While sales of hydrogen powered passenger and small goods carrying vehicles is currently languishing globally, compared to pure battery electric machines, many are still holding out for hydrogen to be the fuel of the future for heavy commercial vehicles, either in creating onboard electricity in fuel cells or burning it as fuel in internal combustion engines.
In the first half of 2024, the global market for hydrogen fuel cell cars was just 5,621 units globally, while in the same period, around 4.5 million battery electric vehicles were sold around the planet.
Clearly from those numbers hydrogen isn’t winning the fight for zero emission hearts and minds when it comes to being a fuel choice for personal passenger transport. However many still hold hope that hydrogen is the way forward for larger vehicles, particularly trucks.
Mike Nakrani, CEO of e-fleet solutions provider VEV, has told Forbes that he believes that, even for trucks, hydrogen may not be the right solution for the future.
This goes against the investments made in hydrogen by leading manufacturers, including Daimler and Volvo who have together invested around $2 billion in a fuel cell joint venture, CelCentric, not to mention other significant investments from the likes of Toyota, Paccar, Isuzu, Hyundai and Iveco to name a few.
Nakrani has apparently had personal experience with attempts to develop hydrogen fuel cells in heavy-duty vehicles, including for a joint venture between Ford, Daimler and Ballard Power Systems. That attempt folded in 2017, but moved on to work on a similar push for BP. In both cases, he says that hydrogen didn’t seem to have the right characteristics for the market, unlike batteries which he says have started to show potential.
“We saw that battery electric was winning the race for passenger vehicles in China,” said Nakrani.
“We are starting to see some of the Chinese products come in to Europe, with BYD is making large inroads, and XPENG having just launched its G6 in the UK to compete with Tesla’s Model Y,” said Nakrani.
“We used to think that battery electric was only going to be for a city car, but suddenly it has migrated into a medium-sized family car and into SUVs. Now you’re seeing the Ford E-transit come out with a larger battery and much better range than the original,” he said.
“Now EVs are migrating into 16, 26 and 44-tonne trucks, and even into massive 264-tonne mining trucks, with customers now buying these and using them for their normal pattern of journeys,” Nakrani noted.
Nakrani sees a range of reasons why hydrogen isn’t proving to be the right choice even for trucks.
“Professor David Cebon from the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight explained the elements of why efficiency of the hydrogen fuel cell stack is so much worse than batteries,” he said.
“He shows how if you take 100kWh of electrical energy, by the time you go through the fuel cell process and get it to the vehicle and do the storage and transportation, you’re at 23 per cent efficiency, so 100 becomes 23 versus EV, where 100 becomes 69,” he explained.
“In other words, an EV is three times more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell from a power generation to delivery point of view.” the analyst said.
He underlines this by going on to say that efficiency isn’t hydrogen’s only problem.
“The storage issues have not been overcome, because if you keep it as a gas, you must compress the hydrogen to a very high level to reduce the volume sufficiently,” he said.
“You then must put it into a tank that can hold that high pressure systems and I haven’t seen the technology that can do it at a cost structure that works.,” Nakrani explained.
“Today, to equal a diesel oil tanker carrying a certain amount of energy, with hydrogen storage compressed by 250 Bar, you would still need at least 20 hydrogen tankers for the same amount of energy.”
“Another option is liquid hydrogen, but this means you need to freeze it to -253C (-423F), and even then, you would still need four of these equivalent tankers to provide the same energy consumption as diesel, so the physics of doing that is a disaster,” he added.
Nakrani points out that there’s another difficulty with hydrogen, saying the third point is transport.
“Because of those expensive storage solutions and the requirement of compression, getting it from point A to point B with a cost structure that could have a hope of being competitive is incredibly difficult,” Nakrani told Forbes.
“The truck OEMs have recognised this, which is why, if you talk to anybody senior in the truck market, they will all say there is a place that hydrogen may play, but it will be very limited,” he said.
“No one is saying it’s dead completely, but now everybody says that the EV will be at least 80 to 90 per cent of the heavy-duty truck volume. Then the problem for hydrogen is, if it’s such a niche, the cost will never achieve the economies you need to deal with its inefficiencies,” he said.
“Lots of companies have put a huge amount of money into trying to bend the laws of physics, and they haven’t managed it yet,” said Nakrani.
“Toyota has spent billions on this, but the parameters have stayed the same for a long time. However there’s a reluctance to let it go, because they’ve invested so much,” he emphasised.
Nakrani told Forbes that it is easy to b believe and understand how hydrogen would be a convenient switch for the oil and gas industry.
“They used to supply fossil fuel, now they supply this great green fuel, but the business model stays the same and customers also may like it. They’ve been doing this for the past 60 years and it works for them,” said Nakrani.
“Governments like hydrogen because they don’t have to worry about road pricing because they can just add a tax to the pump and collect revenue that way, like they do with fossil fuel. There’s a real logic for the legacy industry to want this to work, which is why there is continual fight for survival for some of them.”
“The story that everyone comes back to is that electric doesn’t work, but that’s not true any longer. There are some issues with the additional weight of the battery reducing the carrying capacity of the truck, but it’s possible that the vehicle doesn’t need a battery as big as the operator thinks.,” Nakrani preferred.
“We think they do around 600 km a day. but even in Germany, that’s not strictly true for the law.
“If you think about the speed limits in the UK, a heavy-duty truck can travel at 90 kilometres an hour, the driver must have a minimum 45-minute break after 4.5 hours, and then after eight hours, they must have the whole next eight to 12 hours off.”
“For 4.5 hours at 90km/h, the truck would only need 400 kilometres of range, so even if someone’s running a double driver system, the truck is going to be stationary for a while, so charging capability during that time is quite plausible.,” Nakrani said.
“I haven’t seen any incredibly fast-fueling capability for hydrogen either,” said Nakrani.
Nakrani alleges that you’ve got to get quite a lot of fuel into that truck and that it must stop more frequently than diesel because it can’t carry as much energy in its tanks.
This contradicts claims that a 40 tonne single semi trailer could travel around 1000km on around 80kgs of hydrogen and that it would take about 20 minutes to refuel according to manufacturers such as Daimler through its CelCentric operation, which is about how long it would take to refill a diesel truck wit the 500 litres of diesel it would use fo rthat trip
However Nakrani reckons the inefficiencies of hydrogen mean they aren’t even proving viable for trucks requiring huge battery capacities.
He cites mining giant Fortescue which he says promoted a 264-tonne mining truck powered by hydrogen, but claims it has now switched to batteries.
“They have 1MWh batteries, and 2MW charging, and they’re selling those when they weren’t selling the hydrogen ones. There are also 50,000 40-tonne electric trucks being used in China now,” said Nakrani.
“We should always be driven by the customer requirement in the end,” Nakrani said.
“We should look for things that make business simpler. EVs have proven they can do that at scale in passenger cars, in vans, and it’s starting to prove it in trucks in China.,” he said.
“Companies are going to lead the way, because once they have one truck, they’ll find it works and will migrate the entire fleet,” he said.
“The jury is not out anymore, if hydrogen is going to work at all, it will be niche cases, which are certainly less than 10 per cent of the market.
“If you start with what the customer needs and really understand that properly first, the use cases become clear, then you’ll find the opportunities for hydrogen end up in a small niche segment versus the use cases for BEVs, ” Nakrani concluded.
