GM may be focusing heavily on the development of new battery-electric vehicles and related Ultium technologies, but it’s also looking into new opportunities around hydrogen fuel cells. Now, The General has announced that it will collaborate with Nel Hydrogen US, a subsidiary of Nel ASA, to pursue cost-effective hydrogen fuel production via a new joint development agreement.
Founded in 1927 and based in Oslo, Norway, Nel ASA is focused on the production, storage, and distribution of hydrogen from renewable energy sources. Nel was the first company in the world with a fully automated alkaline electrolyzer production line, creating an opportunity to industrialize the production of its PEM electrolyzer equipment. Meanwhile, GM has made great strides in fuel cell technology development, thus offering substantial synergies with Nel’s PEM platform.
“Adding Nel as a strategic collaborator is an important step to help us commercialize fuel cell technology,” said GM executive director, Global HydroTec, Charles Freese. “Electrolysis is key to creating consistent, clean sources of hydrogen to power fuel cells.”
The Nel PEM electrolyzer works on the same principle as a hydrogen fuel cell, but in reverse. While GM’s HydroTec fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity and water, the PEM electrolyzer uses electricity and water to produce hydrogen and oxygen.
“Nel has some of the most promising electrolyzer technology to help develop clean hydrogen infrastructure, and we believe our HydroTec fuel cell IP can help them get closer to scale,” Freese added.
In exchange for its hydrogen fuel cell IP and development work, Nel will compensate GM on an ongoing basis and pay a license following successful commercialization of the end product. The license will be dependent on how much of the end product is based on GM technology.
“An automated production concept is key when scaling up and driving down cost on electrolyzer technology,” said Nel CEO, Håkon Volldal. “By utilizing the combined expertise of both companies, it will help to more quickly develop a green hydrogen technology that is competitive with fossil fuels.”
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Comments
Not trying to be negative on hydrogen because it seems to be a much better alternative (on the surface) to 1500 lb batteries, however, could someone with a better understanding of the technology explain the error in my understanding shown below?
This understanding is: Electrolysis is the process of separating hydrogen gas from water by applying an electrical current to the water which separates the hydrogen atoms from the water. In theory, the electrolysis process requires around 39 kw/hrs of electricity to produce 1 kg of hydrogen, however, in current production processes the best achieved efficiency is about 75% which means that with current technology about 52 kw/hrs of electricity is actually required to produce the 1 kg of hydrogen. This hydrogen is then used in a fuel cell to power the vehicle. My understanding is that current hydrogen-powered vehicles can travel about 80 miles on 1 kg of hydrogen, however, an EV could travel around 150 miles on the same 52 kw/hrs of electricity that it took to produce the hydrogen. Please note that the 52 kw/hrs does not include the power to compress the hydrogen to 10000 psi necessary to actually store the hydrogen in a tank that can be stored in a vehicle. Can someone explain the error in the logic above? Thanks.
you also have to consider the loss of energy from production to conversion into the DC battery of your vehicle.
Your whole argument is centered on efficiency. That’s not the whole story.
One, is storage mass and volume. Miles/kg or miles/m^3. Batteries are poor versus chemical fuels.
Two, the big one, is refueling rate. A gas car or truck gets 500 miles of range in a few minutes.
These are critical features on long-haul trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes, and baring the new battery technology that’s just around the corner for the last 30 years, you’ll need something like hydrogen.
Hydrogen is $5 per gallon equivalent to a 30 mpg gas car.
$10 in raw energy ($12-16 marked up at the pump) will get you 60 miles of range in an EV powered by a fuel cell. (That’s what they are, EVs)
You need about 50kwh (10 cents each) or about $5 of electricity to reform 4 CCF of natural gas ($1.21 each) into 1 kg of hydrogen which will get you 60 miles of range.
It’s dumb to pay that much for a daily driver when 90% of the time you can plug a battery EV in at home overnight while you sleep for 50 CENTS per gallon equivalent and just rent a gas car for that one trip across America everybody makes in a lifetime.
Or you can just suffer the 15-30 minute EV fast charge time every 120 miles or 2 hours of freeway driving while you take a pee break and get something to eat like you already do. Fast charging is about $2-3 per gallon equivalent.
Hopefully this can help manufacture a small enough system that can allow the hydrogen to be made at each station.
Certainly this seems like a decent way to store power from renewable energy sources like Geothermal, Solar and Wind.
There are much more efficient ways of producing Green Hydrogen… Electrolysis should not even be a consideration where electricity and water are issues. I am not aware of location on the planet where one or both are not issues?
The banks always focus on the quick returns available via subsidies… Take those away and there would be NO electrolyzer deployment!
So what is this process and how does it work? What are the basic resource requirements to manufacture hydrogen in large quantities?
We use engineered biomass to produce affordable electricity and Green Hydrogen.
If you build an electrolysis plant in the middle of a field of solar panels, you can power a car at 0 g CO2E/km (under the right accounting). If half the energy were wasted, it’s still 0 g CO2/km. If the system was 10% efficient, you get 0 g CO2/km. It’s all 0.
Where are you getting hydrogen that’s not from water? From hydrocarbons you got to do something with the carbon. Now you’re not 0 g CO2/km. From biomass or bacteria, again you have a carbon problem. There goes 0 g CO2/km. You could mine a rock like sodium hydroxide and pull the hydrogen off, but that’s far less efficient, not sustainable, and you end up using more water in mining then directly electrolyzing it.
Sam, any reasonable person understands that solar and wind are NOT solutions to baseload power… Which is what ALL industrialized countries depend on… Basic arithmetic can be used to prove that there is a zero percent chance of total conversion to electricity! Wanting something to be true does not make it so…
That argument makes no sense whatsoever.
Electrolyzing hydrogen isn’t a base load. That’s the whole point why you’re making hydrogen, so you can put it in a tank to store and transport the energy.
Think about how oil works. An oil tanker shows up from Alaska. It offloads oil and then it finishes. Then nothing happens for a few days, and another oil tanker comes. The flow of oil from Alaska isn’t continuous, so it isn’t a “base load” source of energy by your criteria.
Exactly how does the “engineered biomass” make electricity and/or hydrogen? Please explain the process. Secondly, based on this process how much electricity and/or hydrogen is produced from 1 ton of this “engineered biomass”?