ELECTRIC vs HYDROGEN VEHICLES

Everything else being equal, a fuel cell vehicle using hydrogen will take it two to five times further than one using batteries:

While most fully electric vehicles can travel between 100-200 miles on a single charge, hydrogen ones can get to 300 miles, according to AutomotiveTechnologies.

The Tesla goes 300 miles on a single charge, but it is a very expensive investment.  Further, one pound of hydrogen gas has 236 times more energy than one pound of lithium-ion batteries.

In any case, it makes no sense to select a hydrogen-powered fuel cell car now because clean hydrogen is too expensive.  95% of all the available supply today comes from reforming natural gas.  Plus, battery-charging stations are mushrooming throughout the world, which is not so for hydrogen stations.

While electric vehicles today mostly use electricity from fossil fuel power plants, in time this problem should be alleviated when more sunlight, winds and other renewable options become prominent.  Then there should be an ideal mix of all those vehicles connected to the grid to stabilize the the system when the sun does not shine.  The problem here is that car owners actually want to re-charge their batteries during this period, actually worsening the demand problem.  Add to this the fact that 20% of EV owners switch back to gasoline on their next vehicle because of the hassle of going to the recharging process.  Read this article to find out why.

Someday, hydrogen will become more prominent when aviation converts to this fuel.  But that could be 50 or more years away.  Thus, fuel cells need an intermediate bridge-fuel, and biomethanol (methanol that is produced from biomass) has long been set aside, mostly because the Farm Lobby succeeded in bamboozling the U.S. Congress.  Plus, methanol is poisonous.  Of course, no one drinks gasoline, so in most ways that is a specious argument.  It was just about exactly a decade ago that one of my HuffPos compared these two fuels:  Ethanol Vs Methanol.

I followed with another HuffPo:

Is There an Option More Promising than the Plug-In Electric Vehicle?

The answer was yes:  the Direct-Methanol Fuel Cell.  Methanol is the simplest of all the alcohols, and is the only biofuel liquid that can be directly and efficiently utilized by a fuel cell without first passing through an expensive reformer.  In addition, the gasoline infrastructure (gas station, delivery, etc.) can be easily switched to methanol.   So I published another HuffPo entitled: 

America, Don't Copy...Build Something Better!

• And this something better is the direct-methanol fuel cell (DMFC).
• So why wasn't this option developed?  The Farm Lobby did not want competition and effectively convinced the Department of Energy and Congress to only focus on ethanol.
• But this leaves the USA with an opportunity to start anew with the controlling patents for the DMFC.  To quote from this article:

We need to instead invent our own new power system. Toshiba and a few other Japanese companies do have a current advantage for portable uses of the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC), but no one is doing anything about using this technology for cars, yet.

• All the patents for the lithium battery are held by Japan, German, South Korea, France and China.  The U.S. has none.
• A further advantage of methanol is that on a mole for mole comparison, this liquid has twice the hydrogen of hydrogen gas itself.

A further quote:

How ideal and opportune, then, for Detroit and the Obama Administration to partner on a new pathway for our future: initiate an Apollo-like project to develop the DMFC. The heartland of our country can also become involved, for the non-food portion of our crops and fields, cellulose, is the ideal feedstock for biomethanol.

So just change Obama to Biden, and you have what should be a priority for the current administration.  And another quote:

The traditionalist might say, isn’t this risky? It will take another decade or more just to build a competitive DMFC. Yes, they are right, it will take some time. But ten years from now, if we maintain our current course, we will be importing foreign batteries or paying royalties for our domestic brand. Is this smart?

Which is exactly what happened and where the USA stands today.  I hate to again in a decade repeat this statement, but a final quote from that same Huffington Post article:

The parallel focus should be to provide an equal sum to a consortium of American firms to accelerate the prospects for a direct methanol fuel cell. An important part of this effort should be to find a substitute for the platinum electrode, as, for example, carbon nanotubes. The potential is at hand to again become the world leader in vehicle production. (I might personally today add that we still need a better catalyst to convert gasified biomass into biomethanol, something that should have started ten years ago, but never became a priority.)

This second challenge is not currently being discussed in the White House or the Congress or Detroit. Why copy the world? Let us invent our own future.

In time, as it becomes more competitive to produce clean hydrogen, the biomethanol can be transitioned out for fuel cells.  Perhaps proton exchange membrane electrolysis can replace the standard electrolysis of today to generate hydrogen.  Maybe something better will be invented.  Airbus hopes to by flying hydrogen-powered jetliners with zero carbon emission by 2035.  But Boeing thinks this option is far in the future.  In any case, batteries are not the final answer to our clean energy future.

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