What to know about China’s push for hydrogen-powered transportation.
There’s a decent chance you’ve heard of hydrogen-powered vehicles but never seen one. Over 18,000 are in the US, almost exclusively in California. On the outside they look just like traditional vehicles, but they are powered by electricity generated from a hydrogen fuel cell, making them far cleaner and greener.
So when I learned that in parts of China, companies are putting hydrogen-powered bikes on the road for anyone to ride, it was a real “the future is here” moment for me. I looked deeper into it and wrote a story.
These bikes have water-bottle-sized hydrogen tanks, which can make them easier than regular bikes to ride, though the tanks have to be swapped out every 40 miles. But they haven’t exactly been getting rave reviews. One rider in Shanghai told me the speed boost from hydrogen felt lacking, and the user experience was hurt by hardware and software design flaws. Many people on social media agree with him.
Youon, one of the largest players in China’s bike-sharing industry, has thrown its support behind hydrogen energy. It has put thousands of hydrogen-powered bikes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, in the hopes of kick-starting a trend.
But for clean energy experts, it’s a head-scratcher as to why these hydrogen bikes are being promoted in the first place: Hydrogen bikes are less efficient than ordinary e-bikes, and they won’t make much economic sense in the long run.
It’s not just one company taking this path. The collective appetite for hydrogen bikes has been much bigger than I expected. By my own counting, Youon has half a dozen competitors in the hydrogen bike field, and several cities have embraced the idea. While the future of hydrogen-powered shared bikes is uncertain, their proliferation represents a much larger trend happening in China: exploring how hydrogen can be used in transportation.
It’s no secret that China has already become a world leader in producing affordable and capable electric vehicles, but the Chinese government and companies aren’t stopping there. A significant number of local policies have been set up in recent years to subsidize the production of hydrogen vehicles, waive toll fees for them, and build more refuel stations for hydrogen. Now China has about 21,000 hydrogen vehicles on the road and more than 400 refuel stations.
It’s worth having a reality check about China’s push for hydrogen: While using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles comes with no carbon emissions, that’s not the case for actually producing hydrogen. In China, the vast majority comes from fossil fuels, which cost much less than producing hydrogen with water and renewable energy. (To learn the difference between “gray,” “blue,” and “green” hydrogen, read this piece by my colleague Casey Crownhart.)
The sad truth is that China will rely on coal and natural gas for making hydrogen for a while. The fact that hydrogen is a byproduct of processing coal explains why many cities in China with abundant coal resources are also at the frontier of the hydrogen industry. For them, the economic argument for hydrogen can trump the environmental costs, and as a result, even though hydrogen vehicles create a pathway for the transportation system to further decarbonize in the future, they are doing very little to address climate change now.
The same issue applies to electric vehicles in China: Yes, electricity is cleaner than gas as a car fuel, but the majority of electricity in China still comes from fossil fuels, so how much cleaner is it really?
But hydrogen vehicle companies need to answer an additional question: If China is already pretty good at making batteries for EVs, why should it bother spending any time or resources on hydrogen vehicles?
For now, the Chinese companies have come up with one good answer, and it’s not bikes. It’s heavy trucks.
David Fishman, a senior manager at the Lantau Group, an energy consulting firm:
Hydrogen passenger vehicles are kind of a dead end here … I think for fleet vehicles, trucking, long-distance cargo, hydrogen is competitive with long-range electric vehicles. Maybe it’s a toss-up?
If you think about it, cargo trucks bump up against some of EVs’ biggest limitations today: They need to go ultra-long distances while being refueled quickly to save time. Meanwhile, the limitations of hydrogen vehicles, like the lack of refuel stations and the higher production costs, make them much more suitable for commercial fleets than for individual car buyers.
As a result, Chinese hydrogen trucking companies are feeling confident, says Fishman. If hydrogen really becomes a next-generation mainstream fuel, it will probably start with trucks in China.
READ the latest news shaping the hydrogen market at Hydrogen Central
What to know about China’s push for hydrogen-powered transportation. source
