Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
Why ask the question if you already know the answer?
The reason it hasn’t taken off is because it’s a fundamentally very difficult technology to safely build. Embrittlement is a fact of physics, and it’s extremely difficult to design around, especially at scale.
And the fact that there is almost zero global capacity to manufacture green hydrogen means that there is little point in subsidising it from an environmentalist point of view.
Hydrogen will have its uses, maybe in niches like aviation fuel where requirements are very specific and it’s possible to exercise much tighter control of the infrastructure chain. But it’s just not a competitive technology for replacing petrol and diesel in general purpose road vehicles.
Because these problems are not prohibitive. Any tech has challenges.
A brief perusal of anything about embrittlement suggests that it’s very manageable. There are hydrogen powered vehicles driving around right now. How is it that their tanks to not crumble or shatter?
Imagine saying “There’s not a lot of computers around, therefore this internet isn’t going to be viable”. In Western Australia there are three large scale hydrogen production facilities under construction. The one nearest me will cover 15,000 km^2 and produce 3.5 million tonnes of hydrogen per annum. Do you really want to bet against mining consortiums contributing many billions of dollars to hydrogen production?
The short answer is that they do. They have a relatively short lifespan (around 10 years) with regular inspections.
Replacing car tanks is not really the tricky bit though- it’s everything else. Pipelines, filling station infrastructure, transport trucks, and so on. All of which ends up having a similarly short lifespan. The ongoing cost (both in cash terms and in terms of environmental impact) of continually replacing huge amounts of the associated infrastructure at a much higher rate than you need to for petrol is a factor in why the technology isn’t competitive.
Green hydrogen makes up a tiny fraction of the global hydrogen supply because so-called blue hydrogen (produced from fossil fuels) is so abundant. Green hydrogen amounts to only 1% of global production, and blue hydrogen isn’t going away. Individual electrolysis plants might manage to turn a profit, but for the foreseeable future anyone filling up their car with hydrogen will almost certainly be filling up with fossil fuels, not renewable fuels.
Maybe at some point in the distant future when all the natural gas wells have been capped then the arithmetic will be different. But as of 2024, subsiding hydrogen vehicles is not a viable way of decarbonising.
That’s just BS. The longevity of everything is comparable to that of natural gas related equipment. It will be much cheaper than massively expanding the grid and build batteries for everything. Not to mention that you can reuse much of the natural gas infrastructure.
Green hydrogen is growing exponentially in the same way wind and solar grew. The upside of something that isn’t dependent on finite fossil fuels. It will eventually be available in vast quantities and at a very low price.