fuel cell
Is green hydrogen the fuel of the future? This CEO is betting on it
Plug Power’s long-time CEO is repositioning the fuel cell maker to be a producer of hydrogen fuel made from water and renewable power to cut climate-warming industrial carbon pollution from the steel, oil and agricultural industries.
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.
www.cbc.ca
Green shift? How the trucking sector is exploring ways to power big rigs into the future
As automakers make electric pledges, the heavy-duty truck sector is also looking at how it might power the industry in the future.
vancouversun.com
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.
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US climate change policy: Made in California.
A peculiar confluence of history, legal precedent and defiance has set the stage for a regulatory mutiny in California that would reverberate throughout the country.
SACRAMENTO — The Trump administration may appear to control climate policy in Washington, but the nation’s most dynamic environmental regulator is here in California.
Mary D. Nichols, California’s electric-car-driving, hoodie-wearing, 72-year-old air quality regulator, is pressing ahead with a far-reaching agenda of environmental and climate actions. She says she will not let the Trump administration stand in her way.
As chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, Ms. Nichols is the de facto enforcer of the single biggest step the United States has taken to combat the effects of climate change: standards adopted under the Obama administration that mandate a deep cut in emissions from the 190 million passenger cars on America’s roads. Together, those vehicles regularly emit more earth-warming gases than the country’s power plants.
At the request of the major automakers, the Environmental Protection Agency officially opened a review of those standards last month. The move was seen as the prelude to a loosening of those targets, which require manufacturers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and light trucks by 2025.
But a peculiar confluence of history, legal precedent and regulatory defiance has given California unique authority to write its own air pollution rules. And because 12 other states now follow California’s standards, the state finds itself in an extraordinary position to stage a regulatory mutiny of sorts — with much of the country’s car market in tow.
“We’re standing firm. We’re prepared to sue. We’re prepared to do what we need to do,” Ms. Nichols said in a recent interview. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
At stake in the dispute between officials in Sacramento, the state capital, and Washington is a measure that the Obama administration estimated would eliminate as much as six billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers more than $1 trillion at the pump over the lifetime of the cars affected.
For now, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said that he will not seek to revoke the federal waiver that allows California to set auto emissions standards — an action that would likely propel the issue to court. Automakers, similarly, have not publicly asked for such a move.
Still, the auto industry has hardly conceded defeat, several industry officials said. The car companies are urging California to negotiate a loosening of the current standards.
“We all have a common stake in working together,” said Mitch Bainwol, president and chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents 12 major automakers in the United States. Automakers, he said, want “the certainty of achievable targets.”
A Choking Haze
To understand why California has long blazed the trail for the rest of the country in air quality, gaze down from the hills above Turnbull Canyon at the Los Angeles haze.
Ringed by mountains that act as a pollution trap for the fumes from the valley’s cars and factories, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area consistently ranks among the nation’s worst areas for ozone and particle pollution.
But California’s smog was once much worse.
For much of the 20th century, swaths of Southern California were hit with smog outbreaks that turned the skies so dark that locals once mistook a particularly intense episode for a solar eclipse. Crops wilted; school events were canceled; Hollywood studios shut down their outdoor shoots.
The state moved quickly to regulate the obvious sources, like factory smoke stacks, steel mills and coal power plants. Yet the acrid smog persisted.
“You couldn’t see the mountains around L.A. on smoggy days,” said John R. Balmes, a physician, air pollution expert and a member of CARB’s board, who has lived in the region for almost four decades. “People’s eyes would burn. They’d have headaches. They’d have problems breathing.”
It took Arie J. Haagen-Smit, a Dutch biochemist at the California Institute of Technology, to link the smog to auto emissions. An avid gardener, he become alarmed in the late 1940s by the discolored leaves and flowers in his garden. He soon tracked down the culprit: the largely invisible exhaust from motor vehicles or factories was reacting with sunlight, forming ozone, or smog.
Major automakers disputed the chemist’s findings. But a determined Dr. Haagen-Smit pressed his case, recreating smog in flasks to release at public hearings — proving, beyond a doubt, that cars were the source. That fervor elevated him to a job as the first chairman of the state’s air resources board, set up by then Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967.
When Congress established the E.P.A. in 1970 and passed the Clean Air Act later that year, California was granted a waiver to follow air pollution rules it had already established.
Automakers Cut a Deal
In facing off with the auto industry, Ms. Nichols has harnessed a similar passion.
At a March meeting of the CARB board — where she and her fellow board members resolved to push ahead with stricter emissions rules for cars and trucks, with or without the federal government — she stared down the auto industry representatives present.
No matter that Ms. Nichols, a former environmental lawyer and Wall Street Journal reporter who is known to keep a grueling schedule shuttling between CARB’s Sacramento headquarters and her Los Angeles home, was nursing a cold and “could barely croak.”
“What were you thinking when you threw yourselves upon the mercy of the Trump administration to try to solve your problems?” she scolded. “Let’s take action today, and let’s move on.”
Ms. Nichols is on her second tour as chairwoman of the air resources board; the current California governor, Jerry Brown, appointed her in 1979, during his first stint in office. She was again tapped to head the board in 2007, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked her to return.
A clean-car evangelist, she is often seen driving around Los Angeles, where she lives, in her zero-emissions Honda Fit in “electric violet blue.” (She recently leased a second vehicle, a Toyota Mirai, a zero-emissions hydrogen fuel cell car, also in blue.)
She initially lauded automakers for supporting an effort, started by President Obama in 2009, to harmonize a mishmash of greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards set by the E.P.A., the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and CARB. Having taken almost $80 billion in bailout money, General Motors and Chrysler, especially, were in no position to resist.
Still, the automakers soon balked at the ambitious pace of fuel efficiency improvements under the program, which requires automakers to progressively raise the fuel economy of their cars to an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, nearly double the average in 2012. That comes to about 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving.
That aggressive target would compel automakers to speed the development of hybrid and electric cars, and to improve the fuel efficiency of their conventional fleets. Automakers also argued that meeting that target would be prohibitively costly, forcing them to raise car prices or to make more battery-powered vehicles than Americans want to buy.
In a compromise, the automakers agreed to the program, provided that the standards for the later years — 2022-25 — would be subject to a midterm review.
That review was in full swing when Mr. Trump won the presidency in late 2016. Just a day after his electoral victory, the Auto Alliance reached out to the president-elect, urging him to rework the standards, calling them a “substantial challenge” for the auto industry.
In a similarly swift maneuver, the Obama administration cut short the review and finalized the rules, calling them “feasible, practical and appropriate,” just before leaving office.
The automakers doubled down. In a Feb. 21 letter, the auto industry alliance implored Mr. Pruitt, the E.P.A. head, to overturn President Obama’s 11th-hour decision. The standards, the alliance argued, “threaten to depress an industry that can ill afford spiraling regulatory costs.”
The E.P.A. has reversed President Obama’s decision. Last month, the agency officially called for comments on standards for model years 2021-25, widening the review’s scope. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which focuses mostly on auto safety, not emissions, is expected to lead the review.
“We’re going to work on the CAFE standards so you can make cars in America again,” Mr. Trump said in a speech in Detroit this year, referring to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, which were first put in place in 1975.
For a meaningful reprieve, however, automakers need Ms. Nichols on board. If CARB does not sign onto the reopened review, the automakers face the prospect of separate rules for California and its follower states — a coalition that covers more than 130 million residents and more than a third of the vehicle market in the United States.
Ms. Nichols is not budging. At the first public hearing on the reopened midterm review last week, CARB’s emissions compliance chief, Annette Hebert, threatened to abandon the review if the E.P.A. took steps to weaken the emissions standards.
Should the agency try to curtail California’s ability to set its own rules — by challenging its Clean Air Act waiver, for example — the fight will more than likely end in court, said Kevin Poloncarz, a San Francisco lawyer focusing on air and climate change law.
“Pulling that waiver would be like declaring an all-out war on California,” he said.
Accusations of Overreach
Even in California, some critics challenge the expansive powers of a board of unelected officials with the authority to set environmental policy. All but two of the board’s 14 voting members are appointed by the governor, and today include a doctor, an almond farmer and a paint company executive.
Over the years, CARB has expanded its reach, regulating products as diverse as lawn mowers and bulldozers, air fresheners, paint thinners and even hair and bug spray. It has sent inspectors to Tokyo and Stuttgart, Germany, to monitor the testing of cars manufactured overseas. And it oversees a system of air-quality management districts across California that issue and enforce their own local regulations.
The agency is insulated even from state budgetary and legislative pressures. Its $956 million budget comes from user fees, like permits paid by polluters or the fees paid by car owners for smog certification, instead of from the state’s general fund.
Accusations of overreach exploded in 2015, when Mr. Brown made a push to require a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in motor vehicles by 2030, with CARB managing the reduction. Republicans and even some Democrats balked at the plan, and an oil industry campaign warned that the law would vastly expand CARB’s authority and could even lead to gas rationing.
The governor eventually abandoned his push. He also signed legislation allowing the state Senate and Assembly to appoint one member each to the CARB board, enhancing lawmakers’ control over the agency.
“What worries me is that they have unrestrained power,” said Mike Morrell, a Republican state senator who is one of CARB’s toughest critics. “They think they’re the masters of the universe.”
A Path to a Cleaner Future
CARB’s Arie Jan Haagen-Smit Laboratory in El Monte, Calif., is a reminder of the resources at the agency’s command.
At the lab, 120 technicians measure emissions on new engines before they can be used in cars sold in California. They also pull cars from the road to make sure older models stay compliant. A failed test can delay certification, or in the case of an older model, an expensive recall.
Engineers at the lab helped expose Volkswagen’s diesel emissions cheating, a scandal that affected about 600,000 cars in the United States. The lab is now strengthening its testing, and will move to a new state-of-the-art new facility in Riverside by 2020.
Even as CARB remains steadfast, however, Ms. Nichols is eager to persuade automakers that they ultimately stand to benefit from stricter fuel economy rules.
This year, Britain and France proposed to end the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2040. Volvo recently said that the models it introduces starting in 2019 will be either hybrids or powered solely by batteries.
Without an aggressive shift toward zero- and low-emissions cars, the American auto industry risks becoming a global laggard, Ms. Nichols said. It is no time, she said, to be meddling with standards already in place.
“We want to start conversations about post-2025,” Ms. Nichols said. “That’s what we’re getting ready for.”
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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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