fuel cell
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Amazon strikes green hydrogen deal with fuel cell maker Plug Power
Shares of hydrogen fuel cell maker Plug Power surged as much as 8% Thursday morning after Amazon said it struck a deal with the company to power some of its operations with green hydrogen.
Green shift? How the trucking sector is exploring ways to power big rigs into the future
Automakers show off fuel cell hybrids at 2019 Vancouver car show
“Cars can go up to almost 600 clicks on a full (fuel cell) tank now and this is going to be something that's formidable in the future," says auto show executive director.
General Motors is going all electric.
After more than a century peddling vehicles that pollute the atmosphere, General Motors is ending its relationship with gasoline and diesel.
AFTER MORE THAN a century peddling vehicles that pollute the atmosphere, General Motors is ending its relationship with gasoline and diesel. This morning, the American automotive giant announced that it is working toward an all-electric, zero-emissions future. That starts with two new, fully electric models next year—then at least 18 more by 2023.
That product onslaught puts the company at the forefront of an increasingly large crowd of automakers proclaiming the age of electricity and promising to move away from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. In recent months, Volvo, Aston Martin, and Jaguar Land Rover have announced similar moves. GM’s declaration, though, is particularly noteworthy because it’s among the very largest automakers on the planet. It sold 10 million cars last year, ranging from pickups to SUVs to urban runabouts.
“General Motors believes the future is all-electric,” says Mark Reuss, the company’s head of product. “We are far along in our plan to lead the way to that future world.”
Reuss did not give a date for the death knell of the GM gas- or diesel-powered car, saying the transition will happen at different speeds in different markets and regions. The new all-electric models will be a mix of battery electric cars and fuel cell-powered vehicles.
To be sure, GM’s sudden jolt of electricity is planned with its shareholders in mind. The Trump Administration may be moving to roll back fuel efficiency requirements in the US, but the rest of the world is insisting on an electric age. France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Norway have all said they plan to ban the sale of gas and diesel cars in the coming decades. More importantly, China—the world’s largest car market—and India, a rising star, plan to join them. No automaker can compete globally without a compelling stable of electric cars.
GM intends to grab as large a slice of the Chinese market as possible. It has previously announced plans to launch 10 electric or hybrid electric cars in the country by 2020. This summer, it started selling a two-seat EV there, for just $5,300. Last year, it sold more cars in China (3.6 million) than it did in the US (3 million).
The crucial question for the American automaker will be how, exactly, to make money from all these cars. By one report, GM loses $9,000 on each Chevy Bolt it sells. Reuss’ strategy hinges on bringing costs down thanks to steadily dropping battery prices, more efficient motors, and lighter cars. Massive scale and global supply chains helps, too. “This next generation will be profitable,” he says. “End of story.”
It's not impossible. “If they’ve really been laying this groundwork, they could be closer to not just having this tech but having a profitable and high volume way of supplying it," says Karl Brauer, an auto industry analyst with Kelley Blue Book.
General Motors’ history hasn’t been especially kind to electric mobility. Its invention of the automatic starter helped kill the first wave of electric cars at the start of the 20th century. This is the company that experimented with battery power in the EV-1, only to recall the two-seater from its owners, crush them all, and pile the carcasses up in a junkyard. In the first years of the 21st century, while Toyota was making hybrids popular with the Prius, GM was hawking the Hummer.
Over the past decade, the Detroit giant has positioned itself for a different sort of future. First came the hybrid electric Chevy Volt. Then came GM’s great coup, the Chevy Bolt, the 200-mile, $30,000 electric car that hit market long before Tesla’s Model 3. GM is seriously pursuing semi-autonomous and fully driverless cars. It offers the first car on US roads with vehicle-to-vehicle communication capability. Now, it talks about its plans to eliminate vehicle pollution, congestion, and traffic deaths.
“GM has the ability to get all of us to that future so much faster,” Reuss says. Now it just has to deliver—and make enough money doing it to stick around for that future.
Fuel-cell cars finally drive off the lot.
While consumers can now buy their own hydrogen-powered vehicles, industry looks to expand the refueling infrastructure and lower the cost of fuel-cell cars.
While consumers can now buy their own hydrogen-powered vehicles, industry looks to expand the refueling infrastructure and lower the cost of fuel-cell cars
By Mitch Jacoby
Credit: Toyota
In brief
The idea of powering a car with a fuel cell has been around for decades. In principle, these cars, which run on electricity generated on board by electrochemically combining hydrogen with oxygen from the air, could reduce global dependence on petroleum while emitting just water from their tailpipes. But despite extensive fleet testing, fuel-cell passenger cars have always seemed to be another five years away. No longer. Motorists can now buy or lease their very own fuel-cell cars. The numbers today are low, and the cars are available only in a few geographic regions equipped with public hydrogen-filling stations. But the industry is gearing up to manufacture more of these cars and expand refueling infrastructure. And researchers continue to look for ways to reduce fuel-cell costs and improve durability.
Raymond Lim, a psychology and statistics instructor, describes himself as an “automobile enthusiast who likes to try out new technology.” Celso Pierre also has a thing for cool gadgets. He’s a mechanical engineer who loves hiking and the great outdoors. Anytime Pierre hears about new technology, he rushes to learn about it. For both men, that excitement has long included electric vehicles and fuel-efficient cars. So Lim and Pierre jumped at the opportunity to join the small but growing number of motorists who zip around California’s roadways in their own fuel-cell vehicles. Lim drives a Toyota Mirai and Pierre motors around in a Hyundai Tucson.
These hydrogen-powered, all-electric cars have been in development for decades as alternatives to conventional cars; they do not depend on fossil fuels and do not pollute—they emit just water vapor. During that time of development, numerous prototypes and fleets of fuel-cell demonstration vehicles logged millions of miles, advancing the transportation technology far beyond the laboratory test stage. Yet industry watchers grew disheartened at the seemingly endless delays that kept fuel-cell vehicles from auto dealers’ showrooms. And upon hearing projections year after year that these cars would hit the market “five years down the road,” technology enthusiasts figured the automobile industry had largely given up on mass-producing fuel-cell cars.
That impression is just plain wrong. The industry continued working away on the technology, and those “five years down the road” projections finally came true in the past couple of years. Although the numbers of fuel-cell cars for sale or for lease today are relatively low and the vehicles are available only in select geographical areas, it is finally possible for a private motorist to drive one off the lot. Meanwhile, industry is expanding the hydrogen-refueling infrastructure in the U.S. and other countries and continuing to find ways to make the vehicles cheaper and more durable.
Rise of the fuel cell
The fuel-cell concept dates back to the 1800s. But it wasn’t until the past century that various types of demonstration units proved that these electrochemical devices could reliably produce electric current. They came to be recognized as reliable devices when the U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration used these power generators in the 1960s and 1970s in the Gemini and Apollo missions and other space programs.
Similar to their electrochemical cousin the battery, fuel cells contain electrodes that extract usable electricity from chemical reactions. In both batteries and fuel cells, redox reactions occur when a positive electrode is connected to a negative electrode through an external circuit. When oxidation reactions take place at an anode and reductions proceed at a cathode, electrons flow through the circuit, powering the device connected to it—an electric motor, in the case of a fuel-cell car.
Fuel-cell cars by the numbers
$57,500
Manufacturer’s suggested retail price for 2017 Toyota Mirai
370
Number of fuel
cells in Mirai’s
fuel-cell stack
~5
Mass in kilograms of hydrogen stored in Mirai’s fuel tanks
≥480 and
Driving range in kilometers on one tank of hydrogen and range for various battery-powered electric cars, respectively
Minutes for hydrogen refueling and electric-car battery recharging, respectively
But unlike batteries, which store the oxidant and reductant within the electrochemical package, fuel cells draw oxidizers and fuels from the outside. As a result, fuel cells don’t get used up or need to be recharged like batteries do. In principle, fuel cells can continue generating electricity as long as fresh reactants continue to flow into the devices.
Numerous types of fuel cells have made their way through research and development stages, and several versions have been commercialized. The devices differ principally in terms of the electrolyte, which is the medium that transports ions between the electrodes; the materials that make up the electrodes and other components; and the intended application.
Fuels also vary from device to device. In a basic fuel cell, hydrogen serves as the fuel and oxygen as the oxidant. But there are also systems that derive hydrogen from alcohols or hydrocarbons, as well as ones that use methanol directly, without first converting it to hydrogen.
Fuel cells in automobiles rely on a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM). The micrometers-thick film serves two functions: It’s a solid electrolyte that conducts hydrogen ions from the anode to the cathode, and it’s a gas separator that prevents direct, uncontrolled mixing of hydrogen and oxygen. Such mixing wastes fuel, causes the fuel cell to operate inefficiently, and leads to by-products that can degrade fuel-cell components.
The number of fuel-cell vehicles has been growing steadily since they entered the retail market in mid-2015, when Toyota began selling them in Japan and California. Hyundai and Honda have also moved into the retail market, and so the numbers are starting to climb.
In 2016, Toyota boosted production of its four-seat fuel-cell car, the Mirai, which means “future” in Japanese, from the 2015 level of 700 units to approximately 2,000 cars. This year the carmaker plans to produce about 3,000 of them.
According to Bo Ki Hong, a research fellow at Hyundai’s Fuel Cell Research Lab, the South Korean carmaker expects to produce about 1,000 of its Tucson Fuel Cell compact sport-utility vehicles by the end of this year and distribute them to 18 countries. Honda is producing similar numbers of its Clarity, a sporty five-passenger fuel-cell sedan. And all three automakers, which are currently the only companies selling or leasing fuel-cell passenger cars in the U.S., collectively aim to boost production levels to the tens of thousands by the end of the decade.
So what allowed fuel-cell cars to move from perpetually five years away from dealership lots to finally parking in people’s garages? To begin with, carmakers have continuously been gaining engineering and manufacturing experience, which has helped lower production costs. They have also steadily improved the efficiency of PEM fuel cells and learned how to significantly reduce the amount of costly platinum needed to make the devices work effectively. Those advances translate to less-expensive, smaller, and more-powerful devices that provide flexibility to design cars in a range of sizes and prices attractive to customers.
How hydrogen powers a car
Credit: Adapted from Toyota
Room for growth
But whether or not carmakers will reach their production goals will depend in large part on how satisfied owners are with their fuel-cell cars. “Customers expect the same level of performance and overall driving experience they get with gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles,” Hong says.
Lim raves about the handling and performance of his Mirai. “This car is wonderful,” he says. “The ride is smooth, quiet, and powerful.” And when it comes to refueling, the process is quick—“less than five minutes, and that gets me over 300 miles [about 480 km] of driving,” he says.
These similarities to gasoline-powered vehicles stand out as advantages for fuel-cell vehicles over battery-powered, all-electric cars. Many of those kinds of cars, which are also known as plug-in electrics, require from 30 minutes to 12 hours for a full charge, depending on the type of charger. And many of them travel less than 150 miles (about 240 km) per charge.
Those factors seem to make a strong case for fuel-cell vehicles. But fuel-cell cars need hydrogen, and currently there are only 29 retail hydrogen filling stations in the U.S., all in California.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario,” says Joseph Cargnelli, chief technology officer at Hydrogenics, a Toronto-area fuel-cell manufacturer.
Fuel-cell carmakers hesitate to ramp up production if customers don’t have convenient access to hydrogen, he says. And gas suppliers are iffy about building hydrogen filling stations without ample demand for the fuel.
But the number of hydrogen stations is about to grow. California expects to see 36 more stations by 2018, half in the north and half in the south.
Hydrogen filling stations are also coming to the Northeast. According to Jana L. Hartline, a Toyota communications manager, Toyota, in partnership with Air Liquide, is supporting construction of 12 hydrogen fueling stations in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The first of those stations should be completed before the end of the year, she says. And in Japan, Air Liquide, Toyota, and nine other Japanese companies agreed to build 160 hydrogen stations and aim to put 40,000 fuel-cell vehicles on Japan’s roads by 2020.
Fuel-cell passenger cars massively outnumber other types of vehicles powered by this electrochemical technology, and as a result, they get the most attention. Yet other vehicle types have seen notable success. For example, nonpolluting, fuel-cell-powered transit buses have traversed congested city streets since the early 2000s. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report, worldwide, 370 fuel-cell buses were delivered or were on order in 2015.
Also, although 18-wheelers aren’t likely to be propelled down the highway by fuel cells anytime soon, Toyota earlier this year began experimenting with one prototype semitrailer at the Port of Los Angeles.
Fuel-cell forklifts rack up far larger numbers than higher road vehicles. Major warehouse operators in North America, including Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx, use some 15,000 of these indoor vehicles to shuttle products and equipment to and fro. Unlike standard battery-powered versions, these fuel-cell-powered versions don’t have to sit idle for 30 minutes or longer to recharge.
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Tokyo to Paris: Could city waterways ease air pollution?
Waterways offer new transport options in some towns and cities, but there are still some challenges to overcome.
Waterways offer new transport options in some towns and cities, but there are still some challenges to overcome
A SeaBubbles prototype on the Seine in Paris.
A test run of an electric, lithium battery-powered water taxi on the Seine river in Paris. Photograph: Francis Demange/SeaBubbles
Supported by
Heathrow
About this content
Adam Forrest
Thursday 31 August 2017 02.00 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 31 August 2017 02.01 EDT
Once bustling thoroughfares for boats of all kinds, to some entrepreneurs the rivers in major cities are a source of untapped potential.
They envisage passenger vessels expanding beyond sightseeing trips and becoming a daily means of travel for residents.
If successful it could ease the pressure on congested roads and crowded public transport and help tackle air pollution.
But boat operators face some major challenges. They have to be able to scale up their services to carry larger numbers of passengers, as well as trying to reduce the environmental impact of boats dependent on high-polluting diesel fuel.
French company SeaBubbles shows the challenge faced on scale. It has been testing its electric water taxi, powered by lithium batteries, along the Seine in Paris this summer. CEO Anders Bringdal says he wants to make waterway transport easier, as well as reducing its associated noise and pollution levels.
He says the company plans to build multiple docking stations at several piers so dozens of boats can be zipping along the river at any one time. However, the craft can only accommodate four passengers.
Some of those trying to grow also face administrative battles to use waterways.
In Japan, Tokyo Water Taxi is hoping to have a fleet of 60 yellow vessels on the network of rivers and canals flowing into Tokyo Bay in time for the capital hosting the 2020 Olympic Games, having launched its first two diesel-powered boats last summer.
“The Odaiba area of downtown Tokyo in particular could benefit,” says CEO Hajime Tabata. “The volume of traffic for land transportation is often at maximum capacity, so waterways could be used to alleviate the congestion.”
Despite its ambitions, however, the biggest challenge for Tabata’s company is the lack of available landing piers, with more than 100 wharfs along Tokyo’s waterways subject to a complex web of regulations and ownership disputes.
In other cities, travelling by water is already more commonplace. In Hong Kong, the Star Ferry fleet carries more than 70,000 people over the bay between Hong Kong island and Kowloon each day. And in Istanbul, around 300,000 people a day use a variety of private ferries and water taxis to cross the Bosphorus, the river that divides the city in two.
But this is still only a fraction of the commuters and holidaymakers travelling in both cities. And ferries and water taxis have not prevented Istanbul being rated one of the most congested cities in the world.
These ferries and water taxis are also all running on diesel fuel, part of a maritime industry that contributes a growing amount of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and particular matter alongside carbon dioxide emissions.
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In London, MBNA Thames Clippers has been slowly building a service geared toward daily commuters as well as tourists, helped by Transport for London’s decision to integrate ticketing, allowing Londoners to hop on and off boats by swiping their Oyster and contactless cards. It carried 4 million passengers in 2016.
But while the company claims its retrofitted catamarans have cut particulate emissions by 50% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 40%, the boats are still powered by diesel.
There are examples of boat operators changing this. In Hamburg, one operator has added a hybrid-powered ferry to its fleet crossing the Elbe river, a prototype vessel that uses both diesel and electric power sources.
And in Southampton, a company called REAPsystems has developed a hybrid system for water taxi boats, one able to switch easily between a fuel engine and electric motor.
The company will take their hybrid water taxi boat to Venice next year, where a hotel operator will run it on a passenger route through the canals and out to the airport throughout the summer.
“We wanted to show that a more sustainable system is possible – hybridisation is a step toward getting rid of diesel,” said REAPsystems’ founder Dennis Doerffel. “Ultimately we have to replace existing transport technologies, if they pollute, with more sustainable ones.”
However, without a growth in passenger numbers, the major investments in cleaner river transport technology are unlikely to come to fruition, says Rupert Fausset, a transport and energy expert at Forum for the Future.
“It remains very challenging to scale up river transport and make it sustainable too,” says Fausset. “But I’m an optimist, so I would not rule out people developing more sustainable systems using new kinds of propulsion and new fuel cells in the future.”
Topics
Guardian sustainable business
Transport
Transport
Rivers
Water transport
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