In the first half of 2024, the global market for hydrogen fuel cell cars was just 5,621 units. In the same period, 4.5 million battery electric vehicles were sold. It’s clear that hydrogen isn’t winning for personal passenger transport. But many still hold out that hydrogen is the way forward for larger vehicles, particularly trucks. I talked to Mike Nakrani, CEO of VEV, an e-fleet solutions provider backed by Vitol, about why even for trucks, hydrogen won’t be the right solution.
Nakrani has had personal experience with attempts to develop hydrogen fuel cells in heavy-duty vehicles, including for a joint venture between Ford, Daimler and Ballard Power Systems. After that attempt folded in 2017, he worked on a similar push for BP. In both cases, hydrogen didn’t seem to have the right characteristics for the market, whereas batteries were starting to show potential.
“We saw that battery electric was winning the race for passenger vehicles in China,” says Nakrani. “We are starting to see some of the Chinese products come over here in Europe.” BYD is making large inroads, and XPENG has just launched its G6 in the UK to compete with Tesla’s Model Y. “We used to think that battery electric was only going to be for a city car, but suddenly it has migrated into a medium-sized family car and then into an SUV. Now you’re seeing the Ford E-transit come out with a larger battery and much better range than the original.” Renault-funded Flexis is hoping to develop this space too. “Now EVs are migrating into 16-ton, 26-ton, 44-ton, even 264-ton mining trucks. Customers are buying these now and using them for their normal pattern of journeys.”
Hydrogen’s Inefficiencies Compared To Batteries
Nakrani sees a range of reasons why hydrogen isn’t proving to be the right choice even for trucks. “Professor David Cebon explained the elements of why efficiency of the hydrogen fuel cell stack is so much worse than batteries,” he says. “He shows how if you take 100kWh of electrical energy, by the time you go through the fuel cell process and get it to the vehicle and do the storage and transportation, you’re at 23%. So 100 becomes 23 versus EV, where 100 becomes 69. In other words, an EV is three times more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell from a power generation to delivery point of view.”
However, efficiency isn’t hydrogen’s only problem. “The storage issues have not been overcome,” adds Nakrani. “If you keep it as a gas, you must compress the hydrogen to a very high level to reduce the volume sufficiently. You then must put it into a tank that can hold that high pressure system. I haven’t seen the technology that can do it at a cost structure that works. Today, to equal a diesel oil tanker carrying a certain amount of energy, with hydrogen storage compressed by 250 Bar, you would still need at least 20 hydrogen tankers for the same amount of energy. Another option is liquid hydrogen, but this means you need to freeze it to -253C (-423F). Even then, you would still need four of these equivalent tankers to provide the same energy consumption as diesel. The physics of doing that is a disaster.”
There’s another difficulty as well. “The third point is transport,” says Nakrani. “Because of those expensive storage solutions and the requirement of compression, getting it from point A to point B with a cost structure that could have a hope of being competitive is incredibly difficult. The truck OEMs have recognized this, which is why, if you talk to anybody senior in the truck market, they will all say there is a place that hydrogen may play, but it will be very limited. No one is saying it’s dead completely, but now everybody says that the EV will be at least 80 to 90% of the heavy-duty truck volume. Then the problem for hydrogen is, if it’s such a niche, the cost will never achieve the economies you need to deal with its inefficiencies.”
The Fallacy Of Sunk Costs In Hydrogen
“Lots of companies have put a huge amount of money into trying to bend the laws of physics, and they haven’t managed it yet,” says Navrani. “Toyota has spent billions on this. But the parameters have stayed the same for a long time. There’s a reluctance to let it go, because they’ve invested so much. You can understand how it would be a convenient switch for the oil and gas industry. They used to supply fossil fuel, now they supply this great green fuel. But the business model stays the same and customers also may like it. They’ve been doing this for the past 60 years and it works for them. Governments like hydrogen because they don’t have to worry about road pricing because they can just add a tax to the pump and collect revenue that way, like they do with fossil fuel. There’s a real logic for the legacy industry to want this to work, which is why there is continual fight for survival for some of them.”
“The story that everyone comes back to is that electric doesn’t work,” says Nakrani. “But that’s not true any longer.” There are some issues with the additional weight of the battery reducing the carrying capacity of the truck, but it’s possible that the vehicle doesn’t need a battery as big as the operator thinks. “We think they do 400 miles a day. But even in Germany, that’s not strictly true for the law. If you think about the speed limits in the UK, a heavy-duty truck can travel at 56 miles an hour. The driver must have a minimum 45-minute break after 4.5 hours, and then after eight hours, they must have the whole next eight to 12 hours off.” For 4.5 hours at 56mph, the truck would only need 250 miles of range. “Even if someone’s running a double driver system, the truck is going to be stationary for a while, so charging capability during that time is quite plausible.”
“I haven’t seen any incredibly fast-fueling capability for hydrogen either,” says Nakrani. “You’ve got to get quite a lot of fuel into that truck. It must stop more frequently than diesel because it can’t carry as much energy in its tanks.” The inefficiencies of hydrogen mean they aren’t even proving viable for trucks requiring huge battery capacities. Fortescue had been marketing a 264-ton mining truck powered by hydrogen but has now switched to batteries. “They have 1MWh batteries, and 2MW charging. And they’re selling those when they weren’t selling the hydrogen ones. There are also 50,000 electric 40-ton electric trucks being used in China now.”
“We should always be driven by the customer requirement in the end,” says Nakrani. “We should look for things that make business simpler. EVs have proven they can do that at scale in passenger cars, in vans, and it’s starting to prove it in trucks in China. Companies are going to lead the way, because once they have one truck, they’ll find it works and will migrate the entire fleet. The jury is not out anymore. If hydrogen is going to work at all, it will be niche cases, which are certainly less than 10% of the market. If you start with what the customer needs and really understand that properly first, the use cases become clear. Then you’ll find the opportunities for hydrogen end up in a small niche segment versus the use cases for BEVs.”
