I had talked several times previously in this blog about the European Hydrogen Road Tour that took place in September and October 2012. Now I want to talk about some of the valuable lessons and insights gained from the road tour.
Copenhagen was the final stop on the tour. And as such all of the major players got together for a meeting to field questions and discuss what they knew about building hydrogen cars and infrastructure.
Here are some of the excerpts from that meeting:
“All auto makers unanimously provided the same answer: The lifetime of a fuel cell is longer than the lifetime of most of the rest of the car.”
“… why automobile industry would not pursue onboard reforming with the beauty of liquid fuels onboard was answered that the challenges were found to be in the complexity, maintainability, difficult dynamics and high specific costs of this high unit production component as compared to large scale central but stationary reforming.”
“To fuel 10,000 cars, 20-30 stations are needed in Oslo and vicinity. There is the possibility to build stations and gradually extend them with a modular system adapting the size to the growing hydrogen demand, greatly reducing costs.”
“Today, Denmark has about 2,000 gasoline stations to supply about 2.1 million passenger cars, yielding a ratio of 1,000 cars per station which is much higher than the average fuel station density in Europe (Germany: about 3,000 cars per station). It is anticipated that a network of 450 hydrogen refueling station will allow a full coverage of the country then growing further if hydrogen has kicked off as a major fuel.”
“To enable the fuel cell vehicle market to kick off, three 700 bar hydrogen refueling stations of latest design HRS are to be built in Copenhagen until 2015. Also, by 2015 (!) the municipal car fleet should be composed of 85% CO2 free vehicles with batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.”
The participants in the meeting made some very good points surrounding hydrogen fuel cell cars and the building of the necessary infrastructure. More information may be found at ScandinavianHydrogen.org.