[Intro music] Hello and welcome to the Automotive Anecdotes
podcast the podcast that's normally for all that useless information your friends would rather
you not talk about but these episodes are a little bit different we are joined by some very
special guest panellists to talk about the future of motoring and more specifically the future of
what's going to fuel it. I am the layman here my name is Martin Clayton uh on twitter as a
@Bobclayton92. Hi I’m Jon so your usual host for the other
automotive tales podcasts and @jonmsm
on all social media outlets. Hi everybody my name is Graham Bennett I’ve been brought in to join
the discussion uh to present the views on hydrogen. Hi everyone I’m Jess Shanahan I’m an Automotive
Journalist and EV owner I am @jetlbomb on twitter. So we move on to our third uh episode and
look at our second alternative fuel in this mini series uh where we are just looking at what the
future may hold uh when ICE restrictions startb coming into place in
the UK in particular uh in
2030 with this we have brought on a specialist and uh Graham uh I know that you're there raring and
waiting to go in terms of answering the questions um I think it's fair to say that whereas with
EV um I think that is getting more and more sortSu of into the into the public consciousness with
Tesla with Elon Musk with the manufacturers now you know being able to go to any pretty much
any major manufacturer and finding some kind of partial electric or electric ver
sion of their cars
on their forecourt um it's fair to say that that isn't the case with hydrogen at the moment so I
think it's really worth the sort of going right to the basics Graham, and saying first of all how does
hydrogen work when it comes to powering vehicles? Thanks very much for the uh for the introduction
Martin so yes my name's Graham Bennett I want to try and spend some time with you today talking
a little bit about the rise of hydrogen in transport and how hydrogen is
part of
the overall energy system is becoming more popular. so just a few basics
I think perhaps before we get any questions from from Martin hydrogen is is the most
abundant chemical substance in the universe its name is actually derived from two Greek
words hydros and genes meaning water forming hydrogen today has got many uses it's used very
broadly in the chemicals industry to make ammonia for agricultural fertilizers it makes feedstocks
for plastics and for pharmaceuticals it's used to remove
sulphur from the petrol and diesel we
use today in our internal combustion engines and a lot of it goes into the food industry to
hydrogenate oils to make things like margarine hydrogen cars and HGVs are vehicles
that are fuelled by hydrogen either as a combustion fuel so you can mix that
hydrogen with diesel in HGVs or you can use it to power a fuel cell and in a fuel cell the
hydrogen gas which is normally stored in pressure in dedicated tanks comes into contact
with the oxygen in the s
urrounding air this is where an oxidation reaction occurs and it
produces electricity to power the vehicle and only water vapour as an exhaust. Fuel
cell vehicles are not that dissimilar to battery electric vehicles in that they also have
a smaller battery pack or a super-capacitor which is used to provide additional power boost when
needed or to store electricity from regenerative braking. So today I’m happy to be here to share
with you some thoughts on the growth of hydrogen fuel vehicl
es but perhaps from a different
perspective instead of focusing on a debate around battery electric versus hydrogen I thought
it might be more interesting to try and consider electric and hydrogen vehicles as part of a shared
landscape and I’ll also address any questions that may come up about why I think now is the
right time for hydrogen and transport to grow so back to you Martin. Brilliant and I think it's
worth reiterating there uh for anybody who didn't uh or can't remember back to e
pisode one of course
uh all the views Graham uh that you're bringing here are your personal views uh rather than
anything uh tied to your your working working day so I think it's important that we make sure that's
stressed as well. Yeah they're very much linked to my transformation from a petrol head to a hydrogen
head. Yeah it's that, that's the new terminology um "I’m an electric head", "I’m a hydrogen head" or
"I’m a petrol head"? You've got to be careful with that because if you call
yourself a hydro-head
does that just make you a really good swimmer? maybe... I suppose it's for me in
particular this is a really sort of um primitive subjects in that my knowledge is pretty
much zero because I am that person that relies on um you know well still does rely on uh
various sort of I don't want to say "car-wow" YouTube videos and things like that but you
know you rely on uh what you see out there in sort of the general one what gets out to the
general uh press as opposed to
um what you might delve into on piston heads or anything like
that so uh it's it's quite an interesting one for me and on a real basic level uh are there any
hydrogen cars that you can go out and buy now from a manufacturer Graham? Yeah I mean the the hydrogen
vehicles want to check at history the first uh fuels electric vehicle was the Honda Clarity
FCX that came out probably way back in 2008 although you'd struggle to see any of them on
their own today and they've really not taken off wit
h scale that's why hydrogen has had several
sort of false dawns with respect to its uh with respect to its uptake in transport but that is
about to change there are several manufacturers including Toyota, Mercedes, Kia, and Honda even Honda
and they've reintroduced the fuel cell vehicles and BMW's planning to launch one in 2022. why why
is that why are mainstream modular manufacturers suddenly getting involved in in hydrogen again?
well it's it's mainly two reasons for me one is largely var
ious governments around the world now
have committed themselves to net zero emissions and that includes the substantial contribution
from from the from the vehicle sector contributes around 20% of overall CO2 emissions
here in the UK but also that drive to net zero emissions is is driving international plans
not only for the decarbonisation of transport but also for hydrogen to become a major component of
the energy system so not just for cars but also for domestic, industrial heating, power
generation,
and for fuelling trucks, trains, and ships and also perhaps more importantly as we look
at the greening of our transport solutions but also to look at the ability of hydrogen to
be created from surplus renewable energy so we can use hydrogen as a battery and we can create
hydrogen from those times when we've got too much electricity on the grid and no means to store it
so you can convert that to electrolysis to green hydrogen and then use that green hydrogen and
other sources
so I do think that the mainstream manufacturers of all have looked at both the um
the likely increase in demand for uh low-carbon zero carbon vehicles but are also getting one
one eye on the increased availability of hydrogen through a much bigger uh refuelling infrastructure
that's likely to appear in the experience. okay and I think it's worth saying that that the
refuelling infrastructure; you mentioned about Honda and one of the vivid memories I have of the first
sort of time I actually
paid paid attention to sort of hydrogen as a way of fuelling a vehicle was
the fact that that did appear on Top Gear uh way way back in like you say pre-pre-2010 the James
May era and you know they did show the gloves on having to secure the pipe in and and obviously
the refuelling uh of a hydrogen vehicle being uh time not too dissimilar from uh going in and
paying for pet you know filling up your tank and paying for petrol but safety-wise potentially have
you had to be a little bit more
um conscious um I think that's something that like you
say has come up quite a lot in terms of uh one of the perceived negatives of
hydrogen is the danger of all this the safety infrastructure that has to go around it have
you got any viewpoints on on that Graham, and sort of how does that pose a problem for a more
sort of general um infrastructure for hybrid uh hybrid hydrogen apologies! Without doubt it's
one of the big challenges one of the potential barriers to the growth of hydrogen f
uel vehicles
and that is the fact that you're dealing with um pressures in storage tanks which are
several hundred bar and therefore you're dealing with delivery systems which are at
high pressure as well but as with many um gas fuelling systems whether it's propane or
whether it's LNG we've we've overcome most of those in the designs of of the fuelling systems
and certainly the work that's already been um taking place with respect to the use of hydrogen
in things like buses in local autho
rity refuge bin wagons and and things have have led to
a generation of new procedures, new ways of designing uh those couplings so in fact you know
plugging in a um a hydrogen fuelling connection to your car is not dissimilar from from how you would
connect the propane cylinder in your barbecue it's it's a push fit and they're designed to be
very safe they're designed to to be tested before any hydrogen is admitted to the to the pressure
system um but I wouldn't want to um disguise the fact
or pretend that that hazard doesn't exist
and but you know we've been fuelling our cars with petrol and diesel for many many years um
we are aware of the problems of fuel and static those things have been managed over the years
and the risk has been reduced but it's it's not risk-free that's for sure. Um I just have a
quick question about something that you talked about there in terms of you know kind of the
the buses uh the you know the dust carts and uh things like that being hydrogen;
at this stage
while it's relatively new and that there's not a great deal of kind of uh that this refuelling
infrastructure out there plus the safety concerns of like you know a normal consumer; is there
going to be more of an uptake of hydrogen within commercial vehicles before we see it more in kind
of our road cars? Definitely Jess I mean the the um the way in which we see this developing is is
primarily in the heavy heavy end of the market so either through as I’ve mentioned earlier
a
blend of hydrogen being used with diesel in a combustion engine and um Royal
Mail have started to do their first Christmas deliveries this year in Royal Mail vans
which are uh converted IVECO vans which are a blend of hydrogen / diesel and that reduces the
emissions of those vehicles by about 60% and that's a traditional combustion process but as
we move forward I think the way in which we'll see uh hydrogen rolled out is primarily into the
heavier end of the market because that's where it
makes more sense that's where it makes um you
know we're counteracting the potential issue of of the weight of batteries and electric vehicles and
you know the trucks and the HGV's if you if you're carrying uh you know 40% of your vehicle weight
is the battery then it affects your payload um so it also makes more sense from the
refuelling perspective because if your um if your HGV is doing point to point if it's
going from a warehouse to a to a manufacturing facility or if your refuse wago
n is returning home
to base each evening then that infrastructure um means that you can roll out a large number of
vehicles but a return to base type scenario for fuelling uh makes it much easier to
uh to look at the the uh at the initial rollout within the heavier end of the market
rather than the light vehicle market the only exception to what I would say in the light vehicle
market is potentially in the the high utilization area and then I’m thinking about taxis, police
vehicles, um you
know ambulances things like that where you can't afford to even have a one-hour
charging time because you know it's almost like a hot seat you know PC Jones gets out of
the car and PC Smith gets straight back into they really can't afford to have um the the
excess capacity they need in the vehicle fleet so having a vehicle in the light vehicle where you
can refuel in three to five minutes very similar to a petrol diesel vehicle today actually has some
attractions for the light vehicle end
of the market where you you need high utilization. Um, so you
mentioned about uh experience from other parts of the the chemical industry, LNG things like that, I
guess for the the consumer what that's near enough equivalent to is um the small number of cars
we've got on the road that run LPG which is a fuel that actually isn't talked about a great deal
but was was quite a revolution probably what 15 20 years ago and is.. there's a very pretty strong
infrastructure all the way around my un
derstanding is that connecting in for refilling hydrogen is
much the same as it would be for connecting LPG which is something that's done on a you
know daily basis up and down the country so to me that it it almost doesn't seem like a
great leap on from something that most consumers are at least aware of if not familiar with already?
Yeah you're right Jon I mean yeah any pressure it's pressurized gas at the end of the day and
so it's very similar to an LPG connection and as you say there a
re a number, perhaps not as
many as we would have hoped, vehicles that are using compressed natural gas today in all or using
LPG but again which is a pressurized connection and they've um the safety records of those those
systems are very good um so I don't want to underplay the the need to be careful and I need
to have well-designed systems and good standards both fulfilling processes and couplings and uh
connections that we need to use but I don't think it's it's it's as much of a potent
ial hazard
as some people would would make it out to be. And can I ask in terms of um what you said there
with uh with regards to the commercial vehicles that are doing a fuel split essentially um
because to me that I didn't realize that was the thing with with hydrogen vehicles but obviously it
sounds you know once again to the to the layman it sounds like an alternative hybrid sort of model
um how does that work having... because presumably unlike with a hybrid where you just fill up a
p
etrol tank and obviously it does everything itself presumably do you have to fuel there are
multiple sort of fuelling strategy I don't know how does it work in the same way
on the real basic level or...? well for the for the I mean I suppose that it's
hard every hydrogen vehicle is a hybrid of one sort or another even for a fuel cell vehicle
it's effectively a hybrid you're using a a fuel cell to uh react hydrogen & oxygen together
to produce electrical energy which is being fed to the whee
ls but it's also being fed to a battery
and the battery is being used to give the vehicle a boost or it's also being used to capture
regenerative energy. In a combustion vehicle you've effectively got two storage tanks you've
got two fuel tanks you've got the traditional diesel tank that you would normally fill up uh at
a fuel station of some sort but you've got a tank of hydrogen that you're also using on the vehicle
so you would have two fuel tanks. Okay it's uh it's something I'd never
even sort of but like you say
if it's going to sort of more the commercial side first I suppose it's not something that needs to
be particularly in the uh retail public domain uh for the time being it's a it's a an interesting
sort of uh commercial point. Yeah and because because you're using the dual-fuel system, you're
not actually.. you tend not to fill both tanks at the same time so the hydrogen tank because
you're now getting significantly more miles per diesel gallon in that sense b
ecause you're
using you're supplementing that with hydrogen you're not filling the diesel tank as often as
you you would do normally so it's not that you have to fill both every time you come to the fill
station um but you know on some occasions you'll be filling up with diesel on some occasions you'll
be filling with hydrogen on some occasions you might be filling, you might be topping up both.
Okay, that's really interesting. It's a really interesting point actually that there's there'
s kind of
two types of applications there's almost two sub technologies in here one which is
using hydrogen as a as a combustible um so mixed in with diesel as you're saying for the
the Royal Mail solution. I know many many years ago bmw looked at doing full hydrogen internal
combustion engine they converted I think it was an e38 7 series um to have a hydrogen tank
in the boot way back in the mid 90s I think as you say it was one of the earlier kind
of false dawns of the technology I thin
k. and then actually and then the other side of
that is it's kind of like a full electric vehicle but your power source instead of plugging
into charge comes from a fuel cell which you know powers the wheels charge
the battery so there's there's almost like possibly even three subsets to the technology
which is really interesting which might mean there's different applications of the technology
or different bits of the technology for different uses we might see fuel cell battery type hybrid
s
for road cars but you might see this diesel hydrogen mix for commercial vehicles certainly
short term as an easier transition? I think that's right Jon I think what you see for the potential
use of hydrogen the diesel market is retrofit it's about extending the life of the existing
diesel fleet because of course the diesel fleet the heavy goods vehicle fleet is not included
in the 2030 ban on new sales so there is a little bit more breathing space in the in the
heavy end of the market t
o look at alternatives however even with uh hydrogen blends in diesel,
you're getting only like a 60% reduction in the emissions and we would need to go further to
to meet on that zero objectives for 2050. so it's it's a way of making sure that we don't
start to scrap perfectly useful usable vehicles way before their uh their lives are up because as
you know these vehicles would typically be doing hundreds of thousands of miles and they represent
a significant investment from the road haula
ge market, so having a retrofit option is a good way
of of making that transition work but I think ultimately it will end up as fuel cell even for
the heavy vehicle fleet. I have another question um so one one of the kind of the arguments
against battery electric vehicles is that they they produce more carbon in in the production of
of the you know the vehicle itself the batteries and so on is there a similar kind of argument
against you know hydrogen fuel cell vehicles um I’m I’m not not
too sure on the process of
extracting hydrogen all that kind of thing but are there kind of limitations or concerns there
like there are with battery electric vehicles? I think it's a very good question Jess and I think
yes there are. I mean I think and what I would always encourage people to do regardless of what
um what solution they're thinking about I would always encourage the broadest possible system
view so yes one of the reasons why I think that hydrogen vehicles will play a greater
role is
because I think eventually, perhaps not eventually, perhaps quite soon, people will begin to question
the life cycle impact from an environmental perspective that's not just emissions that's
also things like um the the challenges of of producing batteries the challenges of producing
fuel cells. I think there are challenges which are not just emission related but are related to
the broader environmental impact of the transition we're making so you know we're moving from one
extract
ive industry in the form of oil and gas and we're drilling for oil and gas and using that
refining it and processing to produce fuels for internal, for internal combustion engines what we're
doing with batteries and, and this is not batteries versus hydrogen by the way, this is batteries AND
hydrogen, what we're doing is we're transitioning to another form of extractive industry which is
rare earth metal mining so we're we're digging out cobalt in very difficult situations in the
Democratic
Republic of Congo we're mining for lithium which is either um excavation projects
or it's um it's brine um production which involves injecting huge quantities of water below ground to
recover lithium salts which are then left in very huge pans to be uh to be dried out and dug out so
I think there are challenges there with respect to hydrogen on the fuel side there are two main
routes to producing hydrogen today one is called blue hydrogen it's uh commonly all part of the
hydrogen rainbow s
o blue hydrogen is produced by uh steam methane reforming and that basically
means applying high temperature steam to natural gas and what we're doing is cracking those um
methane molecules to produce a hydrogen molecule but we also produce CO2 and therefore in order to
make that zero carbon we need to capture that CO2 and store it which is called carbon capture and
storage (CCS) and so blue hydrogen is the dominant uh it's likely to be the dominant lower cost source
of hydrogen for the nex
t probably the next 10 to 15 years but beyond that we'll start to move
to what we call green hydrogen which is the production of hydrogen from electrolysis of water
and here what we're doing is applying electricity to water and we're cracking the water molecule
to produce a hydrogen and an oxygen um and the the oxygen can be used for medical purposes or
it can be it could be released safely back to the atmosphere the hydrogen goes into the into
the could go into a gas grid it could go into
um it could go into power generation it could go into
vehicles um but that's a much cleaner and as its name suggests green solution for the production
of hydrogen interestingly as we start to look at the options for hydrogen we start to look at the
commercial opportunities for hydrogen there are even some opportunities to produce hydrogen from
waste plastic so you can begin to see options, options here a circular economy where you can take
another waste product like plastics that we can't d
ispose of today and through a pyrolysis
process produce hydrogen from that as well so uh yes I would always encourage people to look
at the broadest possible impact and not just think about tailpipe emissions but also think about
the full environmental impact of any solution so yeah green blue hydrogen moving into green
hydrogen for the 2030s will be the likely source of of the fuel but we cannot ignore the fact
that we'll still be needing, we'll need a battery in a hydrogen fuel cell vehic
le we still need large
amounts of copper in electric motors we will still need to find ways to reduce the weight of vehicles
which actually interestingly requires us to use more plastics so if you think about the um the
construction of a battery electric vehicle or a a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in order to
counteract the weight of batteries and motors we use more plastics in those vehicles than we
would do in an internal combustion engine so and Nissan Leaf or something similar probably ha
s
around 350 kilos of plastic that represents around 300 litres of oil so you know there is no getting
away from the fact that we need molecular energy to produce the goods and things that we will
need for the future so the argument that says we just switch off oil and gas really doesn't hold
water because we need oil and gas in particular to continue to make plastics to enable wind turbines
and battery electric vehicles to be built anyway. That's fascinating thank you Graham.
Yeah really
interesting stuff actually and I think it is quite interesting to make
that point that the use of uh of oil and gas that we extract from under the seabed and various
other places isn't just used to burn and produce emissions it has so many other applications in
everything around us especially the automobile you know everything from the plastics we use in the
bodywork and the interiors the rubber on the tyres um not just the fuel so even when we stop putting
you know crude oil derived fuels
into cars um we'll still be using a lot of that that
um that chemical product for other things. Eighty, about 80% of our
energy system today Jon is is what I would describe as molecular energy it is
hydrocarbon-based large it's oil gas just some degrees also coal my own organization does
an energy transition outlook every year and we we model the world's energy system and even with
them with the most amount of electrification and the uptake of battery electric vehicles at
its highest level
in fact much higher than other forecasters would would agree with
uh we only reduce our energy system to 50% molecular energy by 2050 we still need a lot of
oil and gas in the system to make the products that we need. It's quite interesting to hear that essentially
on a when you split them into two like you say so looking at the um day-to-day use and what
comes out the out the tailpipe um there is shared ground for both uh EV and hydrogen there
in different sectors you know commercial perh
aps over retail and then even in the bigger picture
they obviously share the same problems as well so when when you've positioned this Graham as
actually there's probably a place for both and they'll work together it sounds as though in a way
they've almost got the same problems they need to solve together as well there's at least a lot of
crossover? Yeah there is Martin, and I mean I have no doubt that you know and as Jess explained
in the earlier podcasts you know the the battery technol
ogies have evolved tremendously and they
will continue to evolve tremendously as well you know um the criticisms that we we leveed at battery
electric vehicles four or five years ago about their cost about their range uh have largely
been solved and they will continue to improve and the same thing will happen with hydrogen fuel
cell vehicles as well that the we will continue to innovate and you innovate as the market grows so
as demand grows you get more and more competition coming in and c
ompetition drives innovation
and that innovation generally speaking reduces reduces cost but you do have to be careful about
the challenge of technology obsolescence because this transition that we're making has to be just
transition we have to make sure the people we hand our you know second-third hand battery vehicles
or fuel cell vehicles down the chain to; they can still afford those vehicles and they don't end up
with a fleet which which becomes technologically obsolescent very quickly
. Um of course and we um
one one thing that's actually just come to mind that we said about sort of second and third owners
we touched on in the previous podcast um potential uh sort of saving on servicing and then the fact
that there are very sort of few moving parts in terms of a hydrogen uh fuel cell um well
a) what what service, well yeah what servicing does it need and in terms of for a retail
customer for example that had a hydrogen fuelled car what does that mean for them in
terms
of keeping it maintained and on the road? Well it's important of course that we we recognize
that effectively a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is very similar to a battery electric vehicle
it's using electric motors to drive the wheels it's using regenerative
braking to recover energy during during deceleration and the big differences
is the battery pack versus the fuel cell and because you've got a fuel cell and because
you've got a um a pressurized storage tank effectively with with hydrogen
in it, there are
a few more safety checks that need to be done the fuel cell longevity is is currently longer
than a battery in terms of we see battery car manufacturers offering eight 10-year perhaps
uh warranty lives on batteries there is no restriction in terms of the ability of a current
restriction in terms of the longevity of a fuel cell in that sense it doesn't uh it it can get
contaminated if the fuel purity is not correct but that's controlled through the fuelling
systems but you
will need to conduct safety checks you need to check um the the tanks you'll
need to then check the pipes you need to check uh relief systems and sensing systems and some
of the electronics that are built in there through a diagnostic process so perhaps a little
bit more complex than the battery electric vehicle but still far fewer moving parts in terms of
um you're probably looking at maybe a battery electric vehicle today has got 20 to 25 moving
parts a fuel cell vehicle probably in in te
rms of moving parts is exactly the same but probably has
a little bit more overhead with respect to the the checks that need to be taken on the fuel cell and
storage systems. Okay well I think that's, looking at the time, I think that's a really good um point
to sort of wrap up and I think we've covered um I know especially for me uh definitely a whistle
stop sort of uh tour of uh pretty much everything but it was all new to me so that was that was
fascinating and I’m sure it will be to pe
ople that were listening um but if I go around the table
again Jon anything you wanted to uh sort of any final thoughts comments or questions? No I think uh
thank you Graham it's been really educational for me there's a lot I’ve learned about the kind of
hydrogen economy that sits behind this technology as well as the the application of it and I wasn't
aware it was already quite so widely used in in sort of buses and commercial vehicles so that's
really good to know that that technology is
already taking steps forward! No, you're welcome all
I would say probably in closing is you know please just view this as part of the solution there is no
silver bullet to the energy transition there's no one solution one-size-fits-all solution
so hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells are part of the of the path to a low-carbon
future but they're not the only path. Brill, and just to check, Jess anything you want
to ask Graham before we leave or?? No no, I mean I’ve learned a lot today and you
know it's
it's really fascinating how um you know how there are the same challenges facing you know all these
different kind of fuel options um but it kind of really hammers home the point that you know it
isn't one size fits all and that there will be kind of a lot of different solutions for different
people going forward. Brill, I like it unity between the EV and the hydrogen community there uh
fantastic well thank you very much for your time on those discussions there uh hopefully it's
been
enlightening for you listening uh as well but it just needs me to say uh Jess a big thank you uh
for your uh input on this one. Thank you very much it's been great to be here. And Graham thank you
as well for joining us and taking time out your schedule. Thanks Martin I enjoyed taking part
in the discussions. Brill, and Jon uh I’m sure we will be back (indeed) thank you thank you for
co-hosting with me or taking your specialist role uh in this week's episode uh and we will see
yo
u all very soon to continue the discussion [all] goodbye [Music] [Music fades] Don't forget to like [mouse click] Comment [keyboard tapping] Share [mouse click] and Subscribe [double click] Thank you for watching Subtitles edited by Jon - if you found them useful please comment :)
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