Is hydrogen the fuel of the future?
Teslas are now the most popular new cars in Europe. They work so well that I recently walked past one wrapped around a traffic light in Piccadilly. Their environmental attraction is that they emit no greenhouses gasses, unlike dirty old internal combustion engines.
But Teslas and other electric vehicles are only as clean as the electricity which goes into their batteries. The disappointments at COP26 in Glasgow have shown that many countries won’t even pledge in the long term to exclude coal, gas and oil from their power generation. And if hydrocarbon power fuels the plug in-points, what is the point of Elon Musk’s beauties?
Could there be an alternative clean energy source? Quietly, without fanfare or plaudits from the green and renewable lobbies, entrepreneurs may be coming up with an answer: Hydrogen, widely available as one of the two elements which make up water and one of the basic building blocks of chemistry.
There are many possible uses for hydrogen in the fight against global warming – in domestic heating, in blast furnaces and aviation. Most intriguing – perhaps for the ordinary citizen on the Clapham omnibus – is the role that hydrogen fuel could play in turning the wheels and caterpillar tracks on vehicles.
I’ve been taking a ride in some of the transport options which could rival battery-powered options such as Tesla. The industrialist Anthony Bamford is well known as a generous supporter of the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson smashed through the blue wall to get Brexit done at the JCB plant. Now Lord Bamford has a new enthusiasm.
He believes his eponymous heavy vehicle firm JCB may be onto the most important invention of the twenty-first century. He was so keen he cleared his diary to meet me and the film crew at the gravel pit where JCB tests its prototypes.
Hydrogen’s least controversial application is for heavy vehicles, including busses, diggers and tractors. They are often needed to work round the clock on remote sites with neither access to electric plug-in points nor the time to stand at them recharging for hours every day. Hydrogen is as portable as petrol and can be stored in cylinders taken to working sites.
Which is not to say that JCB scorns battery power. The company already sells seven types of smaller plug-in electric machines such as fork lifts and diggers. Bamford points out that they are significantly more expensive than their conventionally fuelled counterparts, but they are also much quieter, which could be very useful for construction in densely populated areas.
They are also testing machines driven by fuel cells at the quarry. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen from the air to produce power to drive electric motors. But there is little doubt that they are most excited by the prospects offered by the internal combustion of hydrogen.
According to JCB’s Chief Innovation Officer Tim Burnhope there are major drawbacks with the other two systems: “We understand batteries and we also understand the limitations with both the product and the infrastructure. We’ve experimented with fuel cells and we realised that fuel cells have limitations because of dust, because of cost and levels of complexity.
I think our customers always challenged us to produce machines that aren’t too complicated and aren’t too expensive for the market they serve. And this hydrogen combustion solution is just perfect for that.”
Amazingly Bamford let me drive the hydrogen internal combustion, or IC, “JCB backhoe loader”, in my ignorance I would have called it a bulldozer with business arms both front and back. Undeterred by overgrown schoolboys, he later took the vehicle to Westminster and got Boris Johnson to pose with it, playing an electric pump attendant. JCB’s engineering team took just 16 months from scratch to build a working prototype which is currently decked out in a white and green livery rather than JCBs trademark custard yellow.
The speed of development was possible in part because “IC” technology is tried and tested and needs relatively modest adaptation for hydrogen. Bamford is aiming to have models on sale to customers by the end of next year.
The development of hydrogen cars is less advanced. Japanese car manufacturers are the most committed. In this country, Ineos is now working with Toyota. The chemicals conglomerate already claims to be the UK’s biggest producer of clean, low-carbon hydrogen.
Smaller companies are also developing prototypes. One example is Riversimple which is based in rural Wales. Hugo Spowers and his wife Fiona raised £5 million through crowdfunding to build twenty test models of their “Rasa” runabout car.
Stripped down and lightweight, Rasa is a two-seater powered by hydrogen fuel cells which drive motors on each of its four wheels.
It’s a simple and stylish little car, which Fiona reckons will be most useful as a local runabout. It has a longer range than a battery car, but the plan is to encourage local networks of drivers who can share a hydrogen source. Riversimple are trying to develop a circular model where “owners” would be subscribers provided with updated and maintained vehicles. In all each would have a twenty-year-long life span with all components recycled at its end.
The company has a memorandum of understanding with Siemens and is seeking £150 million corporate finance intending to produce some 25,000 green vehicles – Rasa, a family car, and a commercial van – before the end of the decade.
Fiona has a dream of a new power supply network “the future forecourt should have hydrogen and electricity, replacing diesel and petrol… given the through put, obviously, in three minutes you get a lot more hydrogen cars. Through than your will ever get electric cars.”
There is a long way to go. Currently, there are only 16 hydrogen fill-up stations in the whole of the UK. The more serious drawback of hydrogen is potentially similar to that of batteries. Green technology at the point of use achieves little if dirty carbon emissions are behind its source of power.
Dr Sara Walker of the National Centre for Energy points out that “at the moment around 95% of the hydrogen created for use in the UK is generated from fossil fuels. And so there is carbon emitted in the process of releasing hydrogen from the methane molecule.”
Hydrogen may also be a by-product of existing industrial processes, one of the reasons why big companies such as Ineos are pioneering hydrogen usage.
There is now a race to find new sources of green hydrogen. It can most simply be produced by electrolysis of water. It is an inefficient energy exchange but not if the electricity is going to waste anyway. The most promising sources of green hydrogen could come from the surplus of energy produced at times by renewables, notably hydro and wind power and solar. The hydrogen produced is effectively an energy store.
Exploration is taking place in search of so-called “Gold hydrogen”, natural gas which may be trapped in pockets below ground. The Greek government is talking about becoming the marshalling point for a hydrogen pipeline into the EU from sunny North Africa. EN+ in Siberia is already producing clean steel burning hydrogen and has hydro-electricity which could produce green hydrogen.
JCB has now gone into partnership with Ryze, a hydrogen production company set up by Bamford’s son Jo, to buy 10% of the green hydrogen output of Australia’s Fortescue Industries.
The clean energy lobby, including government advisors, is sniffy about hydrogen and has not given it the same priority as renewables or batteries. Because of the emissions from petrol and diesel the notion of “internal combustion” is especially taboo, even when it can be clean as with hydrogen.
On the other hand, private industry appears to be moving more quickly to find practical measures to prevent excessive global warming than politicians and climate change academics.
Jim Ratcliffe the CEO of Ineos is the richest man in the UK. Andrew Forrest of Fortescue is the richest Australian. According to the Sunday Times Rich List. Anthony Bamford is worth some $7.7 billion.
They are perhaps not a rich as Elon Musk ($271 billion) but you would have to be brave to bet against them or hydrogen as fuel.