Motor Mouth: Is Canada's future hydrogen-powered?

Ballard’s only problem, as it turns out, was that it was too far ahead of the curve. Some 30 years after developing its first proton exchange membrane fuel cell — and at least 20 years since becoming the favourite whipping boy for anyone looking to vilify the hydrogen economy — Geoffrey Ballard’s vision for Canada appears to have been vindicated.

On December 16, the federal government unveiled Hydrogen Strategy: Seizing the Opportunities, predicting (among other things) that by 2050, a vibrant homegrown hydrogen sector could employ 350,000 Canadians, generate $50 billion in revenue, and most incredibly, be a significant part of an $11 trillion global market. For a little perspective, our current oil and gas industry directly and indirectly employs some 550,000 Canadians, and generated some $41.6 billion in 2016. Hell, according to IBISWorld, the world’s total revenues for the entire oil and gas drilling sector are less than a third of what the government is predicting for hydrogen. Even if Liberal estimations prove as fanciful as ever, them be big numbers.

While the lion’s share of the dramatic upheaval looks to be directed at low-carbon supplementation to natural gas — as much as 50 per cent! — the study’s call to action also includes supporting “a nationwide hydrogen refuelling network with more than five million fuel-cell electric vehicles on the road.” Do the numbers and it means by 2050, a little less than a fifth of all the vehicles on our roads will be fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). And yes, that would mean that at least a portion, perhaps even a significant minority, of the cars we drive would be hydrogen powered.

The road to such hydrogen-propelled mobility, however, depends almost entirely on rapid adoption by the long-haul trucking industry. Passenger cars may be well ahead of 18-wheelers in electrification, but that’s because commercial haulage poses special challenges for battery power. Whatever the case, without an refuelling infrastructure built for commercial trucking, there will be no significant growth in FCEV passenger cars and trucks.

And converting commercial trucks to zero emissions is essential — commercial haulage may only account for five per cent of the vehicles on the road, but almost 35 per cent of the carbon dioxide emitted from tailpipes in our country — and unfortunately, battery-powered trucks won’t be able fulfill all the demand. Oh, light-duty local delivery trucks are easily electrified, and even short-haul — less than 400 kilometres — battery-powered tractor-trailers might be feasible, but the long-range tractor-trailer that is so much of our inter-province and -state enterprise depends on would be severely diminished if powered only by lithium-ion.

The problem is a combination of the enormous weight of the batteries needed to power such avoirdupois, and the lengthy charging times such ginormous amounts of lithium-ion require. There are countless studies detailing the effects of both, but the one I find most credible is from the University of California, Davis.

Essentially, the first issue is energy density — how much energy can be stored per kilogram of battery. Simply put, batteries suck in this regard. According to UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies, a long-haul truck looking to eke out 800 kilometres of range (less, by the way, than current diesels) would need a 1,418 kilowatt-hour battery (1,134 kWh usable).

That’s more than 14 times larger than the battery in the longest-range Tesla, and while cars can get away with ladling in heavier batteries — they don’t face the same weight restrictions as trucks do — commercial tractor-trailers are severely penalized: every extra pound of battery needs to be subtracted from the load they are allowed to carry. According to UC Davis experts, an 800-kilometre battery would weigh nearly seven tonnes, reducing a truck’s 25-ton payload by some 28 per cent, a deficit that would have severe repercussions to the cost of shipping commercial goods.

The other issue is time needed to recharge such an enormous battery and here, even UC Davis’ researchers seem a tad optimistic. According to their calculations, it would take an hour to recharge said 1,418 kWh battery. That’s unrealistic on two fronts: the first is that, even using a simple back-of-the-napkin calculator, it would take a 1.4-megawatt station to recharge such a humongous battery (we’re ignoring, for ease of math, the fact that only 80 per cent of a battery energy is “useable”). The most powerful recharging stations currently being proposed are 450 kW — about a third of the necessary capacity — and, unlike electronics, electrical conductors do not adhere to Moore’s Law of doubling efficiency every two years. I suspect it will be quite some time before we see widespread proliferation of 1 MW+ charging stations

And even if it such a beast were available, it still wouldn’t be enough to charge that big a battery that quickly. Although a 1.4 kW charger might be rated to pump in sufficient juice at its peak, batteries severely reduce the amount current they allow in at the beginning and end of their charging cycle. A Porsche Taycan, for instance, is rated 270-kW charging. But when Car and Driver hooked it up to an Electrify America’s 350 kW charging station — more than capable of supplying enough current — the Porsche was only able to, on average, sustain a 70.6 kWh charging rate through the entire charging cycle.

Indeed, despite various manufacturers’ claims of rapid charging, the Taycan — the quickest of current EVs — took some 42 minutes to recharge its battery from 40 per cent. The Tesla Model S it also tested fared worse, only able to average to charge at an average of 41 kW, far below the 150 kW Tesla boasts for its Superchargers. Long story short, even with a huge charger, a 1.4 kW battery is going to take a lot longer than an hour to charge to the brim.

And those numbers represent UC Davis’ best-case projections. According to the study, that 800-klick range can only be eked out on the most featureless of prairie flatland. Throw in a few hills and dales, say authors Andrew Burke and Lew Fulton, and those 800 kilometres can plummet to as low as 500 — and let’s remember that their studies were based on the comparatively sunny climes south of the border. Faced with a sub-zero Canada, said range could drop even farther.

How many miles you can put in in as short a time as possible is everything in our industry.

Doug Kimmerly, former owner of DSN Chemical Transportation

Factor in UC Davis’ suggestion that any switch to battery power is going to raise the cost of transporting consumer goods and the case for BEV trucks weakens farther. In the best-case scenario laid out — low-cost batteries, cheap electricity and flat hills — the total operating costs of battery-powered commercial haulage would be a few pennies more expensive per mile than diesel trucking. In the worst case — market-demand electricity pricing and, well, the Rocky Mountains — BEVs could cost some 60 per cent more per mile than a diesel-powered truck. The first scenario might be manageable, but the second surely isn’t.

To be completely transparent, FCEVs will not solve the fueling cost problem. As countless critics have already detailed, producing hydrogen is a complicated affair and every step in the process adds extra inefficiencies. As hydrogen production — especially clean, non-methane-sourced hydrogen — is still it in its infancy, it’s impossible to guess what hydrogen electrolyzed from water will be, but suffice it to say that plugging a BEV directly into the grid will always be cheaper than the roundabout refuelling via hydrogen.

The “but” in this argument — and it’s a big one — is that FCEVs can be refuelled almost as quickly as diesels. In the end, the decisive question for the long-haul trucking industry will be the cost analysis comparing relatively cheap energy (battery-powered trucks) versus reduced down time (FCEVs). It’s still too early to tell how quickly the BEVs of the future will recharge or how much hydrogen will cost in 2040 or 2050, but as Doug Kimmerly, former owner of DSN Chemical Transportation, succinctly points out, lengthy charging times would be a disaster for truckers.

“Truckers are paid by the mile, but they are regulated by the hour” and thanks to generous driving timing extensions resulting from the pandemic, a typical 13-hours stretch of continuous driving can work out to almost 1,000 kilometres. In other words, a two-hour stop every 400 or 500 kilometres will not be a welcome “advance” to the long-haul trucker. As Kimmerly puts it, “how many miles you can put in in as short a time as possible is everything in our industry.”

With our vast country relying so much on trucking for inter-provincial commerce, and since we are, as Hydrogen Strategy takes pains to point out, blessed with the natural resources needed to produce hydrogen efficiently — water, electricity, fossil fuels and biomass — we’d be stupid not to “seize the opportunity.”

And, yes, just in case you think you are somehow reading this wrong, this is me agreeing with Justin Trudeau. Miracles never cease.

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