Hydrogen's future as transport option reliant on collaboration

Increasing the role of hydrogen in transport can only be done in collaboration with a wide group of partners to push demand to levels that attract much-needed investment, the panelists in Automotive News Europe's latest Congress Conversations agreed.

Hydrogen has long promised emissions-free transportation without the downside of battery charging. However, despite improvements in hydrogen fuel cell systems from automotive groups including Toyota, the lack of infrastructure and low availability of the cleanest-produced hydrogen has held back the fuel compared with battery power.

Toyota has been successful in turning its pioneering work with gasoline-electric hybrid power into its dominant drivetrain in Europe and has a goal of achieving similar success with its fuel cell systems.

"There is one big difference, though. If we look at the Prius, the [fueling] infrastructure was there," said Toyota Europe's director of fuel cell business and powertrain R&D, Thiebault Paquet. "If we look at the [fuel cell] Mirai, currently, the infrastructure is still under construction."

The expensive work of establishing a network of hydrogen filling stations needs to be coordinated and financed by governments and other stakeholders, Paquet said.

"Toyota's point of view is that it's not really our role to develop the infrastructure," he said.

Instead, Toyota is working to create "eco-clusters" in European city centers that bring together differing industries that can use fuel cells for mobile power, for example, buses, trucks, trains, marine and generators.

"If we get more [fuel cell] applications and come together with people that provide hydrogen supply and, in that way, it can make the infrastructure viable," Paquet said. "It's a pure chicken-and-egg situation, because if there is no infrastructure, we will sell no fuel cell systems."

The difficulty in establishing a hydrogen society is very different from the push into renewable energy 15 to 20 years ago, said Peter Mackey, who is head of strategy and policy support for hydrogen energy within hydrogen producer Air Liquide.

"A lot of people draw that comparison," he told the Congress panel. "But the big difference with renewable energy is that there was always an automatic taker in that market as long as you can plug your renewables into the grid. You always had consumption."

Hydrogen doesn't have that ease of entry.

"You have to create the entire supply chain and everybody in that supply chain is dependent upon everybody else above and below them. And that requires a lot of cooperation," he said.

Government incentives, both on the infrastructure side and to stimulate demand on the consumer side are crucial, said Alessio Torelli, chief mobility officer for energy infrastructure company Snam.

"An incentive for the infrastructure is crucial because without that it's extremely unlikely that private companies will take the risk to invest in a filling station that before any market is created," he told the panel.

Creating that vehicle market also requires incentives, he added.

Lots of different actors

Finding partners was the strategy followed by Punch Torino, General Motor's former diesel R&D center in Italy, to help create a market for its hydrogen-powered combustion engines.

Initially finding it difficult to find customers, Punch Torino realized it needed to create a hydrogen hub with lots of different players. The company focused on buses, and so brought together a bus maker, a bus transportation company, a supplier of hydrogen and a supplier of engine components.

"So, we created a consortium because we needed to put together all these different actors altogether," Punch Torino CEO Pierpaolo Antonioli told the panel. "Alone you cannot succeed."

The cost of hydrogen is another stumbling point, particularly for the greenest version created by renewable energy.

Currently the majority of Air Liquide's hydrogen is ‘grey,' which means it is created from natural gas.

Air Liquide's Mackey said that hydrogen currently costs between 1 and 1.50 euros per kilogram before transportation, compared with 4 to 6 euros for so-called "green" hydrogen created by electrolysis using electricity generated by renewable energy.

The cost of green hydrogen will fall by 60 percent by the end the decade, according to the Brussels-based Hydrogen Council.

Two-thirds of that cost reduction will come from lower renewable energy costs, and one-third from economies of scale in the electrolyzer industry, Mackey said.

$50 billion gap

However, there is currently a "$50 billion dollar" gap to reach that level of industrialization and for that to be bridged hydrogen needs to be used far more widely, Mackey said.

"Mobility of transport alone is not going to get us to that point. It requires an enormous amount of scale up and that requires adoption of hydrogen more broadly in industrial applications as well," he added.

The beauty of hydrogen however is that "it can be produced almost everywhere" said Snam's Torelli. You just need a renewable source of energy.

Snam's plan is to install green hydrogen plants in North Africa fueled by solar energy and transport it to Europe through existing pipelines.

That could reduce the cost of transported hydrogen to about 2 euros per kg.

"There are signs that hydrogen can even become cheaper than gas," he said. "Under these circumstances, of course, hydrogen becomes completely convenient against any other viable option."

Snam has already successfully experimented carrying hydrogen mixed with natural gas in Italy.

The bus transport sector is most likely to move to hydrogen first, Mackey predicted.

"It's really developing very quickly in the near-term," he said. Examples include the rollout in June of 20 fuel cell buses in London made by Northern Ireland-based Wrightbus. The buses run on hydrogen produced by Air Liquide.

"That's a market that's very sensitive to local policy and perhaps less driven by pure commercial arguments and more by air pollution in the cities and the social acceptance aspects," Mackey said.

After buses, Mackey expects hydrogen trucks to take off toward the end of the decade with planes following in the mid-2030s.

The cost of moving to hydrogen can be mitigated by adapting internal combustion engines, Punch Torino's Antonoli said.  

"We have a product that is sustainable because it is using investments that have been already amortized several years ago," he told the panel. It also keeps production and expertise in Europe. "We aren't disrupting the supplier chain," he added.