Once upon a time, some serious people used to believe that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) might have a snowball’s chance in hell of being a practical and affordable climate strategy in our lifetime. Those very sincere people were used by some of the car companies and Bush Administration as part of a strategy to oppose or delay the introduction of more viable alternative fuel strategies, in particular electric cars — see, for instance, the movie “Who killed the electric car?”
That isn’t to say pure EVs were slam dunks as successful mass-market consumer vehicles, particularly with the technology of the 1980s and even 1990s. HFCVs, however, required multiple technological (and other) miracles to succeed and every plausible competitor, including EVs, to fail first (see “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective“ and “The car of the perpetual future” — The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen“). That is but one reason the absurdly expensive infrastructure will never be built — nor has any independent group ever proposed a plausible scenario under which the infrastructure would be built. And that’s the fundamental hydrogen cars will not be practical or a cost-effective climate strategy in your lifetime.
Under the leadership of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California briefly flirted with a serious investment in hydrogen cars and infrastructure — the Hydrogen Highway. A driving force for that alliterative but ill-fated effort was Terry Tamminen, who “headed California’s Environmental Protection Agency and was Cabinet Secretary and Chief Policy Advisor” to Schwarzenegger, who is now “the Cullman Senior Fellow for Climate Change and Director of the Climate Policy Program at the New America Foundation” and author of a recent but outdated attack, “The Myth of Battery Cars” debunked below.
The California legislature in particular sped away from the Hydrogen Highway effort once it became clear that both the fueling station and the cars were insanely expensive and not terribly practical (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.“)
Today, with rapidly advancing battery and related technology, we know that pure EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are a core climate solution since electric drives are more efficient, easily powered by carbon-free energy and indeed far cheaper to operate per mile than gasoline (or hydrogen), even when running on renewable power. And they are the key alt-fuel strategy needed to deal with the energy/economic security threat of rising dependence on imported oil and the inevitably grim impacts of peak oil (see “Why electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence“). That is why pretty much every car company in the world will be introducing one or more models of PHEVs or EVs in the next 2 to 4 years, but we still don’t have a single commercial HFCV anywhere near production (see L.A. Times: “Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won’t work in cars.” Duh.).
In particular, a renewable-energy-based hydrogen fueling system capable of handling even half the cars and light trucks on the road would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars. And it would have a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today. Also, the total well-to-wheels efficiency with which a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle might utilize renewable electricity is roughly 20% (although that number could rise to 25% or a little higher with the kind of multiple technology breakthroughs required to enable a hydrogen economy). The well-to-wheels efficiency of charging an onboard battery and then discharging it to run an electric motor in a PHEV or EV, however, is 80% (and could be higher in the future)—four times more efficient than current hydrogen fuel cell vehicle pathways.















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