The Death of Hydrogen Vehicles
The rise of electric vehicles in recent years has been meteoric. Amidst climate concerns, a world economy that has grown increasingly dependent on the sale and consumption of fossil fuels, and a corresponding increase in legislature at global, national, and local levels, an industry shift in automotive production has arrived. Electric Vehicles (EVs) are flooding the market, and while many believe that EVs will be the future of carbon neutral automotive transportation, they aren’t the only solution. Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) are a solution that have been developed and produced in recent years, to much less recognition and success than their electric counterparts. However, despite promising technology and an automotive market bustling with demand for carbon neutral vehicles, HFCVs are simply a less effective alternative to their competitors. Despite the recency of HFCVs and their unique technology, the HFCV market will continue to lose ground against EVs due to a combination of infrastructural and logistical challenges facing both consumers and corporations. This paper will explore why HFCVs aren’t a viable alternative to EVs, and how the downfall of this budding technology will shape the future of sustainable transportation.
Before we explore the reasons why HFCVs are failing in comparison to EVs, we must first take a look at the technology underlying all modern vehicles. Modern gasoline powered vehicles work via internal combustion engines (ICEs), which use the combustion of gasoline to create torque, from which carbon dioxide is created as a byproduct. To avoid this, HFCVs and EVs use electric motors, which utilize an alternating current and powerful magnets to create torque. The two types of vehicles differ in how this electricity is gained. In the case of Electric Vehicles, a large battery is used to store and discharge electricity; it is simply recharged by being plugged into an outlet. Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles, on the other hand, use a more complex process with what’s called a “fuel cell stack” [1]. This fuel cell stack uses a chemical reaction to combine hydrogen and oxygen; the resultant product is electricity, and the only byproduct is water, in the form of vapors and small amounts of liquid. Water obviously doesn’t contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and modern roads are already equipped with adequate drainage systems, so HFCVs and EVs both present viable alternatives to traditional ICEs, without further carbon emissions.
Despite their similarities, however, HFCVs should theoretically be easier to adopt and more familiar to use than EVs to the average consumer. Due to the ubiquity of ICEs, people have become used to the experience of riding a vehicle that requires liquid fuel, and vehicles that create exhaust. With EVs, however, this all changes. Rather than going to traditional gas stations and filling up, EVs charge overnight, or are placed at quick charge stations for longer periods of time than a traditional gas fill-up. Vehicle designs are also affected with EVs, as exhaust pipes are no longer necessary; this shift in design language is quickly noticeable in comparison to traditional ICE cars. These challenges are what HFCVs are designed to address; rather than fully changing the driving experience consumers are used to, Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology can be integrated into existing infrastructure for a smoother transition into carbon neutral transportation. Rather than replacing gas stations, existing gas stations can be used to store liquid hydrogen, and exhaust pipes are still necessary, which can allow for a similar design language to remain. In this way, consumers can adapt to carbon neutral technologies without having to radically shift the automotive experience that they’re already familiar with. However, as we’ll soon see, these theoretical advantages won’t be enough to support the HFCV market in the face of its overwhelming challenges.
The primary concerns for HFCVs stem from their fuel: to use hydrogen as a fuel source, it is necessary to pressurize it as a gas and store it in large tanks within the car. Doing so presents many logistical challenges: for starters, having highly pressurized hydrogen aboard a vehicle capable of high speeds can be a safety concern (especially to those who are aware of the Hindenburg disaster). Additionally, the amount of space needed for these large pressurized tanks makes it harder to design compact hydrogen vehicles without detracting from their range. Careful engineering is required to design vehicles that are compact, safe, and capable of driving long distances. Even with the backing necessary to solve such a problem, it’s a big leap for an automotive manufacturer to take, and an even larger leap for safety skeptics. EVs, by contrast, only require large batteries that don’t need pressure or specialized tanks to operate.
Another large challenge for HFCVs comes from the price of hydrogen itself. In order to entice consumers, private and federal programs alike have offered programs that make it incredibly cheap to purchase hydrogen for the use of refueling an HFCV. However, these options only exist in the short term:
“A Toyota Mirai comes with up to $15,000 of complimentary hydrogen, while a Hyundai Nexo includes the same $15,000 over a three-year lease or up to six years of ownership. After those offers expire, however, the driver is on their own. And if hydrogen can be compared to gasoline at $5 to $8.50 a gallon, note that charging an EV overnight usually equates to gasoline at just $1 to $2 a gallon.” [1]
From a fiscal standpoint, lucrative deals that offer free or significantly discounted hydrogen would only exist insofar as there were few interested customers; as soon as demand would increase, such deals wouldn’t be financially viable for automotive companies, and consumers would be forced to pay even more than they do for gasoline. With EVs, the cost of electricity is comparatively stable, and something that most people pay for anyway.
This long term fiscal inviability extends from automotive manufacturers to hydrogen manufacturers and distributors, too. The same specialized tanks and equipment are necessary to store and distribute hydrogen at gas stations, just on a larger scale. In order to adopt hydrogen vehicles during this transitionary period, gas companies would need to take on the burden of facilitating the complex process of hydrogen transportation and storage alongside gasoline. Essentially, they would be taking on all the risk, with no guarantee that consumer demand would grow alongside budding HFCV technology. Considering rising gasoline prices and ever-fluctuating margins, it would be very difficult to convince gas companies to make this leap along with consumers, even with government backing. Fiscal inviability surrounding hydrogen isn’t the subject of speculation–the evidence is clear when you look at how many gas stations around the United States even supply hydrogen. Of the thousands of gas stations in all 50 states, only 60 serve hydrogen gas, and all of them are in California [4]. This means that if you were to purchase a hydrogen vehicle and drive as efficiently as possible, it would be a challenge to make it into Arizona or Nevada, and you would not be able to return. Even with federal incentives and hydrogen discounts, gas companies themselves are reluctant to take a chance with hydrogen technology, resulting in California being the only state to currently be viable for HFCVs.
The biggest factor in the slow death of HFCV demand is the question of efficiency. One might argue that a lot of the aforementioned challenges could be solved if the industry were to wholeheartedly accept HFCV technology, rather than the slow, reluctant rollout that we’ve witnessed in recent years. If consumers, governments, and automotive companies banded together to accept HFCVs as the future, then surely prices would go down as economies of scale were utilized and consumer demand increased. The question is, why hasn’t this happened yet? Simply put, hydrogen is less efficient as a fuel source than electricity. To produce, store, and transport hydrogen gas, an immense amount of energy is required, and the conversion from hydrogen into electricity is also quite lossy. This results in a 62% loss of energy; at the end of the entire process from hydrogen production to driving an HFCV, 62% of the initial energy is lost. By contrast, EVs only lose about 20% of their initial energy, as the electricity itself is transported instantly and costlessly through the existing electrical grid [5]. This means that HFCVs are more than 3 times less efficient than EVs per unit of electricity; this is a seriously vast difference.
From this, it’s clear to see why there is an industry reluctance towards hydrogen vehicles: the transport of hydrogen fuel on a national scale is a major logistical challenge, one that is incredibly costly and with little guarantee of success. The fuel itself is costly to transport, and requires a large upfront investment from gas companies and automotive manufacturers alike. For consumers, HFCVs are only backed by temporary promotions with fast approaching expiration dates, and are only available in California, limiting their travel distance within a single state. Though HFCVs have a theoretical potential to ease the transition from gasoline powered ICEs, they lose a tremendous amount of efficiency in the creation and transportation of hydrogen, which presents an insurmountable flaw in the face of high-efficiency EVs. In total, HFCVs are too much of a risk for corporations to invest into, and are not promising enough to gain momentum with consumers. While it’s possible that HFCVs could have gotten off the ground with more investment from consumers and corporations alike, the industry has clearly made its choice, and EVs have become the undisputed leader in the carbon-neutral future of the automotive industry.
WORKS CITED
[1] J. Voelcker, “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know,” Car and Driver, Sep. 26, 2022. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
[2] “Why hydrogen is losing the race to power cleaner cars,” MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/28/1089068/ev-hydrogen-race-cleaner-cars/
[3] US Department of Energy, “Alternative Fuels Data Center: How Do Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles Work Using Hydrogen?,” Energy.gov, 2019. https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/how-do-fuel-cell-electric-cars-work
[4] U.S. Department of Energy, “Alternative Fuels Data Center: Hydrogen Fueling Station Locations,” afdc.energy.gov. https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=HY
[5] J. Morris, “Why Hydrogen Will Never Be The Future Of Electric Cars,” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2020/07/04/why-hydrogen-will-never-be-the-future-of-electric-cars/?sh=5054904612fa (accessed Mar. 11, 2024).
