Trucking's hydrogen future nears reality overseas

[Caribbeans]

The hydrogen refueling station in Hofolding, Germany, is replenished a few times a month by the tank inside the trailer on the right. It is regularly swapped out with green hydrogen developed in southern Germany.

Trucking's hydrogen future nears reality overseas

FleetOwner.com | Josh Fisher | Sept. 22, 2023

In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, dozens of hydrogen refueling stations are coming online, supporting municipal fuel-cell fleets, passenger cars, and emerging FCEV trucks, giving a glimpse into U.S. transportation's zero-emission future.

HOFOLDING, Germany—The potential future of clean transportation was on display under the hot Bavarian sun as I joined a dozen other North American trucking and automotive journalists at the grand opening of the region's largest hydrogen commercial vehicle fueling station in this suburb about 15 miles south of Munich.

In a solution developed by Hynergy engineers here, green hydrogen produced at an electrolysis plant about 75 miles away is hauled to the filling station at this municipal bus depot a few times per month. The 1,250-kilogram (2,755-lb.) tanker trailer will be swapped out as the station provides enough daily fuel for at least 25 hydrogen fuel-cell buses and trucks. Fuel-cell buses, the primary early users of the H2 to start, will have about a 215-mile range. And it takes just about 10 minutes to refuel the vehicles...

...Paccar's Kenworth and Peterbilt brands will soon start taking orders for the hydrogen fuel-cell tractor it developed with Toyota Motors. Volvo Trucks and Daimler's joint fuel-cell program, Cellcentric, is finding early development successes in Europe. In Stuttgart, Germany, Bosch is producing fuel-cell stacks for Nikola trucks in the U.S. and hopes to provide the technology to other OEMs. Cummins is also developing a hydrogen internal combustion engine for long-haul trucks as part of its X15 fuel-agnostic engine platform. Volvo Trucks is also producing an ICE for hydrogen in Sweden...

...The development of hydrogen fuel-cell trucks will create a demand for hydrogen refueling stations, and the development of hydrogen refueling infrastructure will make hydrogen fuel-cell trucks more viable. With fueling times comparable to diesel—but without the carbon—it could be worth the wait and the investments...more
https://www.fleetowner.com/perspectives/lane-shift-ahead/blog/21274059/hydrogen-as-fuel-truckings-fuel-cell-future-is-becoming-reality-in-germany-previewing-potential-in-us

[Think. Again.]

1. Yet another example...

...of the U.S. sitting back and watching our chance at National Energy Security slipping away.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

7. Be so much easier to do this

when Germany is smaller than the size of PA and NY, or just half the size of Texas

[Think. Again.]

8. It seems the size of ....

...the effort to transition from fossil fuels to any other form of vehicle power generation is only dependent on the political and market will to do it.

Germany is starting small but can grow as big as is needed, while the U.S. is not starting at all but can also grow as big as is needed.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

11. I think you're right in getting things started,

but building new infrastructure is far easier in small countries (geographically speaking) than how huge the US is...

or maybe focus on the megalopolis corridors like DC to Boston and San Diego to San Fran?

[Think. Again.]

12. That's a terrific point...

...focusing our initial efforts on areas that would have the most impact would be a great start, especially because we simply gave away the time we needed to take a slower, steadier build up.

[NNadir]

2. We already are reliant of fossil fuels. It is tragic and stupid to make things even worse with...

...this very stupid fossil fuel marketing crap that makes fossil fuels even worse, since transforming them into hydrogen destroys exergy.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

This is particularly true in Germany where contraction of the availability of the natural gas to make hydrogen has led to the shutting of ammonia plants on which African food supplies have depended.

BASF closes ammonia production plant in Germany

The laws of thermodynamics, which are not changed by dishonest marketing, dictate that hydrogen is an extremely dirty fuel.

It is a moral disgrace to push this crap when the atmosphere is collapsing.

[moniss]

3. It is also

a major push by the fossil fuel industry to maintain a deathgrip on energy for transportation. It maintains making the "fuel" a commodity that can be price manipulated/price obfuscated and as you point out marketed as "green". Big money options traders will still make billions every year by whipsawing the market in collaboration with each other and the OPEC crooks. One of the main reasons the powers that be throw roadblocks, when possible, for home solar panels is because once you have them and an EV they are nearly eliminated from your life as far as draining money from your pocket for "fuel" and "power". So they enact laws such as more or less preventing you from "unplugging" from your local utility by way of mandatory charges and efforts for blocking installation of panels by way of zoning laws etc. for spurious "safety" and aesthetic purposes.

[Shermann]

4. Appears to be made by hydrolysis using green electricity

You can say what you will about energy efficiency and alternate strategies, but the specific "green" claim is supported.

[NNadir]

5. I am acutely aware of bullshit marketing claims.

In Germany, electricity is dependent on the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, increasingly, since their pal Putin is no longer funding his criminal war by selling all that much dangerous natural gas to Germany, by coal.

There are zero instances in the German electrical grid is carbon free.

The thermodynamic penalty of electrolysis is appalling, especially given that electricity is already thermodynamically degraded.

They don't sort electrons in Germany or in any other place on the planet. If one shuts an electrolysis plant because the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, the thermodynamics gets even worse because of the well known issue of hysteresis.

Germany is shutting ammonia plants because it can't afford fossil fuels to make hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process, invented and first commercialized in Germany using coal as the source of hydrogen. (Hydrogen is still made from coal in China.)

Even now, at this particular time, with the wind happening to be blowing, and the sun shining, the carbon intensity of Germany is 215 g CO2/kWh. More commonly, if one follows this data as diligently as I do, Germany has the 2nd worst carbon dioxide intensity for major economies in Europe, second only to Poland, with the obvious caveat that Poland is committed to doing something about the climate as opposed to handing out delusional bullshit in the German language.

"Green hydrogen" is a fucking fraud, and to repeat a link to my analysis, citing papers from the primary scientific literature and the WEO (2022), less than 1% of the world's hydrogen is made from so called "renewable energy," this at a thermodynamic penalty for an already useless approach to producing energy: A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Humanity cannot afford this detestable marketing.

[Shermann]

6. I guess, but you can say the same thing about EVs

Changing the energy grid infrastructure to renewable is interconnected with but also a separate problem from phasing out ICEVs. As I see it, they are both plodding along at a snail's pace. One effort isn't significantly ahead of the other. So, if the FCEV or EV rollouts gets ahead of or out of sync with energy generation for a time, so be it. The important thing is to phase out ICEVs as they have no path to renewability.

[NNadir]

13. Storing energy when primary energy is dirty is - there's no two ways about it - destructive.

Electricity is thermodynamically degraded.

It is true, to a limited extent, that an EV can recover waste energy, connected with braking, but this is trivial.

I personally drive a hybrid car, a 2023 Camry LE hybrid - which I am fully aware is not in any way either a sustainable device, nor, given the ethical implications of metals, a morally benign device - from which I am able to coax between 55 to 60 mpg. Given that electricity is overwhelmingly produced using dangerous fossil fuels, and that the energy content is degraded - exergy is destroyed - by generating electricity, I don't buy at all the notion that the idea of phasing out ICEV's for electric crap is a particularly wonderful idea. My car runs, part of the time, on recovered exergy, energy recaptured by going down hill, from the excess electricity produced by a generator attached to an ICEV and from stopping or slowing down.

This said, an ICEV powered by DME will be simpler and cleaner than any electricity based scheme could ever hope to be. Such a device can basically be run using common metals and allows for a closed carbon cycle.

So called "renewable energy" is a grotesquely failed and environmentally odious scheme. It has done nothing to address climate change, is doing nothing to address climate change and won't do anything to address climate change. It's land and material costs, coupled with the requirement for redundant systems including these absurd battery/hydrogen schemes which should offend the sensibilities of anyone aware of the laws of thermodynamics are the equivalent of placing small circular band aids infected with Vancomycin resistant and methicillin resistant staphylococcus on a gun shot wound.

I've been hearing about so called "renewable energy" and how wonderful it is for my entire 20 year tenure at DU, and indeed long before that. When I was poorly educated about energy I actually bought into the idea that it was sustainable. I changed my mind. In the 20 years I've been at DU, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere rose by 45 ppm (as of this writing, near the annual minimum). Since I first started hearing about so called "renewable energy" coupled with soothsaying about how great it would be "by 1990" and then "by 2000" and then "by 2010" and then "by 2020" and now "by whenever" the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide rose by nearly 100 ppm. That's one, long, increasingly cynical lifetime.

Now DME could be made using thermochemical reactions driven by nuclear primary energy, but it isn't, and so, for the time being, since primary energy is increasingly dependent on the use of dangerous fossil fuels while we all wait like Christians waiting for Jesus, under clouds of smoke for the grand "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, isn't here, and won't come, it, as a form of energy storage, is not currently acceptable.

The issue is primary energy, and for sources of primary energy there is one, and only one, sustainable option owing to the high energy to mass ratio it displays; it's nuclear energy.

The 3 card Monty games played with Rube Goldberg energy schemes have got to stop. We need to take a cold, hard, look at reality, beginning, I think, with the inviolable laws of thermodynamics.

The planet was in flames all through the Northern Hemisphere summer and the equinox reprieve will be short lived. You would think that this reality would generate some reflection and thought, but it seems to have generated more chanted dogma than results.

[Shermann]

14. It wouldn't surprise me if the GOP goes "nucular" at some point

Nuclear energy has a big problem: no strong support from either party. This is a problem and an opportunity. The GOP's staunch support of oil and gas is an untenable position that is slowly and irrevocably losing votes (and plausibility). Embracing nuclear in their energy platform is sort of a perfect solution. It can take 10 years to approve and build a nuclear reactor if things go relatively well. Imagine how long it could take if these plans were slow walked? Big Oil is assured big profits for a long, long time. In the meantime, the GOP can kill subsidies for solar panels and scrap plans to build wind farms, all the while pointing at their "better" solution. They can create talking points out of everything you have said and not be entirely wrong.

This embrace is tougher for the Democrats because it would appear to be a walk back. The Green New Deal clearly lays out a very different direction. The GOP hasn't rolled out a comprehensive path to energy sustainability, so this is less of a pivot and less of a problem.

I think Democrats are vulnerable here.

[Think. Again.]

10. That is exactly why....

...continuing and increasing the transition away from fossil fuels is critical.

We will need much more non-CO2 emitting energy sources to produce hydrogen to displace the current fossil fuel energy sources.

[Think. Again.]

9. That's exactly why...

...we should be building out much more solar, wind, and nuclear.

You write;

"We already are reliant of fossil fuels. It is tragic and stupid to make things even worse with...
...this very stupid fossil fuel marketing crap that makes fossil fuels even worse, since transforming them into hydrogen destroys exergy."

Our Hydrogen should only be made using non-CO2 emitting processes and energy sources such as solar, wind, and nuclear as is written about in the original post article on the Green Hydrogen industry in Germany.