Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars Aren't The Dumbest Thing. But... | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream [Music] is that your car oh yeah Tesla right yeah it's totally electric no fossil fuels at all yeah well except for the Colburn making the electricity I'm an all renewable plan well my car has a hydrogen fuel cell so it runs on pure water oh cool go on yeah yeah I mean except that takes a lot more parts and they have to fly that all around the world that increases in number of emissions just in the production Tesla actually does most of their stuff in the u.s. no quite that well my car is made from carbon fiber spun from the carbon dioxide in the air all right well my car makes ozone and it's fixing a hole in the ozone layer well my car separates hydrogen and oxygen using the pure joy of Cory puppies well my car plants a tree in the rainforest for every mile that I Drive well my car is biodegradable and will feed a thousand birds when I'm done with it are you turned on right now what what no that wasn't are you turned on right now I didn't say I was turned on I just asked if you were no no are sexually a rash right you disgusting pervert not a pervert you and you were talking green stuff I like green stuff I got a green on green on yeah yeah yeah I like the environment so much I want to have sex with it ah something is wrong with you come on Zoe something went wrong there in September of this last year I became an easy owner and I made a promise to myself I promised that I wouldn't become one of these Eevee douchebags is just like constantly talking about how awesome Eevee's are I've failed at that now my defence battery electric vehicles are the hot thing right now as I've talked in previous videos in the next few years almost every single car maker has some kind of easy on the way but there is one glaring exception Toyota Toyota who pioneered hybrid cars with the Prius who made driving green cool that had the first real electric drivetrain and a popular car they have no V's on the market and none in their pipeline outside of an electric version of the right port which is really just a compliance car why would Toyota of all companies has such a stellar record on eco-friendly vehicles not be on the Eevee train it's because they're placing their bets on a different kind of zero emission technology hydrogen fuel cells so let's take a look at hydrogen fuel cells and see if Toyota knows someone that we don't HFCS is their up and called have a long and interesting history sir William Robert Grove of Wales is credited with inventing the first version of what we now call a hydrogen fuel cell back in 1838 the idea behind fuel cells is it's basically a tiny power plant that uses hydrogen to make electricity it works by taking an anode in a cathode and sandwiching between them what they call a proton exchange membrane or p.m. hydrogen is flowed into the anode which separates the electrons and protons the proton exchange membrane lets the protons through but not the electrons the electrons have to reroute around the membrane to get to the cathode which creates an electric current this current is then stored in the batteries and used to run the electric motor once the electrons have done their thing they flow back through the cathode where it reconnects with the protons forming h2 which is then mixed with the outside air combines with oxygen and creates water vapour which is what comes out of the exhaust and the outside air has to be super clean so the intakes are heavily filtered which means that you're basically cleaning the air as you drive now because the car is constantly replenishing the energy and the batteries with electricity from the fuel cell it doesn't need very big batteries at all fewer batteries means less weight less weight means less power needed to make it go and more range fuel cells were first used to power a vehicle in 19 with a 20 horsepower tractor but they really gained traction in the apollo and gemini programs with NASA since Rockets used hydrogen and oxygen as fuel anyway they decided to just kind of put those into a fuel cell and create electricity for the capsule that way and in a space shuttle they actually captured the exhaust h2o as water and the astronauts drank that for water so in some ways fuel cells are kind of a NASA spin-off technology now about the time that fuel cells were starting to prove themselves in space scientists were starting to realize the dangers of all the fossil fuel emissions that were going into the atmosphere plus there was the big oil embargo that was going on so there was a big push to find new cleaner ways of getting around now batteries at the time weren't quite ready for primetime the energy density wasn't high enough to get people to kind of range that they wanted so a lot of people were looking at fuel cells which were working really great in the space program as the you know driver of the future and people started to imagine that hydrogen might be the new gasoline in fact chemistry professor john bockris coined the term hydrogen economy to describe a future where we'd use HSCs to power everything a future he and a team of scientists worked to promote throughout the 70s 80s and 90s and one of the major reasons this didn't happen is because the Platinum that's required for the anode in a fuel cell is prohibitively expensive but this change in the 2000s when new anode materials actually dropped the price down to 1/5 of previous levels but also around that time battery technology hit some major breakthroughs and energy density due to the scaling and development of lithium-ion technology so that kind of evened the playing field so when you consider these two options on a mass scale the first thing you have to consider is efficiency which is another way of saying how much energy you have to put in to make the car go forward both cars run on electric motors which are incredibly efficient roughly 96 percent efficient at taking energy and converting it into motion so you're only losing about 4 percent they're both cars store their energy and batteries that's converted energy to AC current which means has to pass through an inverter which can operate at 90 to 98 percent efficiency for our purposes we can split the difference call it 94 percent meaning at 6 percent loss additionally batteries have charging in efficiencies which apply to both vehicles as well Eevee's charge from the grid whereas fuel cells charge from the fuel cells using Tesla's estimated charging efficiency of 92 percent we can calculate another 8 percent loss and for battery electrics that's pretty much it if you want to account for phantom drain you can add another 2 percent loss but even that might Steve so in terms of operation EVs are roughly 80% efficient but fuel cell cars add another step the step of converting hydrogen gas to electricity and at our current fuel cell technology this is only sixty percent efficient resulting in an additional forty percent loss and that loss to the engine and burner and charger losses in your operating at about forty two percent efficiency now that's just talking about the operation of the vehicles but to get a much better picture you have to look at the whole lifecycle of the fuel and here's where things get a lot more stark because hydrogen gas despite being the most abundant element in the universe is actually not naturally found on earth like helium it's light so it just floats up to the very top of the atmosphere where you can't get to it but unlike helium hydrogen is a building block of many compounds and molecules which you can strip out of those compounds and molecules and get hydrogen that way most industrial hydrogen these days is created from a process called steam methane reforming and this is super efficient at creating hydrogen the only problem is it does create co2 in the process so it's far from clean which kind of defeats the whole point so let's not do that the other way to get hydrogen is through electrolysis this is pretty simple you zap water with an electric current and that separates out the hydrogen and the oxygen the only problem is it takes a massive amount of electricity far more energy going into it than you ever get out so it's not a net positive in fact you lose about 30% from electrolysis but there are some newer methods out there using that same protein exchange membrane that I talked about before it's almost like a fuel cell in Reverse and this is a little bit more efficient you only lose 20% in this process now there is another loss point that is compression hydrogen gas has to be compressed in order to be used usually to around 780 atmospheres and this takes energy removing about 13% of the efficiency and last but not least hydrogen has to be transported to the filling station where it's actually going to be pumped into the cars realistically this is gonna be done in the back of diesel semi trucks which again kind of defeats the purpose but let's just say we are in a full hydrogen economy and these are being transported on semis that are running off of fuel cells themselves I did a little bit of back of the envelope math using specs from Toyota's portal experimental fuel cell truck the truck uses about point two kilograms of hydrogen per mile and I estimated an average of 400 miles to drive to the furthest end point from the refinery and I factored in how many liters of liquid hydrogen it would carry time this energy density and calculate the percentage to that amount that it was spent by driving and came up with a whopping 2.3 percent so when you add these losses into the picture 20% from electrolysis 13 from compression and an extra 2% I'll round down for simplicity you've lost 35 percent before the fuel even gets in the car that remaining 65 percent is then used to run the car at 42 percent efficiency resulting in an overall efficiency of twenty seven point three percent and this is the best case scenario comparatively the electricity goes into a battery electric car requires no electrolysis no compression and no transportation it just travels over the grid to your home or charging station where it loses about five percent along the way meaning soup-to-nuts battery these operated about seventy-five percent efficiency before you guys jump into the comments and say anything about this I'm gonna leave out how this electricity is produced in the first place because it's gonna be the same either way just for the second comparison that you know the electrolysis for the hydrogen is gonna take a lot of electricity the batteries for the car gonna take a lot of electricity both of those are gonna be coming from the same source so it kind of washes out in the end so let's just pretend for now we're living in some idyllic world where it's all green clean energy okay alright so this looks like a no-brainer like why why would Toyota or anybody for that matter want to go this route because while efficiency matters what also matters is how this works in practice and fuel cell cars in many ways are kind of the best of both worlds you can fill the tank in less than five minutes just like a gas car instead of having to sit there for 20 minutes to an hour with an electric car but they run on electric motors which gives you that instant torque that evey drivers want so much but they also don't have thousands of pounds of batteries weighing them down giving them a lighter weight in the longer range but they produce no carbon emissions and actually clean the air as you drive so the real comparison here might not be hydrogen versus electric it's hydrogen versus gas and this is illuminating using the same metrics we were using before let's follow the efficiencies involved in gasoline cars first you have to drill the oil out of the ground which takes energy and more energy all the time because the easy oil went by by years ago then you burn energy to transport the oil to the refinery they need burn energy to refine the oil into gasoline then you have to transport that gasoline to filling stations in the back of trucks and this takes more energy and then while the gas is sitting at the gas station there's actually an evaporation rate so by the time the gas gets in your car already 42 percent of the energy in each gallon of gas has been expended just getting it there and then on top of all of that the average internal combustion engine only turns 23 percent of that energy into motion meaning for every gallon of gas only around 15 percent does anything whatsoever the other 85 percent is completely wasted oh and every step of this process creates more carbon emissions this is the efficiency that 99% of us get when we drive every single day which means two things one clearly hydrogen is better than gasoline and two clearly we don't care about efficiency we care about experience all this about efficiency and energy density and life cycle the blah blah blah that's so far outside of our thought process all we care about is something that's simple to put into our cars that's cheap and that gets us as far as possible that's it and that brings me to infrastructure our gasoline infrastructure is massive and ubiquitous and just a huge part of our lives already it's a done deal but this is where EVs and hydrogen still have a long way to go I've made the argument in the past that the easy infrastructure is already 90% there because technically any place there's an outlet is a place you can charge a car in granted charging from a winton outlet is extremely slow but your car spend 90% of the time parked you can just be charging during all that time I actually did that myself when I first got my ad it's longer travelling in road trips though the issues with EVs and yes the e the infrastructure is still in the early days of being built out with only twenty five thousand charging stations around the u.s. right now now hydrogen by comparison is a lot more like gas it's not something you can do at home you got to go to a hydrogen filling station of which in the United States right now there are 39 21 of which are in Los Angeles okay so that's bad but let's just say that we got serious about hydrogen for a second I think the same argument that I make about electrics applies to hydrogen as well they argument being that 90% of the infrastructure is already there they're roughly 150,000 gas stations in the United States right now each of them being fed fuel through a network of pipelines and trucks and each of them could be modified partially any way to deliver hydrogen so proponents of hydrogen fuel cells see this is something that can kind of piggyback on gasoline and maybe eventually replace it but it does actually get better than that because hydrogen has one thing over gasoline and that is hydrogen can be made anywhere electrolysis is not something that has to be done at some big massive plant if you've got water and you've got electricity you can make hydrogen you can make it right there at the filling station and at the little mini plant that the filling station is run by solar panels well now we're getting somewhere and this is the hydrogen future that fuel cell proponents believe in literally hundreds of thousands of cars on the road getting fantastic performance great range being fueled by locally produced hydrogen powered by renewable energy literally cleaning the air as they go it's easy to see why they believe in this future so much and it is definitely a compelling future but is it a future will ever actually see right now there are only three fuel cell cars in the market the Honda clarity with a range of 366 miles the Toyota Mirai with 312 miles of range in the Hyundai Nexo with up to 500 miles of range these are roughly in line with the prices and the ranges of current battery electrics that are on the road the one difference is hydrogen fuel right now is really expensive is like $14 per kilogram the average car takes about 80 bucks to fill up now obviously these prices will go down over time with scale but with battery electrics already getting such a head start well fuel cells ever catch up is there a Tesla out there for fuel cells on the horizon that being a car that excites people's imagination and really shows how great the technology is or could hydrogen cars actually benefit from the growth of Vivi's as people get used to the idea of cars that aren't driven by a gas in five years you should expect to see at least 10 times the number of EVs on the road and even conservative estimates say that one-third of cars will be battery electric by the year 2040 and fuel cell cars which are a type of Eevee could ride this wave of course the infrastructure would need to be you know built up nobody's gonna buy a car if they can't feel it but all it takes is for one gasoline company to really get behind it and start outfitting all of their stations with hydrogen that in for the price to come down now both of these technologies are improving getting cheaper every single year batteries have the upper hand right now but this isn't a race it's not a zero-sum game you might think electrics are the way to go but hydrogen is still way better than gas and if I may opine for just a second I actually think that hydrogen might be more easily accessible for most people here we go you know one thing I found especially hard to get across to people when I talk about my you know driving a TV is the idea of me just charging at home you know the idea that I don't have to like go somewhere to charge up my car I can just do it in my garage I just blows people's minds and I think it's because all of our entire lives have had to actually go somewhere with our car to fill them up that's just a fundamental part of owning a car that's just a part of our life routine but even these require something of a shift in thinking you almost have to think of it more like a phone it's just something you plug in when it gets low you know most of the time you charge your phone at home or at work or wherever you happen to be sometimes when you're traveling you might have to use one of those little charging stations in the airport or something like that but most of the time it's just where you are that's what owning a TV is like and this really is what seems to trip people up the most whenever I talk to them about EVs it's not so much a habit thing it's just more like having to kind of rethink what a car is kind of thing you know to a lot of people the car is a thing you have to take some place and put fuel into it to make it go and it might be an easier switch for some people to just go down to the corner station and put in hydrogen instead of gas you know that might be easier for some people to embrace I guess we'll see you know a lot of people are dismissive of fuel cell technology and I say you know we need all the solutions we can get a day when you go to buy a car and you have the option of getting an electric or a fuel cell that's a good day indeed it's a no more fighting now that sounds good to you if you are into visions of a good future you might want to check out the series dream the future on curiosity stream it's actually hosted by Sigourney Weaver and it kind of tries to take a look at what are the technologies that run our lives might look like in the year 2050 there is one specifically about transportation but it covers all kinds of different topics food energy school even heritage in other words how they'll look back at us which sounds terrifying and this is of course just one of thousands of awesome science documentaries and shows available at curiosity stream curiosity stream is basically like the Netflix for awesome science documentaries in an apparition we use we're Netflix and I'm doing a sponsorship for a curiosity stream but there I've already said it twice who cares it's the best way to say it's the Netflix of science documentaries and it's awesome anyway if you follow my channel if you follow other science channels curiosity stream is totally right up your alley you can sign up and get one month free at the link down the description below I do have a curiosity stream account it's kind of one of the perks of being a major youtube star but no I've been watching the hell out of it and I like it a lot I think you guys will too so you can sign up down below curiosity stream comm / Joe Scott you get one month free definitely worth a look alright thanks to curiosity stream for eight being awesome and be supporting this video and I also want to give a big shout out to my answer files on patreon who have created a wonderful community I just love all these guys and there's some new people that just joined I got a murder the names real quick we got Jason daniel Smith Steven Neville Gary Stevens Shawn cook so wrong Sahaba tabooed yeah Joseph Gaines Ian Lake cran middle coat Dan Garvin Cody Tetro Michael Stepanek Richard a Fuhrman Owen Dana Rowland's row bag iron fines yellow Emily burnt Hank Boethius Alex leaves Nathan Campbell's subatomic and Jupiter Mining thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to early versions of the videos and get behind the scenes stuff and just get access to me you can go to patreon.com/scishow I also want to give a big shout out to brandy price she helped me out with the intro to the game this video and I think she nailed it she's awesome she's an actor you probably saw her in something before now but she also does have a YouTube channel I'll put a link right here I recommend you go check it out she's also t-shirts is always available in the store answers with Joe calm slash shirts lots of cool fun nerdy geeky stuff I like them I wear them thank you well two answers Joe to come sweatshirts go get one alright thanks again for watching you guys go out now have an eye-opening week and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,195,726

Rating: 4.7912517 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, hydrogen fuel cells, fuel cells, hydrogen, toyota, tesla, lithium-ion, NASA, clean energy, honda clarity fuel cell, toyota mirai, hyundai nexo, hybrid car, clean transportation, transportation, electrolisys, methane steam reforming

Id: xU-LDZ0HTGc

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/erichiro]

nice video thanks

[u/paulwesterberg]

I agree that there are some old people who are conditioned to buy vehicle fuel at filling stations and would prefer that business model simply because that is what they are used to. But you can't sell an expensive new shiny product to luddites, especially if it has a high purchase price and high running costs.

EVs also have a high purchase price, but they can offer better performance that fuel cell vehicles, lower manufacturing costs and cheap operating costs.

No oil company is going to waste billions on a hydrogen fueling network and then try to convince drivers to buy new vehicles so they can can pay $80 to fill-up mid-sized car. No bank will loan the money for such a project.

Just like with smartphones, old people will eventually figure out how to plug in their smart car.

[u/xfjqvyks]

His maths is a little bit out, it’s actually 33.97% efficiency for Hydrogen electric and 77.29% efficiency for battery electric and gas efficiency of 14.69%