Toyota helped to kick off the 2014 CES show by pronouncing themselves happy with the rate of development and cost reduction on Fuel Cell Vehicles: “Fuel cell electric vehicles will be in our future sooner than many people believe, and in much greater numbers than anyone expected.” Indeed, they intend to have a “vehicle” (by which I understand a car of some sorts) on sale by 2015
Now, even with my occasionally shaky grip of arithmetic, especially in German, that’s NEXT YEAR. Whilst it’s usually better to look forward rather than backwards, the history of fuel cell vehicles is long and far from glorious, so it’s worth taking such pronouncements – even from Toyota – with a pinch of salt.
Having said that, I’ve always been fascinated by fuel cell technology - as a naive young engineer, I somewhat irrationally invested in what in hindsight was a rather dodgy looking British-Belgian-Russian company called Zevco. This firm at least managed to get a fuel cell into a river boat, a taxi (a recurring theme in fuel cells, as a small fleet of taxis created for the 2010 London Olympics shows) and an airport tug - before it folded, with the best of intentions to rise again. Admittedly, I wasn’t the only dreamer out there, as Zevco managed to sign several alliances and intents of work before going under, with companies much richer than I – but there has never been a convincing commercial case for fuel cells.
More recently, I was naturally keen to be involved in a project to develop the high pressure lines and connectors between the hydrogen fuel tank and the fuel cell. This was, alas, but from a business perspective sensibly, cancelled by our management as – well, quite simply, there wasn’t a convincing commercial case for it. Money aside, key technical challenges remain:
- H2 infrastructure (and figuring out where the energy to extract hydrogen should come from)
- Tank and system pressures of up to 900 bar
- Operating fluid temperature -40 to + 85 °C
- When the fuel cell is running at max power, it’s drawing the maximum amount of hydrogen from the tank, thereby reducing the pressure and cooling the feed system to sub zero temperatures
- System permeation & losses
- Sealing all the lines and connections in such a way that they’re quick to assemble and acceptably cheap
- Ensuring that you can leave a car in an airport car park for a week without it emptying of its own accord.
- Refuelling safety and losses
Even before sending cars out onto the roads, developing and validating the system is non-trivial as there are only a handful of test centres capable of handling the full suite of tests required. And they’re not particularly cheap.
The fuel cell endeavour seems to go in waves, with resources built up and then, like GM-Opel’s team in Mainz, Germany, discarded. I personally hope that it works out. Perhaps the competitive and commercial might of Toyota, Hyundai, Daimler as well as a range of dedicated system suppliers like Intelligent Energy and Ballard, can result in a compelling case for the technology. But I fear that, for want of a serious infrastructure, and the insurmountability of storage issues, it won’t.
Still, give me a project working on carbon fibre fuel cell cars, and I’ll be one happy engineer…!
