The the city mobility and then when you go into those l hole or or or heavy duty vehicles and F cell will win because as you can imagine F cell is kind of a chemical devices there’s a flows there’s a chemical flows hydrogen oxygen water flow
Within the devices so you have to have some sort of additional uh pumps valves and then when you have all of these things there there’s a scaling effect so the bigger the uh the better the system so to that extent uh there’s a common concern that Fu cell domain Fu cell will
Probably be performing better in these uh trucks heavy duty vehicles but battery might has a better solution for those smaller ligh kind of uh application and then there’s a bit of uh intersection the overlap with those uh median range ones okay so and we also discuss U
Because one of the question we are we always try to ask ourselves how good the technology is and and how good is good enough right because you can always kind of improve the Technologies and uh uh and make it better but at some point there should be some Target and div of
Travel and at some point we will find that the fuser is competive Enough full battery two battery vehicles or two uh internal combustion engines so in that nature paper we also discuss where we can improve again I don’t want to go into too much details but uh this is
Just another way of showing the fu cell uh in a slightly probably more a beautiful way uh and and if you really unfold that F sale you can see that the key component are the bipolar plate so that that’s a plate that will assemble everything together and provide the flow
Channel for the hydrogen and oxygen or air to flow uh it’s made normally made of metal uh and then it it is the gas diffusion layer so that’s a porous layer currently mostly made by uh carbon paper but there’s there there’s some discussions of using alternative materials to improve the performance
And then because it’s a electrochemical reaction so you normally need catalyst so that’s the Catalyst layer that’s a layer between a poon exchange membrane a membrane is it’s it’s just like a plastic membrane but it’s made of a a a special material people called nfin so
The function of nfin is to allow the hydrogen arm to transport through the membrane from the one side to the other side while don’t allow the other molecules to be passing through um and the catalyst is normally made of U Noble Metals like Platinum so that’s one of
The issues that we want to address because platin is expensive okay so we discussed uh in that paper that uh how much we how far we want to go in each of these individual component so that when we assemble them together to make a f out cheap enough or high enough to compete
With other options and also there are kind of other agencies such as us uh the United States departmentment of energy us does or the European unions they have targets of f sales so we feel that or or the research Community feel that if we can achieve that ultimate Target then
The technology will be competitive in uh in the market so if you look at how far away are we from those most ultimate Target so the First Column is the 2015 status which is probably or really seven eight years ago the in Target is the interesting one so that’s the 2025
Target and that’s probably exactly where we are now because the fusel eror is developing very very fast so that kind of reflect where we are now so if you look at that for example the peak Energy Efficiency so we are now uh I 7 eight years we’re at 6 we’re now probably at
65 ultimate Target is 70% so improving it’s not so far away power density okay so there has been some improvement still have a a way to go specific power so you we’ve already final targets and then cost I think cost is one of the key factor that people want to drive down because
Essentially you want to make your car to be cheap enough to attract buyers so if we there’s different ways of measuring the cost here we use uh US dollars per kilowatt net kilowatt and back to 78 years ago it was $ 53 us per kilo per kilo per kilowatt and we’ve
Reduced to 40 and the ultimate Target is 30 uh and then the durability so uh we are I mean we’ve been involved in number of research project we can confidently say that currently we can run the F sale uh in 5,000 hours so that translate to
About 10 year uh lifespan if you your car in the typical duty cycle so 10 years roughly enough but the ultimate Target is uh 8,000 hours that translate to 15 years which is definitely uh enough probably the other part of the car world die out before the F uh dies
So you can see there has been quite a lot of achievement there has been progress made uh we are close we are very close so sometimes we already achieve the target for some other Target there’s still a way to go but people are confident in achieving these targets and
And ask okay these are the engineering kind of numbers how that translate to if we want to buy the car so you can buy a f cell car if you wish even uh in UK I just look at the the the the the Toyota miror website this afternoon before come here
So this a quite decent car you can buy from 5 uh 50k so it’s it’s not too expensive right and then you can you can you can top up your hydrogen uh tank uh with around uh 7 70 uh pounds and that will give you five 400
Miles so it’s it’s not too bad probably it’s it is competitive with your diesel cars your your your uh your uh your petrol cars probably is slightly worse or or not that compatitive with your EVS because EVS normally give much cheaper uh electricity charge uh for the certain
Mileage but in terms of the the the the vehicle price and also the mileage that it can gives you it it is a decent choice already okay so uh so then then I think I Tred to give you to to paint a picture technically uh there has been a lot of
Discussions or development in recent years that make fer cars uh close to Market is already in Market uh given the competitive options uh compared with other other electric vehicles but we want to know in the next part of my presentation to put that kind of Technology into the wider system to look
At some of the limitations we currently facing today so the first question we’re going to ask or or people the first thing people normally ask is where the hydrogen comes from because uh you’re going to use hydrogen to power your car it is clean at the time of of use
Because if you still remember the byproduct is water so it’s a clean in terms of carbon emission but it’s also clean in terms of kind of air pollution you don’t have all these nasty socks knocks emitted uh but the if you look at the system from the big picture
You have to ask where hyrogen comes from right so currently the majority of the hydrogen comes from uh uh the steam reforming of nature gas and interesting people trying to I don’t know if you’ve seen this before but nowadays people trying to different colors uh into different ways of making hydrogen so
That it comes with kind of the hydrogen rambos here only I only show uh five colors but if you look at the literature there probably tens and 20s colors and no one I don’t think there’s any single person can name all the colors of uh different hydrogen production ways but
Here just name a little a few so uh currently we are largely uh producing gray hydrogen so that is hyd from Steam reforming of fossil fuse and blue hydrogen is the same way but you try to capture the carbon dioxide uh in the hydrogen production process uh we
Are trying to shift to the green hydrogen production so that is the through the electrolysis of uh water using renewable energy okay so that’s that’s just the opposite way of Fu cell electrochemistry by the way and there are other ways of uh hydrogen production like yellow hydrogen pink hydrogen the
Pink hydrogen is the one that uh through the same electrolysis process but using the nuclear energy okay and then there’s uh uh quite a lot of other ways of producing hydrogen so different ways of producing hydrogen will have different carbon footprint or environmental footprint footprint and not all the hydrogen
Protection methods are are low carbon or sustainable and then if you look at this finger that uh for example black or Bron that was a hydrogen quite high high Hy footprint the gray H High see that captur but actually from the life cycle point of view it’s still
High and green and then depending on on on how the system is configurated is still so if you look at that and what I’m trying to help you here is to to give you the diesel so you can see that uh not all the hydrogen production are
Low carbon many of them has a higher carbon footprint even than the diesel so if you use hydro vehicle uh the hydrogen is from for example gray or blue hydrogen and it does not uh automatically translate to a sustainable solution so that’s one thing that need to consider then the other
Thing we need to consider is is the high storage so we talk quite a lot of uh hydrogen fuse cells seem like a Hightech and we tend to forget about the hydrogen storage about a tank because people think tank oh that’s just a cylinder
It’s it’s it is a low taxing but it is not because if look at in theory hydrogen probably one of the most energy dense molecules so it gives you if you com especially in terms of mass so that Mega per kilogram this probably two or three times higher than Diesel and
Petrol and of course order of magnitude higher than the battery Solutions and because hydrogen is a is a gas so in terms of volumetric energy density it’s not as high as uh Diesel and petrol they are liquid but if you com if you compress them or liquify them they still
Offers a comparable even higher volumetric energy density than most of the battery Solutions but that’s in series that’s a hyd itself so in reality you have to have a hydrogen tank to to put all the hydrogen into your car and then when you add the tank together the
The whole picture has changed so these are the kind of the reality so if you put all the hydrogen storage system together then you will probably end up with uh something lower than Diesel and gasoline so again this is a US doe Target so by 2020 we are here so that
You can kind of compare with uh other Technologies or especially Diesel and gasoline and this is Ultimate Target 2050 see uh once we consider the the storage systems the the the energy density will be much much lower but still kind of comparable with diesel and gasoline it will not give you kind of
The mileage Panic uh if we do it well and also I think one of the key problem is is infrastructure because uh many of you think oh it’s a decent car but where can I charge my hydrogen so there there has been quite a lot of development uh
Recently because hydrogen has been uh man many many times in many national uh energy infrastructures or strategies and guess how many hydrogen refilling station we have a w is around 81 so that that’s I get uh today so there’s a kind of a website hydrogen station. that gives you a real life
Numbers of hydrogen stations so the blue ones are the ones in operation and the the green the green dots are the ones has a solid plan uh to to be operated in the next two years so you can see some areas of the world we have decent amount
Of the density of hydrogen uh poers sorry hydrogen fing refilling stations that’s the European uh region and some of the East Asian and if you look at if we try to kind of Zone these two two regions a little bit larger you can see uh it is mostly Germany here in the in
The Europe uh who want to develop the hydrogen Network so they have the target to have enough hydrogen uh stations in the highway system so that if you drive a hydrogen uh vehicle you can get uh recharged within your mileage range we have a handful numbers of hydrogen stations in
The UK and there there will be more in the coming years but the numbers of course is orders of magnitude lowest the electric charging Point uh and also like Korean and Japan they have they put hydrogen electric vehicles as of course at a higher priority than the UK as
Option so they are developing quite a lot of uh they’ve already developed quite a lot of hydrogen feeling stations so you so this is a picture of the the infrastructure so now I try to kind of uh okay so the the last part is about the sustainability because I think one
Of the motivation why we choose electrical vehicles or hydr Vehicles is we want to we want to achieve a sustainable uh future and how to assess that is we we use the so-call life cycle assessment technique so instead of assessing a snapshot of a process we take the full life cycle Viewpoint of
The electric vehicle uh so if you look at the sustainability vle need to look at the fu cycle so that’s how you burn where your Fu comes from how it is produced how it is burned and when it’s burning how what is emission so that’s a cycle and also there’s a vehicle cycle
So what is the raw materials of making that vehicles and what is the environmental impact when you produce that raw materials and converting those raw materials uh into the component of your car and the end of the life uh we need to have a proper dispersal of the
Vehicle so each step has certain environmental impact in terms of carbon emission but it also in terms of for example ecology toxicities or or or environmental wider environmental impact uh people have done quite a lot of uh uh LCA life cycle assessment and and the Hotpot I mean there’s problems
For both EV battery EVs and and the fuser Vehicles the issue for batteries are really the the cobal and nickel so we’ve heard a lot of stories uh recently about a co uh mining of Co and nickel and the battery EV are very clean at the
Point of use but when you try to get this Nick in other part of the world has generate quite a lot of problems both environmentally ethically uh F cell has a different problem it’s mainly the Platinum so that’s the one that used uh as a catalyst for uh for for for the
Electrochem actions uh so one of the we are trying to do is to lower the amount of platinum use in the Fus our systems and and uh with the technology become mature and mature we we can use less and less Platinum uh so trying to reduce the environmental impact so if we consider
Everything into account as I said the fuel cycle and the uh the the vehicle cycle uh we can see that uh different there are quite a lot of LCA Studies by the way in the Lage and some many I mean there are slightly different results reported but I think the consense here
Is if we compare the hydrogen Fus vehicles and electric battery vehicles uh in the within the technology so that’s your current car uh hydrogen fues are perform slightly better in terms of sustainability than the electric vehicles but then with the future technology advancement of course both vehicle the the the environmental impact
Will be lower in done and then probably in the future electric vehicle will slightly win H but also uh there are other studies so for example in this study they compare the battery EVs and fusel EVs and sometimes it uh some studies say the Fus are slightly better
And battery is slightly better but I think the overall story I’m trying to tell is both are quite Sustainable Solutions especially if you compare with uh the current gasoline engines and especially the electri and the hydrogen is from renewable sources okay so the last part is just
Come back to the title so hydren fuel cell vehicle is it does it as a future or is it a future of driving or not so I hope I have given you enough information that you can make your on judgment but I just want to throw a few different
Voices because there’s no definite answers unfortunately uh different people have different voices uh for example the European climate foundation so here I just trying to give you uh there’s a lot of predictions how how the fusel what’s the role of Fel to be played in the future transport mix uh
The European climate Foundation predicted uh by 2050 probably more than 30% of the new car cells will be hydrogen fuse cells and the this is a conference paper are they’re even more optimistic that they feel that more than almost half of the uh new sales by 2050
Will be fuser CS which I personally don’t believe and uh also there’s some negative voices like this report the future of electric vehicle Report by boomberg uh you can see in their prediction by 2040 so that’s the blue takes a just a slice of the uh the
Future uh mix of the new vehicles so I think if you look at if you drw down into the the methodology how they produce these models because as an engineer I always want to see the data and the me the method and the model to to produce these results so they they
Use different datas they use different models and and most importantly they use different scenarios so I think my concern is uh the more environmental I mean the the more straight straighter and N zero kind of push you want to go the more you will see hydrogen fuse cell
Uh in that picture because uh probably that will go back to the to the picture that I just shown in order to decarbonize the the transport sector you have to consider both the city mobility and the heavy duty vehicles and and I think F cell will definitely play an
Important role in the heavy duty vehicles but also in some part of the city mobilities okay so I think that’s the end of my presentation and I hope you find it useful and uh this is a quite kind of interesting as there’s a lot of debate so maybe you agree or disagree
With me but I’m very happy to open the discussions or questions thank you very much for such a fascinating and informative presentation electric vehicles are heavier which obviously has implications for infastructure Carion how does the weight of hydrogen cars compare with in combustion and so so you mean that in terms of
Weight the weight of the yeah so I think that’s kind of been shown in some of these uh diagram that have been shown before so it’s essentially the kind of the uh energy density because we have different ways of measuring energy density so you can measure in terms of
Warning and in terms of uh weight so uh hydrogen has uh again so so that so this is kind of the uh the energy density in terms of weight so electric vehicles are slightly weight heavy not that heavier so if you compare 200 and 300 so I think F vehicle can be
Potentially lighter but then you also need to kind of think because F the energy storage part is only a proportion of the whole kind of uh vehicle right so uh so uh in the current technology F cell wins a little bit marginally so uh the whole car yeah signicant so you mean heavy
Duty the total weight of an actual car on road compared to com it’s it’s almost the same it’s almost the same yeah it’s it it WIS a little bit uh yeah okay can I thank you very much thank you um yeah great presentation thanks a lot um you quoted the 200 to
300 uh comparison between a battery vehicle and a fuel cell vehicle um is that was um kilowatt hours per kilogram if I understood correctly was that kilowatt hours after the efficiency or before because after after the thanks very much so well why why is the um the
Weight um comparable why is the weight of a fuel cell vehicle not a third of the um sorry uh yeah why is it not 2/3 of the weight of a um of a battery electric vehicle yes because the energy storage weight is only a proportion of
The whole kind of weight of the vehicle yeah thanks much oh thank you very much for enjoyable presentation I’m just wondering if there have been any assessment of safety relative safety of the different types of yeah that that’s a really hot topic especially right out the fire of the the
L uh so hydrogen uh if we talk about hydrogen it it gives an impression that it’s a dangerous gas but it is not actually so there’s a lot of hydrogen safety studies so it is kind of the top ex that we have been studied 200 years
And we are relatively kind of and know the safety ASP of the hydrogen so uh so it’s it’s actually people may not believe but it’s actually safer than the internal compassion enine because uh in order for hydrogen to exp or to to to to burn it has to be mixed with oxygen and
Because hydrogen is SC when when it when there’s any leakage the hydrogen will go into the air it will not still kind of inside the vehicle that will generate kind of fire compared to normal kind of liquid Fu side and and also because of
The the kind of the hydren is so easy to kind of to emit that that is less of course there a risk but the safety is well controlled and a common concept that hydren vehicle is safer than normal internal combust so there’s no spontaneous combustion of hydrogen has to
Be no it has to be it has to have oxygen to to get comust but some heat or something else as well you have to have o because if you the the fire TR go so it have to have a few the oxidant and the heat you have all yeah so there’s a
Certain amount of heat that you need to get get com yeah but they still have oxygen so and and the beauty of H is it’s it’s a gas field so it will it very very quickly even there’s a leage what about battery EVS how do they compare in
Terms of safety yeah that’s I mean it’s it’s it’s a highly Dependable some people feel it’s it’s batter car safe but they see all these news coming out uh regularly so I’m not a research on battery uh so I cannot really comment but there has been a lot of research
Recently especially in the UK to address the battery safety problems so I think it’s a there are two problems here one is a public perception that uh and also the real technical challenges for battery safy which I’m I’m not familiar with say were approximately equivalent to internal contion do you think well
I uh it’s difficult to say I I think there’s are different levels of risk not different yeah thank you okay one um you mentioned about the the efficiency of the process and trying to get it up to 65% and you also mentioned that chemically obviously is a very efficient
You can get very high so so what’s the limitation on the 65% where in in the processes are we limited yeah so that 95% is a thermodynamic limit so that’s that’s kind of the uh the highest you can go anything beyond that will kind of uh uh well well it’s you’re gu the
Second law of Thermodynamics but there there there are different losses in different kind of systems because uh first of all when you kind of have this electrochemical reaction there losses kinetically which means for example not all the hydrogen are reacted and then within the reacted hydrogen not all the
Energy is generated in terms of electricity some are emitted in terms of heat and then when the electricity is generated there’s also transmission loss which which is small compared to uh the internal composition engine so then you add all them together you get kind of 60%
The you say that the efficiency of the fuel cell system is about 60% compared with 90% for battery system that leaves you 40% of your energy um that you have to manage in some way there something to bee a theral management problem in the vehicle and
Can you use that for any useful purpose such as heating passengers in C weather yeah and gain an advantage over the the battery vehicle where you Haven use battery power for that sort of thing yeah that that’s a really good question so the two challenges in F cell
Management one is thermal management the other is Water Management because you generate a lot of water so how to get rid of the water efficiently from the fuser is one of the problems there’s also theral management issues as you uh rightly pointed out but techn technically it’s is less challenging
Than the Water Management as you can imagine uh but there is theral management issues and I think that kind of emerging studies as you said how can we utilize that part of the heat uh for example for air conditioning or for for other part of the vehicle where heat is needed thank
You on purpose thank you than a very interesting presentation you put it across very clearly thank you um couple of questions I one very quick one I was what really cool is one of your charts where you showing different ways of producing hydrogen and yellow hydrogen which I think you explain as solar
Produced looked incredibly inefficient compared with everything else I why why that is yeah I mean it’s so just because the definition of different colors of hydrogen kind of varies quite a lot so some people use yellow hydrogen as kind of the the solar P the solar inred and
Also someone just defined yellow hydren as uh just using the kind of off peak electricity to generate hydrogen I think uh because of there some sort of ambiguities of defining that part of the the the definition of the Haj and that gives you kind of the impression that uh
The solar one is is not as efficient as as people are thinking of so uh so my impression is if you are if you have a solar farm and then you use a solar farm to generate hydrogen the carbon footprint will be lower uh but if you are just using uh the the
The the the kind of the off peak electricity from the grid to generate uh that hydrogen then the the carbon footprint can be potentially very high okay yeah thank you and for me one one other question I’ve read the uh something that fuel is very United for is very short duty cycle Journeys
Because of the time of the energy it takes to get them off to operate ring temp is that is that correct and are there things being done to address that no so I think it’s I think it was an impression but I think uh that has been
Largely addressed so as if you look at for example the the the Toyota mirror specification so one single charger can drive 400 kilog of sorry kilometers so so that’s that that’s a decent driving range isn’t it so my question is a bit the opposite typical s of City driving that
Is perhaps only a journey only being a couple of kilometers that they’re very inefficient when used in that way because time to reach operating C is that correct uh kind of kind of that that is issue because as I said fale do have that kind of the the start the
Start phase but it’s it’s not that kind of because for example we have the the US Department of and I didn’t show that part but uh they have the the the target to uh to for the fuel cell to reach the full operation within kind of uh three 3
Minutes okay so if for example if you can only drive less than three minutes and that’s efficient but yes longer than that will be um if you if you look at the market today um and you look at electric vehicles there’s a a sort of Sweet Spot um in
Smallish SUVs like the equivalent of the Honda Jas um which um claim a range of say 300 mil plus – 50 mil and an efficiency of um about 4 uh mil per kilowatt hour plus minus say .25 could you sort of Hazard a guess as to what the equivalent Sweet Spot might
Be for hydrogen and when it might come about well that’s that’s that’s a difficult question to to to answer I think so there’s always you know the competitions right between the the batteries and and the fu cells and you see a lot of advances uh in battery vehicles in different uh in different
Ways like the fast charging the the long range so uh so some of the typical issues of battery Vehicles no longer exist like like the mileage and and or or or or things and people also trying to address uh like the the the the battery mileage in cold weather so there
Has been a lot of uh kind of progress recently and I think it’s also laric driven by the market need because there so many uh battery battery Vehicles such a big market so that drives money on the R&D of battery uh vehicle so that’s kind
Of you see a lot of progress on that but there also quite obvious uh progress uh in the fut Vehicles so as I said as I presented earlier there there has been targets so if we meet that Target uh I I don’t have a clear picture how those ultimate Target will finally translate
To the to the performance in terms of mileage in terms of efficiency but uh I think the common sense is if we achieve the US doe Target by 2050 other sooner the better than the the whole technology will be comparable to the to the to the
Battery EV you touched a little bit on um the use in hgvs I noticed um although it’s a bit out of the scope of this lecture maybe um but is it true to say that um the potential for use in hgvs where there’s not much alternative would
Be a driver you know in this whole technology area um to get it you improve the take up in um in in cars lower end of the scale of course we’ll see it in in buses as well yes that that’s largely true so I didn’t show actually there are
Two you two sets of us doe Target the one I shown is for uh for City Mobility so there’s a different set of targets for hgvs and there’s a group of people actually I think there’s a kind of they called consultent for HG F hydrogen hgv
So it’s a very hard research area and there some some big big initiative in this area could you say a little bit more about hydrogen combustion um a few years ago JCP I believe produced a fuel cell Digger which was a fairly Mighty beast but I understand the JCB are now directing all
The development energy in hydrogen combustion yes so that’s it’s kind of seen you’re absolutely right so we’ve been see because it’s almost regarded as kind of a de research area for hydrogen internal combustion but there has been seen a number of kind of bump back of of this area then people
Start to to relook into the area and companies we see kind of investment uh into the hydrogen combustion internal combustion vehicles but I think the problem is uh I mean the the the good side is it’s it’s a relative L wellknown system because we’ve been uh researching
Comus for many many uh years so if it I think it’s just replacing the field between hydrogen and gasoline it’s it’s still difficult but it’s relatively kind of easy if you you want to reinvent the wheel uh I think for hydrogen combus there are two two main issue one is it
It operate at very high temperature it it has a much higher temperature than the diesel compostion so you you me there high much higher material requirement so that normal kind of standard steel cannot uh Toren that high temperature so you have to use uh you have to use expensive materials to build
The engine and also the operate High operating high temperature means you have a lot of nox emission so that’s kind of a uh side problems uh of the hydrogen comens and also it’s about the efficiency because any internal combustion engine cannot bypass 40% but that’s I think still the the people
Still find Niche applications of hydrogen internal combustion in some applications so that area start to be uh kind of receiving some interest recently yes I believe JCB claimed that they have solved the problem with the high temperatures and the KNX production by able to burn much low temperature
Yeah thank you for including a section on the whole life cycle of vehicles it’s really a bit that quite often when people talk about electric vehicles they’re focused on oh but nothing comes out of the tailpipe it’s all it’s all F and dadly um interesting in interestes
In the kind of the next step one of the big struggles at the moment is that a lot of EVS are coming to the end of their life cycle and what do they do now and um some of the battery recycling systems are not that great at the moment
They’re just kind of shredding it and then trying to extract whatever they can from it um and I guess potentially an advantage of the hydrogen fuel cell is that the only thing that’s essentially different to yeah you’ve not got the the chemistry of the battery you’ve got the
Fuel cell which is in many ways a simpler construction than a little iron fuel cell so as I I I assume from the uh comprehensive presentation you do today there is a lot of research into that next step as well yeah exactly so I think that a lot of uh life cycle
Assessment studies on that and absolutely right fuser has a simpler or less hazarded material compositions uh than batteries so which make it easier uh for the end of life treatment or essentially offers slightly kind of a lower environmental impact from the vehicle cycle point of view but there
Also quite a lot of research on the battery recycling so uh I think one day people will solve that problem and then that will bring down the environmental impact of the both Technologies um so how difficult is going to be to set up the the the fueling stations around the country that
There seem to be a complete lack of at the moment and then how sure can you be that your is going to be sourced from a reasonable Source yeah how difficult it will be it’s technical not difficult I think it’s all about money right so it’s an investment and I think it’s a
National strategy whether we want to go for purely electric vehicle routs or we want to have some sort of hybrid or mixture or in some part of the country then uh we can see there more emphasis on the hydrogen Roots so as long as you have the clear National strategy and you
Have the investment comes in then it’s technically not an issue to roll out the hydrogen uh fing station and also hydrogen is so important nowadays in the UK so I think in the future the the the big picture is all hydr should come from uh renewable sources yeah thank [Applause] You