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Bye-bye, Electric car – KIT Professor Explains, is Hydrogen the Drive of the Future?

hydrogen electric car future

Bye-bye, electric car – KIT Professor Explains, Is Hydrogen the Drive of the Future?

Take a proton and an electron – the basic building block of the universe is ready: hydrogen. Versatile in use, it is often seen as a more efficient and environmentally friendly fuel compared to electric vehicles. But why can’t the hydrogen-powered car still prevail over the battery?

Better range, less environmental impact, longer service life and more power – all this should characterize the H-drive. But is it really that simple? Are hydrogen-powered cars the future and electric vehicles “only” a medium-term interim solution?

Thomas Jordan, professor at the Institute for Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). 

No. The whole topic is not black and white, even if it is occasionally presented as such. Nevertheless, one must of course keep in mind the advantages and disadvantages of both drives.”

“We would need a new power grid for widespread e-car traffic”

In fact, the disadvantages of e-cars seem very serious at first glance – both in terms of their range, their battery production from critical raw materials, but above all in terms of their charging network. 

“If you were to equip traffic in Germany with electric cars across the board, you would actually need a completely new power grid. Otherwise you couldn’t fill the many batteries at all according to the current status,” says Jordan in an interview with ka-news.de.

“Imagine a motorway service area with trucks, where each individual truck has to charge as quickly as possible. However, each one needs at least 20 minutes to charge, and even longer depending on the charging technology.”

This is a major problem both logistically and in terms of the load on the power grid. “In my opinion, setting up a completely new network would be far too expensive,” says Jordan. “Maybe there will be better charging systems in the future, but with hydrogen-powered vehicles we already have the corresponding efficiency today.”

Internal combustion engine or fuel cell?

The reason: “With hydrogen vehicles, it is possible to refuel within three minutes with a range of around 500 kilometers without overloading the power grid,” explains Jordan. “And completely CO2-neutral and with comfort functions such as heating or air conditioning.” For this reason, countries like China are now mainly investing in hydrogen filling stations instead of e-charging stations.

There are two ways of using hydrogen: On the one hand, the combustion engine, which runs on hydrogen instead of petrol, and on the other hand, the fuel cell, which generates electricity from hydrogen using an electrolysis process. 

“A car that runs on a fuel cell doesn’t work any differently than an electric car. It’s just that it doesn’t get its energy from a battery, but from the fuel cell,” explains Jordan.

Where the hydrogen car is ecologically ahead

From an environmental point of view, engines and fuel cells have one thing in common: they do not emit any CO2. “An internal combustion engine that runs on hydrogen primarily produces water vapour. It can also release some toxins in rare cases, but these can be easily eliminated with filtering processes.” 

A fuel cell, on the other hand, almost exclusively generates heat as a by-product during its use phase.

A fuel cell is also far less critical in production than an electric car battery: “For low-temperature fuel cells, i.e. those that are most used in car construction, you need a certain amount of platinum, but you need it during construction of a catalytic converter in an internal combustion engine.”

“All other raw materials in the construction of a fuel cell are relatively uncritical. Platinum is also not toxic to the environment, the only problem is its rarity,” explains Jordan.

Apart from the fact that batteries are also installed in hydrogen vehicles, the hydrogen vehicle stands in clear contrast to the lithium requirement for electric car production. However, the H-cars were not entirely without disadvantages compared to the electric vehicles.

“Battery vehicles are more energy efficient”

If you ask about the usable energy, you get into a dilemma. “Battery vehicles are definitely more efficient in their energy consumption,” says the professor. “With an e-vehicle, you fill up the electrical energy immediately.

If you charge 15 kilowatt hours, for example, you have an average range of 100 kilometers – energy that the vehicle then uses up almost completely for itself.”

Fuel cell vehicles are less sustainable in terms of energy economy: “A fuel cell fills up around one kilogram of hydrogen for 100 kilometers. It converts this into electrical energy and transfers it to the electric motor of your car.”

“However, a significantly larger part of the energy is lost through heat generation than in e-cars.” But what is lost here with hydrogen could be recovered elsewhere.

Hydrogen as energy storage?

“If you want to drive an e-car in an environmentally friendly way, you have to make sure that the electricity you are charging at the moment also comes from renewable energies, for example from wind power or photovoltaic systems,” explains the professor.

This is no longer guaranteed when charging overnight or when there is no wind. “It is currently very difficult to store such green energy. But if this energy were to be used to produce hydrogen, it would be stored in the hydrogen.”

In this splitting process, some of the energy would also be lost, “but energy that is generated from wind power or solar systems and is not used promptly is in principle completely wasted,” says Jordan.

And this generation without consumption also occurs regularly in the German energy industry “If you were to produce hydrogen from this energy, you could use at least the larger part of it much longer.”

“Currently, hydrogen is produced as a waste product”

In addition, this concept is also significantly more environmentally friendly than the current production of hydrogen. 

“At the moment, hydrogen is mostly obtained as a waste product from chlorine and plastics production. The corresponding chemical parks in Germany are very often fed by fossil fuels. This means that a by-product that would otherwise simply be disposed of is sensibly reused, but it is actually green hydrogen it’s not,” says Jordan.

Hydrogen as an energy store is therefore also a more sustainable alternative to current processes. This realization has already arrived in Karlsruhe.

100 hydrogen filling stations in Germany – one of them in Karlsruhe

“So far, almost 100 filling stations have been installed at strategic points throughout Germany, so that one could easily move through the whole country. One of them is in Karlsruhe, namely the TotalEnergies filling station on the southern ring road,” explains the lecturer.

“In addition, there have been various funding programs for the further development of hydrogen vehicles for several decades, which run parallel to the funding of battery vehicles.” It is currently very possible to apply for the same state subsidies for fuel cell cars as for electric vehicles. Nevertheless, the trend is currently still in favor of the battery. Why?

“The internal combustion engine is being demonized”

“On the one hand, because e-cars, as already mentioned, are somewhat more energy-efficient, on the other hand, because a hydrogen tank or a fuel cell is much more difficult and expensive to produce – especially in terms of safety,” Jordan explains to ka-news.de. “Another key reason is that many hydrogen vehicles would work best with an internal combustion engine.” However, this does not sell particularly well in politics and the media.

“Unfortunately, there are some dogmatic approaches in politics to ban and demonize the combustion engine as a matter of principle,” said Jordan. “In my opinion, the funding should be distributed fairly and different technological solutions should be allowed.” After all, a hydrogen engine is not only CO2-neutral, but even necessary in some areas.

“It is inconceivable to convert all vehicles to electricity”

“The main CO2 pollution from road traffic does not come from cars, but from trucks,” says Jordan. “However, a battery-powered truck would not make much sense. The battery would be far too heavy to power a truck in the long term.” Apart from the fact that such a powerful battery would have a high environmental impact, “its weight also brings the truck closer to the permitted 40 tons, which would reduce the payload.”

Overall, it is “inconceivable to convert all vehicles to electricity,” says Jordan. For trucks or agricultural vehicles, the hydrogen combustion engine is therefore a more environmentally friendly and far more powerful alternative to batteries and fuel cells, as the professor explains. So are these combustion engines also part of future mobility? Thanks for staying up to date with Hydrogen Central.

The future of road transport – a mixture

“Neither the environment nor the infrastructure is helped with the current electricity mix,” says hydrogen expert Jordan. “Of course, you also need a large supply infrastructure for area-wide hydrogen trucks, but fuel cell-powered cars could use it together with them.” Building up this infrastructure is also cheaper and less expensive than converting the power grid.

However, it cannot be said that e-cars have no future, as Jordan explains when asked by ka-news.de: “There are certainly possibilities to combine both. For example, you could use a so-called ‘range extender’ – i.e. an additional fuel cell – Install in an electric vehicle to increase its range for long journeys.”

READ the latest news shaping the hydrogen market at Hydrogen Central

Bye-bye, electric car? KIT Professor Explains: Is Hydrogen the Drive of the Future?, March 20, 2022

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