Toyota to Tesla: we can play the free patent game as well Toyota has taken a gauntlet and tossed it in the general direction of Elon Musk, telling the CES audience it will loose a hoard of patents relating to hydrogen fuel-cell cars on the world. The 5,650 patents to be made royalty-free between now and 2020 cover “approximately 1,970 patents related to fuel cell stacks, 290 …
Because hydrogen is a dead-end technology with a rather crappy reputation and a whole host of massive probems associated with it.
A taster:
- Hydrogen takes a lot of energy to produce. The best way we currently have is cracking oil or gas and releasing the hydrogen from the carbon. (Hint, this is less efficient than refining and using it as fuel)
- Hydrogen has a rather dreadful energy density when stored as compressed gas.
- The equipment needed to compress hydrogen uses/wastes a lot of energy.
- It's pretty much impossible to make a hydrogen installation completely leaktight. It'll leak somewhere. It won't be enough to be dangerous but even diffusion through hoses will over time lose you not insignificant amounts of it.
- Hydrogen is dangerous. More dangerous than diesel, petrol, Liquid Petrolium Gas, Methane, LNG, CNG, etc. A petrol leak is not dangerous is you stay away with open flame. LPG and other gasseous carbon based fuel require quite a bit of ignition energy and will fwoosh more than bang when ignited in most cases. Hydrogen has an extremely low ignition energy. It WILL go bang with significant energy and a sharp high pressure blast front at a very wide range of volumetric mixtures and can support combustion even for tiny leaks (micrograms/s). Also, quoted from the hydrogen safety wikipedia page: "Flames in and around a collection of pipes or structures can create turbulence that causes a deflagration to evolve into a detonation, even in the absence of gross confinement."
- Hydrogen is odorless, colourless and tasteless like natural gas, but unlike natural gas there are no known odorants that don't damage a hydrogen fuel cell
I work with machinery using the stuff. It requires a constant attention to detail and an almost religious following of work methods to obtain a leaktight system. Any work on the system means vacuum leaktesting all affected joints. This can be a tedious process. I wouldn't trust the average spanner with a spanner at my local garage to perform this type of work given the consequences of getting it wrong.
You CAN refuel an electric car in a matter of minutes (faster than a petrol car even) by dint of swapping the battery pack. What's more the hydrogen fuel cell is bad at soaking up instantaneous changes in demand, so you need a battery pack in there also to cope with this. The result is a complicated, expensive, dangerous system that has no advantage over batteries except as far as the fuel companies are concerned.
no advantage over batteries
I would beg to differ, on this point alone.
The one major advantage is that you can use a large tank for longer range, without it costing the world. Just as with hybrids. Add to that the speed of refuelling vs recharging, and the advantages are clear. I know battery swap tech would mitigate this, but it needs standardising to work across a range of vehicles, which is not at all easy given the different shapes/sizes/specifications of the vehicles.
I do, however, agree with you on all the downsides. Hydrogen is a very impractical fuel. We would be better off developing hydrocarbon fuel cells, particularly ones which would run on a variety of fuels. At some point, that would allow an easy switch from oil-based fuels to synthetic fuels.
Or building nuclear cars.
A large tank isn't the trivial job you seem to think (low energy density, high pressure). You've also got the problem of de-gassing if you want to do any work on it (hydrogen permeates into metals and an empty tank can ignite if it hasn't been de-gassed).
The battery powered car can however have more efficient batteries fitted as the technology improves (the original Tesla Roadster is being upgraded from a 50 to a 70kWh pack in the same space, add a couple of aerodynamic enhancements and they are claiming a 400 mile range on a charge).
The battery powered car can however have more efficient batteries fitted as the technology improves
But it is still specific to the individual vehicle.
The only real option we currently have for quickly "refuelling" a battery-powered vehicle is battery swap technology. However, for this to work with current designs, the "fuel station" needs to have a multitude of different packs available, and would probably need different equipment to change them for each different model.
To implement this effectively, we need a standard battery pack and swap technology for every vehicle, or at least a standard with only a small number of variants. However, this would lead to sub-optimal battery designs, not best suited to the vehicles involved.
Without that, or disruptive new battery technology, the best we can achieve is incremental improvements on the current 20 minute quick charge to c.80%. This is not quick, buy hydrocarbon-powered vehicle standards, and puts off many potential purchasers.
Incidentally, I know of someone who uses his Leaf for journeys from Leeds down to Cambridge. As many service stations have free quick charge points now, he just runs from service station to service station, plugging in and having a coffee. He finds it much more relaxing than just driving, although it does take longer. It also costs him very little.
For the vast majority of people in the UK, I'm certain that current electric cars would cover the vast majority of their use. However, the down sides (having to charge overnight, lack of range if they decide to do a longer trip, image, cost etc.) put most of them off.
Have an upvote. Hydrogen is widely known as completely unusable as a retail fuel source simply BECAUSE of the danger.
This is why Toyota made these patents "Free" because they won't lose any money or market share while "appearing" to be munificent. By the time we have fusion electrical generation to make hydrogen cheap enough, none of their patents will be applicable anyway.
Praxair, a longtime producer of Hydrogen gas has a website that explains the safety issues with Hydrogen better than I can. All I can say is if you ever saw the plastic bag experiment with oxy acetylene, you would never think about using hydrogen gas as a portable fuel source
http://h2bestpractices.org
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/12/16/turn_to_nuclear_power_to_save_planetary_ecology_from_renewable_blight/
You give up if there's a less dangerous, cheaper alternative available, yes. Hydrogen is a bad fuel, not because there isn't a lot of it, but because it's expensive to provide in a form suitable for transport, is hard to contain and is prone to combustion or explosion over a wide range of concentrations. All it is in this form is a modified version of a battery car (you still need a battery for fast demands and to store breaking energy), but one that has limited refuelling options and a long history of industrial/transport accidents.
but giving up on it is not the way forward.
Neither is hydrogen.
If you want a synthetic fuel why not synth diesel/gasoline.?
Leverage the whole supply chain infrastructure and installed base of vehicles.
Id be unsurprised in the overall efficiency of leccy to fuel to wheel wasn't at least as good with syndiesel in a modern TD as electrolytic hydrogen in a fuel cell.
"Id be unsurprised in the overall efficiency of leccy to fuel to wheel wasn't at least as good with syndiesel in a modern TD as electrolytic hydrogen in a fuel cell."
Be unsurprised. I work for a company with large and pioneering investments in producing H2 from electricity, and that's exactly the situation. Fuel cells produce heat and power, that gives them their high theoretical efficiencies. But unless you can continuously use all the heat and all the power, the efficiency nose dives. And you're right that methanation (converting H2 to CH4) is the only logical application of dissociation of H2O, because most spark ignition engines can be converted to use CH4, and CH4 is easy to store and handle.
Sadly the end to end system efficiency as CH4 is still diabolical (if better than H2), and you'd need to cover the planet with wind turbines and PV to get anything useful from it, and the costs of doing that are not credible.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but why do I suspect they released all patents they are sure are not going to work for them anyway?
Having/maintaining a patent costs money. Won't ever use the technology or won't see big enough return on the investment? Just free up the patent and be done with it.
A quick google shows about 10 stations in the entire UK.
Here's a quote regarding the flagship Honda station in Swindon:
"The station provides refuelling capability at both 350 & 700 bar and is capable of refilling 4 cars per hour"
4 an HOUR????
I know it's very early days but...
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Exactly. Even if some company or other immediately started work with those patents today, we'll already be in 2020 before anything gets to market, at which point the royalties kick in.
I might be more impressed if they made them royalty free in-perpetuity, effectively making them public domain.
Gives everybody a chance to play with and build upon their technology without spending $$$ on patents first.
I am eager to see their cars on the road. There have been fuel cell powered cars before, but only a handful, probably hand-built, manually tuned, with a team of engineers nearby to fix them. Doubtless there will be kinks with early models, and it will take years to iron them out. Toyota has balls to go down that path.
Hydrogen can be made anywhere, and there can be a market for its production. You could build dams across northern Canada, plaster the Sahara desert with solar cells (well, you do need a bit of water), or use oceanic nuclear powered plants.
Let the market play with it for a while. Could be that it's the future, could be that it's dead in 10 years. But we won't know without trying.
You can't really "play" with it. For a successful rollout it would need a massive and concerted effort from a large number of suppliers and markets.
The investment and practical problems required would dwarf the likely patent costs. You will also have to pay the patent costs if ever your device hits mainstream anyway.
CNG (compressed natural gas) is a better fuel cell solution and it's already available. It has far less safety issues than H2 and has roughly 4 times more energy per cubic foot than H2. It even works directly without fuel cells in existing vehicles with slight modifications to the intake. It is FAR cleaner than diesel or gasoline ever could be.
But it's NOT happening with $50 dollar per barrel oil prices.
Keep dreaming.
Although Hydrogen might be a poor fuel option, methanol is not. Methanol fuel cells are already in use in small scales and provide the advantages of a high energy density liquid fuel with the low emissions of a fuel cell. The rectifier needed to produce Hydrogen from the methanol does take some of the energy, but this is made up for by removing the need for a pressure vessel to store the hydrogen. The water needed to dilute the methanol for rectification is recycled.
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