Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell Offers 365 Miles of Range, and Quick Fill-ups

I've often thought that any sort of hydrogen vehicle should include a complement of batteries to store excess electrical energy produced by the fuel cell or to capture whatever is produced by regenerative braking.

Very interesting article, Laurent. Do you know if it's possible for the driver to select battery-only operation for shorter range city driving? Is it possible to plug in and charge the battery? Or is the fuel cell dependent upon working with the battery on all accounts?

@Brian Schwerdt

Agreed, the 24kwh figure seems abit high for being used just for buffering.. .24 kwh or 240wh would be more reasonable, besides I thought Hyundai was using supercapacitors in their hybrids for this function.

I've said it 20 times before but one more time, since GEN3+ Nuke plants aren't going to be built anytime soon due to Fukushima/San Onofre, etc, I don't see any cheap source of Hydrogen anytime soon, and methane derived home refuelers are to my knowledge very expensive, and use a fair amount of gas compared to the amount of H2 Gleened.
Otherwise, if you can find it, I'm assuming H2 is still around $7-8 per gallon.

Someone please explain to me why this is so much superior to Electric Cars. At least EV's are usually cheap to run, for all their other current disadvantages.

"Well, according to all the people I talked to—disagree if you like—is because the fuel cell is lighter and cheaper."

Lighter, I could concede. Cheaper than another ~50 kWh of batteries?

If *that* is true, then their engineers are getting nothing short of a Nobel prize when this gets released.

Then you get to consider what happens when you need to refuel. There's another reason for keeping a large battery on board: performance. Usually, pure fuel cell vehicles have crap acceleration because the fuel cell itself can't produce a lot of power. So they have to store it somewhere for the times when you need more instantaneous power. And to do that, usually they use a much smaller battery than 24 kWh.

So if you drive until you need to refuel, then you're going to be waiting a while for the battery to charge before you start moving again.

To me, this doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm going to pin this on you, because more than likely it's because you have the numbers wrong. I could see a 2.4 Kwh battery for starts and regen. But to have a 24 kWh battery PLUS a fuel cell would make the car outrageously expensive. It would be like taking the cost of a Leaf and dropping a $100,000 fuel cell on top of that. Even if they're making the fuel cell "cheaper than 50 kWh of batteries" (which would run a ballpark of $16,000. No less than $10,000, I would expect, and that would be a highly optimistic wholesale rate), that's *still* more expensive than the BEVs we already have on the market. Then after that you still have to pay through the nose for fuel.

And people already say that BEVs are only for people who will throw practicality out the window in exchange for environmentalism. That's why people are tearing fuel cells down as being "fool cells", and I haven't even touched on hydrogen production yet.

@Anderlan,

Cool observation about MJ/mile!

Most people are (or should be if you pay for your electricity) familiar with the kWh unit, since that's how utilities measure electricity to homes, and by extension, to EVs. I agree that to a physicist it's redundant. Joules are of course preferred to the physicist.

BTW, for those following along, one Watt is defined as one Joule per second. A kW is 1000 Watts, or 1000 Joules per second. One kWh is 1000 Watts for one hour, or 1000 Joules per second for 3600 seconds. Or simple 3,600,000 Joules. 3.6 Mega Joules.

Thanks, Anderian. It became somewhat revelatory to me when I finally got volts X amps = watts under my belt. But, yes, the amp hour thing is counter-intuitive. Glad to know I'm not the only one flustered by it. The Joule equations do make it more understandable.

So, the battery in the Hyundai ends up being fairy small (only about 1kWh?) and is there only to buffer the fuel cell during quick acceleration? I don't know how scalable fuel cell technology is, but the smaller cell with bigger battery scenario still sounds like the way to go to me. Perhaps that's just my plug-in EV bias and the engineers are being market directed to make it more fuel cell than battery.

Still, also, all the same problems with the hydrogen we've talked about before: how to manufacture it without causing environmental issues that neutralize the cleanliness of running it through a fuel cell and the cost of all of it.

Gorr has been pretty reasonable lately.. He even likes the Chevy Volt!!!! I bet if you had shown him his own statement back in time 2 years, he would have had a heart attack back then!

I have no problem with kilowatt-hours. Its a metric term for those who like metric. To convert to proper British terms, 1 kwh = 3.413 British Thermal Units. A BTU is the amount of heat necessary to heat 1 pound of water 1 degree fahrenheit. How's that for a neat little unit. 970 BTU's will evaporate 1 pound of water at 212 degrees to 1 pound of steam at 212 degrees (in tables they've coined the phrase "FROM AND AT").

1 U.S. gallon (128 oz) of Gasoline has 125,000 BTU. #2 Fuel oil (Diesel) has 140,000.

A pound of H2 is about 60 cents, 48% by natural gas, 30% by oil (and you guys are going to LOVE The next one), 18% by COAL, and 4% by hydrolysis (3 times as expensive). Also the cost goes up 3 times if it has to be liquified for the distributor (likely).

5.64 *2.2 = 12.48 pounds. $7.45 or $22.34 if it is stored at the distributor in liquid form. Not sure how much they charge to compress it. Or whether its refueled as a liquid and it is allowed to boil and build up pressure all on its own, probably the latter.

The Heat value of 1 lb of H2 is 61,000 BTU, but I'm unsure what percentage of that a fuel cell can recover.

So this car goes 365 miles on the heat content of under 6 gallons of gasoline?

Lets assume 95 kwh of electricity for an ev would be required to go 365 miles in this vehicle. So thats 324, 235 btu. 5.7 gal of gas * 125,000 btu would be 712,500 btu. So I guess all these numbers are ball park reasonable.

So, $22.34 doesn't seem too unreasonable to go 365 miles. I'm having trouble finding exactly how much H2 costs at a retail H2 pump. Anyone have any info? My pricing seems a bit too cheap, but honestly this is the first time I've tried to rigorously calculate the cost.

Bill,
I found out not too long ago that the value for the BTU of natural gas is actually the average of the HHV and LHV values.

LHV-low heating value = 3236 BTU/kWh
HHV-High heating value = 3585 BTU/kWh

Apparently, the government and power companies use the HHV in their reports of annual power generation.

Fuel cell cars always use a fair size battery to provide oomph for acceleration, enable regenerative braking and so on.

It is though trivial to increase the battery size to make it a plug in hybrid, unlike the complex engineering needed for the Volt to marry ICE and electric.

You wouldn't lug around 24kwh of battery, but 12-16kwh is perfectly practical, which would mean that everyday running around would be done on battery power, but there would be no hassle at all in longer journeys using the fuel cells.

This immediately knocks out most of the quibbles about fuel cells, and incidentally a great deal of them for battery cars.

If we do set up systems using electrolysis to produce hydrogen and have an efficiency penalty, then for local journeys that is not going to matter, and only the long distances which battery cars are not very good at would be covered by hydrogen, so the alleged poorer efficiency becomes moot.

Far less hydrogen infrastructure would be needed, which knocks out another oft repeated canard about hydrogen.

Conversely the problem of how to wire up the ~50% of cars which are kept by the road, not in a garage, is largely overcome by the flexibility of using hydrogen as well as batteries.
However batter only advocates seek to sweep the problems of charging those cars without a garage under the carpet, this is not a trivial problem.

A fuel cell battery hybrid eliminates the need for around 70kwh or more of batteries to give a battery car respectable range.

Battery only advocates simply like to assume that performance of batteries will increase so greatly, and costs reduce even more, that this can be overcome, whilst of course assuming that fuel cells do not improve hardly at all.

If you ask me how it will pan out, I don't know, and neither does any other serious commentator or organisation, who are pushing ahead developing both batteries and fuel cells.

We don't know and can't know how their progress will compare.

Certainty in the matter is the preserve of guys on blogs.

Dismissing them as 'fool cells' shows the commentator to be something of a fool themselves.

Identical fuel cells already showed themselves to be the most reliable back up power supply in Hurricane Sandy, outperforming both batteries and diesel.

Fuel cells are a vast area of technology, at its very beginnings, and none of us know how great the progress will be, but it is already clear that they will provide an effective solution across whole swathes of technology.

@Davemart,

You are right, we don't know with any certainty what the future holds. A "hydrogen economy" sounds great, but today there are major hurdles. By contrast, today the only hurdle to plug-in technology is a slight price premium. And even that often isn't the case when total cost of ownership is considered. I myself am not a purist, at least not in the near-to-mid-term. Technology like the Volt or Energis is the right solution for now. These cars actually solve the problems you mention with battery-only (e.g. no access to garages, quick refuel times), unlike hydrogen, which is not available in most of the US. Gasoline can be purchases in any town in America. No new infrastructure needed. If most charging can be done at home and at work, very little new infrastructure is needed there either.

I am glad people are researching new things, including hydrogen. You never know where it will lead. Einstein once said "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research". But I grew weary of hydrogen being dangled in front of me, always just out of reach. Today that kind of thing is a distraction from real technology, selling today in the thousands of cars per month. Keep pressing on with research, but stop pretending that these cars *will* be available N years in the future (or ever).

@DaveMart: If the whole point of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is environmental, then getting said hydrogen from natural gas defeats that purpose.

As an added aside, on top of the complete lack of any environmental benefit whatsoever, you stack added expense on top of added expense. You have an expensive fuel cell stack. You have an expensive new infrastructure to build. You have the difficulties inherent to storing and transporting hydrogen gas.

And for what? So you can burn natural gas instead of gasoline? Today, you can convert any gas car to use propane or natural gas and take advantage of an already existing infrastructure. It's not tremendously expensive to do so, and the fuel is far less expensive to transport and store. The *only thing* you're saving over a purely electric vehicle is about an hour on the few days a year that you want to drive some significant distance more than normal. Considering the energy that goes into producing hydrogen in the first place, you're better off just burning it to make electricity. It's cheaper that way.

Hydrogen-fueled vehicles are a pipe dream for people who are easily fooled into thinking that it's more environmentally friendly than other, far cheaper alternatives.

@Bill,
Here is the values for the HHV and LHV for natural gas with the definition of HHV and LHV.
http://cta.ornl.gov/bedb/appendix_a/Lower_and_Higher_Heating_Values_of_G...

I don't know what UHV is though. Ultra Heating Value? 1022 BTU/ft3, is that LHV or HHV? I always see 3413 BTU/kWh but there is no mention if that is HHV or LHV. So after some research I found that table. Very informative. I was curious because the annual energy efficiency report says it uses HHV values for its calculations. So I had to know what the actual value of the HHV of natural gas was. If you will notice from the table, HHV of natgas is 1089 BTU/ft3.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/2013publications/CEC-200-2013-002/CEC-200-2013-...

I'm not saying you are wrong, I just don't know where 3413 BTU/kWh came from.

@Jesse Gurr

Since people are just waiting to pounce, let me correct that to 1000 watts = 3413 BTU/Hour. Obviously a 100 kw heating element would produce 341,300 btu if left on for an hour. IF left on for 20 hours it would produce 6,826,000 Btu.

Well that's confusing. STP is at 32F but the EPA saw fit to do it differently and make 60F standard just for natural gas.
http://www.eia.gov/FTPROOT/natgas/013104.pdf Page 157

http://www.epa.gov/ttnchie1/ap42/ch01/final/c01s04.pdf
Apparently it is 1020 BTU/ft3, you are correct. My bad :P

Neil:
I have many times provided links to numerous massive studies by the DOE and others which cover all the points you raise.

Ignoring them and continuing to claim that they are unanswered questions is simply being wilfully obtuse.
You don't like the answers they give, and hence you ignore them.

Equally fantastical are ludicrous claims that:
'Hydrogen-fueled vehicles are a pipe dream for people who are easily fooled into thinking that it's more environmentally friendly than other, far cheaper alternatives.'

Amongst those who are not in touch with reality according to this gloss are, as mentioned, the DOE, just about every major car company in the world, and just about every large renewables program including those in Germany and Japan.

We are asked to believe that some guys on blogs who don't happen to fancy hydrogen and have scribbled, invariably inaccurately, on the back of envelopes are the ones really in the know.

As for the notion that using hydrogen invariably means fossil fuels, that is no more true than that producing electricity is only possible using them.

Already in every program there is considerable input of non-fossil fuel sources, and that is not going to stop.

I would link once more to the studies from just about everyone to support what I am saying, but it is clear that the contrary position is not based on data and analysis.

Indeed, zero links are provided to their sweeping claims, and instead the reliance is on entirely false canards such that batteries are far more efficient, which are arrived at by the simple expedient of ignoring well to wheels losses for batteries and/or cherry picked assumptions on future, not present, generating strategies.