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The hydrogen fuel strategy behind Nikola’s truck dream

Water electrolysis, not methane reformation, will drive heavy-duty refueling plan.

4/20/2019, 2:00 PM

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona—The Nikola Motor Company wants to reinvent trucking by replacing diesel heavy-duty trucks with hydrogen fuel cell trucks. But hydrogen skeptics are numerous, and not without good reason. Although hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are quiet, emissions-free (with the exception of water) during operation, and relatively fast-charging compared to battery electric vehicles, they have a host of other problems.

First, hydrogen is hard to store, and it must be cooled and compressed. It's also hard to transport. Additionally, H2 is not a green fuel in the US, for the most part. Generally, natural gas (CH4) is reformed to create H2 in ways that still cause carbon emissions. There is a way to create hydrogen fuel without the carbon emissions: by applying electricity to water (a process called water electrolysis). But water electrolysis has been prohibitively expensive, and if hydrogen can't compete with diesel, what's Nikola's value proposition to freight companies that will make them want to switch?

This week, the company hoped to address those concerns during a two-day conference in Arizona. And in a 45-minute talk, Nikola's vice president of hydrogen technology, Jesse Schneider, joined Jon André Løkke, the CEO of Norwegian water electrolysis company Nel Hydrogen, to outline Nikola's plans to fuel hundreds or thousands of hydrogen fuel cell trucks per day.

Making the hydrogen
Nikola's early partnership with Nel Hydrogen is a positive sign. Nel has been around for 90 years, supplying water electrolysis machinery to industrial and commercial companies in Europe. Løkke told Ars that the company has never made hydrogen from methane; water electrolysis is its primary business. Though the company has primarily built systems for industrial use, it sees its partnership with Nikola as a valuable way to expand its market into transportation, building the many refueling stations that any serious attempt at a hydrogen freight network will need.

In his presentation this week, Nikola's Schneider said that every one of the 700 refueling stations that the company plans to build across the US would be powered by "renewable energy supplemented by low-carbon grid energy" using equipment from Nel Hydrogen. Solar panels will be a prominent feature at every Nikola station, and Schneider later added that the company hoped to source a minimum of 30 percent of its electricity from these solar panels and other renewable forms of electricity.
After his presentation, Schneider told Ars that the company would be targeting areas like Arizona, where low-carbon sources of electricity like solar and nuclear power make up a significant portion of grid energy, and areas like the northeast, where hydroelectric power is dominant. But Nikola won't avoid setting up shop on more carbon-heavy grids—Schneider said where fossil fuel is a major source of power, Nikola will likely buy carbon offsets to keep its fuel "green."

(Of course, carbon offsets have their own issues. But as more and more utilities move toward renewable and low-carbon portfolios, the number of offsets that Nikola would have to buy in, say, Colorado or Idaho is likely to fall over the years.)

Nikola's plan to create hydrogen at every station that it opens also potentially solves a problem that has plagued hydrogen fuel: transportation and storage. Nel will be providing the storage facilities, which it says will ultimately be able to store up to eight tons of H2 per station.

There is some hope that such a massive station would be feasible. Recently, Nikola built a private, one-ton/day station on its property using equipment from Nel, which Schneider said is currently the "largest gaseous H2 vehicle station in the USA." The company is using the station to conduct heavy-duty fueling testing.

Nikola says that producing and storing hydrogen on site improves its efficiency, especially compared to diesel and gas, which must be produced in refineries and trucked out to stations around the country.

"Fuel cell vehicles are twice as efficient as fossil fuel vehicles," Schneider told Ars. "Though electric efficiency is higher, the issue is range. With [all-battery] trucks you have to add about seven tons more weight, and if you produce hydrogen from renewables or low carbon, there’s no CO2 or low CO2."

In response to an audience question, Schneider said an eight-ton-per-day station would require access to 17.6 megawatts (MW) of power, although he didn't elaborate on annual capacity factors of various types of renewable energy that might service such a station. (That is, 17.6MW of solar energy produces far less electricity in a year than 17.6MW worth of electricity from a nuclear plant running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.)

Nel CEO Løkke added that "the vast majority [of that electricity]... is going into splitting water." He said that up to 95 percent of the electricity that Nel's systems use is dedicated to H2 formation. "The rest is almost negligible in compression and cooling," Løkke said.

Heavy-duty
In addition to building hydrogen stations the size of which have never been built commercially before, Schneider said that Nikola is currently building a research and development lab. This lab will help a team of engineers not only stress-test the hydrogen tank and fuel cell that goes onto a Nikola truck, but it will also help the team develop heavy-duty hydrogen fueling standards, which doesn't exist today.

Light-duty hydrogen fueling stations exist around the world for passenger vehicles, but massive freight trucks need different equipment, Schneider says. Nikola trucks will be able to carry 80 kilograms of hydrogen fuel at once, and the new stations will fill the trucks at 70 megapascals (MPa). That, Schneider hopes, will bring down refueling time to 10 minutes.

Schneider, incidentally, said he worked on the light-duty fueling standard for hydrogen passenger cars "in a previous life." He said that during refueling, the pressure ramp rate is extremely important for gaseous fuels, and more testing needs to be done to key-in the right pressure ramp rate for heavy-duty vehicles.

According to Nikola's plan, an eight-ton station would be able to service not only 150 Nikola trucks per day, but also 200 cars per day (the company intends to outfit its heavy-duty stations with the more common light-duty refilling stations for passenger vehicles). "Hydrogen will be cooled according to standard and piped out to the dispenser bay, with separate dispenser bays for heavy duty and light duty," Schneider elaborated.

The case for putting in light-duty stations is not as well-defined as the case for creating heavy-duty stations, though. There are just over 6,000 hydrogen-fueled passenger vehicles on the roads in California, which is by far the largest market for passenger fuel cell vehicles in the US currently. Nikola doesn't seem to have any plans to build a hydrogen passenger vehicle, so fueling 200 passenger cars a day seems optimistic for any stations outside of the state.

Cost

Another major concern around hydrogen fuel is the cost. Currently, Nikola intends to sell its trucks with heavy-duty fuel contracts in place so that fuel is less of an unknown for potential buyers. But at Wednesday's presentation, Schneider and Løkke gave a little more insight into this. They said that if Nikola and Nel could procure electricity for less than $0.04 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), out-of-contract customers could buy hydrogen from their stations for a little less than $6 per kilogram.

Speaking to Ars after his presentation, Schneider added, "four cents a kilowatt-hour is not a pipe dream. You can get that here in Arizona at scale. On the Northeast coast, Niagara Falls has a huge grid over there that we hope to utilize."

Currently, the California Fuel Cell Partnership says that "hydrogen fuel prices range from $12.85 to more than $16 per kilogram," with the most common price being $14/kg or what is "equivalent on a price per energy basis to $5.60 per gallon of gasoline." If Nikola can cut that price in half, it could come close to being competitive with gas and diesel. Unfortunately, Nikola's numbers are theoretical at this point, so we'll have to wait to see if producing hydrogen onsite is really as cost-effective as Nel and Nikola claim.

For another potential source of cost reductions, Nel's Løkke told the audience that the company has a large facility in Denmark that can supply the kind of equipment that Nikola will need. However, the company is currently working on finding suppliers in the US that can make the same components closer to the customer.

Is it safe? What about water?
Hydrogen fuel seems to come with a number of standard questions about safety and water availability that Schneider and Løkke addressed. Both men drive fuel cell vehicles to work, and both men said that they believed hydrogen to be a safe fuel.

An audience member asked if people resisted hydrogen storage in their neighborhoods because of "Hindenburg" images. "Hydrogen safety is at the top of our list of priorities," Schneider responded. "What people don't realize is that the Hindenburg… was covered in a highly flammable coating." (That said, the theory that the Hindenburg explosion was caused by the flammability of the airship's outer material, rather than the flammability of the hydrogen within it, hasn't been definitively proven and is not universally accepted.)

Still, Schneider added, "hydrogen is 14 times more buoyant than air," meaning that the threat of explosion is minimal with proper storage that doesn't trap errant H2.

As for water, Nel's CEO said that the alkaline electrolysis method that the company employs does require filtered, fresh water, but the filtration necessary is minimal. Unaffiliated researchers have recently proposed ways to derive hydrogen from salt water, but these processes are very novel at this stage.

For a fuel network that is still very much a theory, Nikola has an aggressive schedule when it comes to hydrogen fueling station build out. This year, the company hopes to complete some demo stations, and by 2020 it hopes to have a demo heavy-duty station. By 2021, it intends to build its first eight-ton-per-day station at an undisclosed location in California, and it hopes to start its 700-station build out in earnest by 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/04/the-hydrogen-fuel-strategy-behind-nikolas-truck-dream/