4G光元：几十年来，氢燃料电池一直被人们所忽略，但是，它们己经悄悄进入了自己的角色，渐入佳境。丰田要告诉我们燃料电池可以实现卡罗拉成本，也就是中国人常说的白菜价。
一直以来宣传燃料电池，建议电动汽车用其他方式供电，是会遭到谴责的。提到燃料电池，你会迅速被认为是白痴，大石油的代言人，甚至更糟糕。特斯拉的埃隆马斯克经常对燃料电池肆无忌惮妄加指责，嘲讽之为“令人难以置信的愚蠢”，和“傻瓜细胞” ，与电池路线支持者摇旗呐喊产生共鸣。
新能源圣战的另外一侧表现则比较安静，为了了解燃料电池如何成为白菜价，我坐在东京品川站的一家咖啡店，专门采访了丰田燃料电池项目的核心人物之一，广濑胜彦（Katsuhiko Hirose）教授，他一直负责丰田的燃料电池系统开发，他告诉我为什么马斯克理如此害怕燃料电池：氢燃料电池汽车终将比汽油动力汽车便宜，在世界各地为零排放运输敞开大门，而不仅仅是在能够负担依赖稀缺的自然资源和政府支持的电动汽车的富裕地区。
现在加氢站太少，而且这种稀缺性让燃料电池汽车未来持怀疑态度者的大放厥词。一位年轻的物理学家Hirose，他在核聚变工程中曾开发了早期的数字引擎控制器单元。后来这变成了一个管理燃油经济性和排放的任务，这个控制器可以说是天上掉下了一个大馅饼，成就了混合动力的丰田普锐斯。
当丰田开始研究氢燃料电池时，Hirose加入了团队。Hirose还清楚的记得，作为一名科学家，他明确指出氢气是一种需要能量产生的能量。同时当时他质疑氢气从哪里来，以及储存在什么地方。因为，当时並没有合适安全的大型存储系统。
那时是2003年，Hirose的老板Mitsuhisa Kato告诉他“现在是加入敌对阵营的时候了”，从混合动力转向氢气研究。Hirose被任命为丰田燃料电池系统开发总经理，他不得不努力消除自己的疑虑。当然，他並不是唯一的怀疑者。
三年后，在2006年，德国科学家Ulf Bossel撰写了一篇论文，基本上声称用电制氢是浪费能源。博塞尔认为，将相同数量的能量存储在电池中，而不是将其转化为氢气以便存储和以后使用会更有效。相信几十年后，电池行业的极端者仍然将把这一理论视为宝典。 直到今天，博塞尔的电熨斗理论仍然是纯电池原理的思想基础。
Hirose认为这位核物理学家，波塞尔在他的分析中犯了一个根本性的错误。博塞尔假设氢气将使用现有电力产生。“如果起点是电力已经在那里，如果你用现有的电力用电解水制氢，那么是的，你会失去30％的能量，”Hirose提醒说。“但是人们忘记了，当用天然气或煤炭制造电力时，60％到70％的能量都会损失掉。如果直接从天然气甚至煤中产生氢气，它们将不会损失60％或70％的能量。这一切都取决于你从哪里开始。“
今天的大部分氢不是通过电解水制成的，而是通过重整天然气，甚至是煤。奇怪的是，博塞尔并没有像他自己承认的那样“考虑这个选择，因为氢气完全可以以相对较低的成本进行化学合成。”
反燃料电池技术的另一个支柱是 “当储存液态氢时，出于安全原因必须允许一些气体蒸发，这意味着在两周后，即使没有被驱动使用，汽车也会失去一半的燃料。 “难怪如果我们让一半的氢气在还没有为车辆提供动力之前蒸发消失了。这里有点牛头不对马嘴，我们讨论的是氢气，而博塞尔谈论的是液氢。
汽车制造商早就放弃了，在乘用车上使用液氢的想法，因为如此之小的储氢罐无法保持液氢在－253°C以下，其中一半的确可能在两周内蒸发。燃料电池汽车中使用的氢气是加压的，而不是液体，它不会逸出。然而，如果氢气想从现在的储氢罐中逃脱可能至少需要13年时间。
另一方面，大规模储存氢采用液态储氢确实是非常实用的，当我喝第二杯咖啡时，我从丰田专家那里学到了这一点：在日本的种子岛空间站，足够的液态氢为多个火箭发射提供动力储存数月，蒸发量小于1％。即便是少量的增发也可以不浪费用于发电或其他应用。
电池的重量一直是电池无法逃避的短板。重量是里程的大敌，通过增加电池来提高续航，让越来越多的能量被电池重量所抵消和浪费。电动重型卡车的失败尝试就充分的证明了这一点。
40吨电池动力卡车，500公里续航需要8吨电池。这个数字确实有点荒谬，你想要运输是货物，而不是一个巨大的电池。而燃料电池组却更轻，更易于操作。氢燃料电池动力传动系统的重量可与柴油发动机相媲美，丰田的专家告诉我，可以更轻。单位重量氢气的能量是柴油燃料的三倍。
自Ulf Bossel写论文以来，时代和技术发生了变化，他自己早已不做纯粹的电池信仰的传教士。Ulf Bossel现在是瑞士Almus AG的所有者，该公司出售UBOCELL，一种将燃料转化为电能的小型SOFC燃料电池。
到目前为止，燃料电池对电池阵营的最大威胁一直保持不变 - 当我要了今天早晨的第三杯咖啡时，有兴趣的话题出现了，燃料电池车将很快比丰田自己的混合动力汽车便宜，而且有一天它们可能比普通汽车便宜。虽然我们提及燃料电池汽车非常昂贵，因为它们使用了大量的铂金？
Hirose说：“当第一批燃料电池车耗资一百万美元时，我们就使用了100克铂金。你要花3000美元购买。现在我们用量......“他停顿了一下。“已经很少了，甚至可以不使用。”随着铂在丰田的燃料电池组的影响不断减少，最后，Hirose透露它现在的用量与柴油车催化转换器的铂金相当，MIRAI大约使用10克白金。
虽然事实并非如此,人们仍然习惯认为燃料电池使用了大量昂贵的贵金属。“Hirose说。“燃料电池堆中最昂贵的东西是0.01毫米的薄膜。电堆的其余部分非常便宜。实际上，燃料电池最昂贵的部分就是工艺，它是单一零件重复堆叠的制造，成本并不进入它的材料。“
这使得燃料电池相对于电池具有巨大的成本优势。70％的电池成本是在原材料中，原材料的价格通常不会随着需求的增加而迅速下降。电池也没有逃脱政治的捆绑。电池的一个关键成分是钴(Cobalt)，世界上66％的供应来自刚果民主共和国，该地区人权状况欠佳。原始设备制造商急于获得供应，钴的价格一路飙升。相比之下，锂电池相对充足，但“作为全球争夺的活动的狂热爆发，以提取金属和确保锂离子电池的供应。”，只要世界上有水（H2O，氢的两个氢原子），就有取之不尽的氢气。
由于70％的电池成本与原材料相关，因此成本优化必须集中在剩余的30％，并且“电池产能已经足够大了，但是电池成本並没有下降很多？“由于产能过剩，电池成本大幅下降，”Hirose说。“电池是一种商品，如果有人以低于10％的价格出售它们，他们就能获得销售，而且这样做的结果销售价格会越来越低。世界各地建造的巨大电池厂需要巨大的前期投资，技术进步几乎没有时间来收回CAPEX。丰田公司的电池合作伙伴松下写道“两年内亏损70亿美元，主要是因为过时的电池厂的拖累，
全球又有多少电池厂没有被套上了这个紧箍咒呢？
松下制造的电池由特斯拉转而成为内华达Gigafactory的电池模块。松下公司总裁Kazuhiro Tsuga最近告诉彭博社，松下“与特斯拉仍在亏钱” ，只能称之为有望改变。与此同时，松下为特斯拉制造的18650和2170电池已经过时，当丰田和松下宣布联盟首先制造棱柱形电池，然后固态时，Tsuga公开希望技术不会进展太快，如果我们突然转向固态电池，我们现在的投资就又要被打水漂了。
与电池相比，燃料电池仍处于规模的早期阶段，丰田6万美元的Mirai燃料电池汽车只生产了约3,000辆，但它“正在建造一座新工厂，到2020年将产量提高到每年30,000辆”。最重要的是，丰田将其燃料电池技术应用于卡车，公共汽车以及非机动性之外的许多应用，规模的扩大，已经使丰田拥有世界上成本最低的燃料电池了。
到2025年，丰田计划将燃料电池汽车的价格与现在混合动力汽车的水平相当，但“就个人而言，Hirose对这个目标并不十分满意。“为了进入替代燃料世界，我们需要提供比传统汽车更便宜的燃料电池。这是我个人的目标。我认为可以做到。
这个目标听起来有点高不可攀，但根据行业标准燃料电池行业评论的共同作者，燃料电池工程师Matthew Klippenstein说法，丰田对燃料电池成本的乐观情绪在行业中悄然分享和走俏，即使是电池永远是新能源统的头条新闻。随着燃料电池的生产规模扩大，其成本将直线下降。
Hirose认为燃料电池汽车的成本会低于卡罗拉，这取决于我们对真正可持续交通的认真程度和决心。丰田但努力微不足道，需要全社会的参与，那就完全有可能。Hirose现年63岁，他相信他的有生之年能看到它实现的那一天。
关于电池和燃料电池堆之间细微差别的争论还没有结束，只要工厂必须摊销，它就会肆虐，只要有政府资金，没有人愿意与另一个阵营分享。虽然电池电量成为所有头条新闻，但全球对氢的支持正在增长。在达沃斯举行的2017年世界经济论坛期间，成立了一个氢能委员会，其中包括53家能源，运输和工业公司，Hirose作为丰田在论坛的发言人。到2025年，中国宣布了350个加氢站的计划。到那时，德国希望拥有400个加氢站。日本将世界第三大经济体重新投入燃料电池，并宣布在2030年到2050年之间计划将该岛国变为“氢社会” 。日本首都东京都希望氢气更加普遍，并计划到2020年奥运会实现氢气社会。
广濑是一个直言不讳的人，他并不像他承认的那样“喜欢氢社会这个词”。“氢社会意味着我们完全豪赌氢能源。相反，我们应该为可持续发展的社会提供一系列解决方案。当然，政府可以激励，但从长远来看，我们需要提供客户喜欢选择的东西。这与电池与燃料电池无关。它涉及可持续，运输和客户的选择。“
“建设一个可持续发展的社会是一项繁重的工作，”Hirose在收集他的东西以便将他的新干线赶回名古屋时说道，“但如果我们推迟就全球变暖等问题作出决定，我们就可能偷拿走了我们后代的未来。
Exclusive: Toyota Hydrogen Boss Explains How Fuel Cells Can Achieve Corolla Costs
Hydrogen fuel cells have been written off for decades, but Toyota's Katsuhiko Hirose says they area just coming into their own.
BY BERTEL SCHMITT
JANUARY 18, 2019
TECHTECHBATTERIESELECTRIC CARSENGINEERINGEXCLUSIVEFUEL CELL VEHICLEHYDROGENINTERVIEWTOYOTA
BERTEL SCHMITT
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If you want to bring the wrath of Twitter upon you, suggest that electric vehicles could be powered by something other than batteries. Only the utterly naïve seem to think that any technology bringing zero emission transportation should be worth the consideration. Mention fuel cells, and you will swiftly be denounced as an idiot, an agent of Big Oil, or worse. Tesla’s Elon Musk routinely piles invective on fuel cells, calling them "mind-bogglingly stupid," "incredibly dumb" and "fool cells”—schoolyard taunts that resonate especially well with battery-bullies.
The other side of the holy war for the most part quietly turns the other cheek. Well, until this morning, as I sit down in a coffee shop in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Station for an exclusive interview with one of the central figures of Toyota’s fuel cell project. Professor Katsuhiko Hirose has been in charge of Toyota’s Fuel Cell system development, and he tells me why Musk is rightfully afraid of the fuel cell: Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles will eventually be cheaper than gasoline-powered cars, opening the door to zero-emission transportation around the world, and not just in rich pockets that can afford battery-electric vehicles that are dependent on scarce natural resources and government support.
Hydrogen fuel stations are few and far between, and this scarcity opens the door for skepticism of the future of fuel cell cars. Hirose was a young physicist who had traded nuclear fusion for an engineering job at Toyota, where he developed early digital engine controller units. This turned into an assignment of managing fuel economy and emissions for a pie-in-the-sky project that became the hybrid Toyota Prius. When a skunkworks team at Toyota started looking into hydrogen fuel cells, Hirose joined the ranks of people pooh-pooing the project. “I am a scientist, and I pointed out that hydrogen was an energy that needed energy to be produced. I questioned where the hydrogen would come from, and where it would be stored. There were no proper and safe large-scale storage systems at the time,” Hirose remembered. “Ironically, I later I became the person to develop advanced hydrogen storage.”
That came when in 2003 Hirose’s boss Mitsuhisa Kato told him that “it’s time to join the enemy” and switch from hybrid to working on hydrogen. Hirose was made General Manager of Toyota’s fuel cell systems development, and he had to work on dispelling his own doubts. He wasn’t the only doubter.
Three years later, in 2006, the German scientist Ulf Bossel wrote a paper that basically claimed that that making hydrogen from electricity is a waste of energy. Storing the same quantity of energy in a battery rather than turning it into hydrogen for storage and later use is more efficient, Bossel posited. Decades later, the battery cam still treats this paper as if it was brought down from Mount Sinai on two iPads. To this day, Bossel’s screed remains the ideological basis of pure battery doctrine.
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Bossel made a fundamental mistake in his analysis, Hirose says about the fellow nuclear physicist. Bossel assumed Hydrogen would be made using existing electricity. “If the starting point is that the electricity is already there, and if you use that existing electricity to make hydrogen with electrolysis, then yes, you would lose 30% of that energy,” Hirose says. “But people forget that when that electricity was made from natural gas, or coal, 60% to 70% of the energy was lost. If hydrogen is produced directly from natural gas or even coal, they will not lose 60 or 70% of the energy. It all depends on where you start.”
The bulk of today’s hydrogen is not made from electrolysis, but by reforming mostly natural gas, or even coal. Strangely, Bossel did not, as he himself admitted, “consider this option, although hydrogen can be chemically synthesized at relatively low cost.”
Another mainstay of the counter-fuel-cell dogma is that "when storing liquid hydrogen, some gas must be allowed to evaporate for safety reasons, meaning that after two weeks, a car would lose half of its fuel, even when not being driven.” No wonder that hydrogen loses out if we let half of it evaporate before it can power a vehicle. Ah, but Bossel is talking about “liquid” hydrogen, and Hirose calls him on it.
“Automakers have long given up the idea of using liquid hydrogen in their passenger cars,” exactly because their small tanks lack sufficient insulation for the minus 253 Centigrades of the liquid hydrogen, and half of it could indeed boil away within two weeks, I am told. The hydrogen used in fuel cell cars is pressurized, not liquid, and it won’t escape. However, it may escape those who still copypaste a 13-year-old, and long outdated paper.
Large scale storage of liquid hydrogen, on the other hand, is extremely practical, I learn over a second coffee from Toyota’s expert for advanced hydrogen storage systems: “At Japan’s space station in Tanegashima, enough liquid hydrogen to power a number of rocket launches is stored for many months with evaporation of less than 1 % of volume.” Even that is not wasted, and is used for power generation or other applications.
Another matter escaping the author of the alleged analysis was the heft of the battery. Weight is the enemy of mileage, and trying to gain range by adding more battery quickly becomes a losing proposition as more and more energy is wasted dragging a heavy battery around. Nowhere does this hurt more than with the electric trucks planned by several automakers.
“A battery-electric 40 ton truck with 500km range needs 8 tons of battery. That’s ridiculous,” says Hirose. “You want to transport goods, not a huge battery. A fuel cell stack is much lighter and easier to handle.” A hydrogen fuel cell powertrain’s weight is comparable to that of a diesel engine, Hirose tells me, sometimes it’s even lighter. “Per weight, hydrogen delivers three times the energy of diesel fuel, but it also needs a heavier tank,” Hirose says.
Times and technologies have changed since Ulf Bossel wrote the paper, and he himself has long departed from the pure battery faith. Ulf Bossel is now owner of the Swiss Almus AG, which sells the UBOCELL, a small SOFC fuel cell that turns hydrogen into electricity.
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The biggest threat to the battery camp has been kept under cover so far – until this morning when I order my third coffee: Fuel cell vehicles will soon be cheaper than Toyota’s own hybrid cars, and they may one day become cheaper than regular cars. That may come as a jaw-dropper, after all, haven’t we been told that fuel cell cars are inordinately expensive, because they use high amounts of platinum?
Nonsense, says Hirose: “Back when the first fuel cell vehicles supposedly cost a million dollars, we used 100 gram of Platinum in them. You can buy that for $3,000. Now we are using …” And he pauses. “Much, much less.” A back and forth ensues on how little Platinum goes into Toyota’s fuel cell stack, and finally, Hirose reveals that it is in the neighborhood of the platinum in a catalytic converter for diesel cars, which “uses around 10 grams of Platinum.”
“People still think fuel cells use a lot of expensive precious metals. Not true,” says Hirose. “The most expensive stuff of the fuel cell stack is a 0.01 millimeter thin membrane. The rest of the stack is very cheap. Actually, the most expensive part of the fuel cell is the process, it’s the making of the stack, not the materials going into it.”
That puts the fuel cell at a huge cost advantage vis-a-vis the battery. “70% of the cost of the battery is in the raw materials,” says Hirose, and the price of raw materials usually does not come down as demand goes up. Neither do batteries free us from being tied to political hotbeds. A key ingredient of batteries is Cobalt, and 66% of the world supply comes from the allegedly Democratic Republic of Congo, where it is mined amid continuous complaints about human rights abuses. Cobalt prices have been exploding, and OEMs are in a rush to secure supplies. Lithium is plentiful in comparison, but nonetheless, The Telegraph reportsof “a frenzy of activity as a global scramble erupts to extract the metal and secure supplies for lithium-ion batteries.” As long as there is water (H2O, two atoms of Hydrogen for one of Oxygen) in the world, there is no way to run out of Hydrogen.
With 70% of the battery cost tied to raw materials, cost optimizations must focus on the remaining 30%, and “the battery is already scaled out,” says Hirose. But haven’t battery costs come down a lot? “Battery cost has come down drastically because of overcapacity,” Hirose says. “Batteries are a commodity, and if someone sells them 10% cheaper, they get the sale, increasingly below cost.” The huge battery factories built around the world require monstrous up-front investments, and advances in technology leave little time to recoup the CAPEX. Toyota’s battery partner Panasonic wrote “$7 bln in losses in two years, mainly over the write-down of an outdated battery factory,” Hirose says, “and many battery makers are in the same situation.”
Panasonic makes the battery cells that Tesla then turns into battery modules in its Nevada Gigafactory. Panasonic is “still losing money” with Tesla, Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga recently told Bloomberg, saying he was hopeful it would change. Meanwhile, the round 18650 and 2170 cells Panasonic makes for Tesla are already outdated, and when Toyota and Panasonic announced an alliance to first make prismatic cells, and then solid state, Tsuga was publicly hoping that technology would not advance too quickly, saying that “If we would have shift to solid state batteries all in a sudden, our investments would be wasted.”
In comparison to batteries, “fuel cells still are in the very early stages of scale,” says Hirose. Toyota makes around 3,000 of its $60,000 Mirai fuel cell car, but it is “building a new factory to increase the production to 30,000 per year by 2020,” Hirose tells me. On top of that, Toyota supplies its fuel cell technology to trucks, buses, and “many applications beyond mobility,” Hirose says, a scale that already allows Toyota to have “the lowest cost fuel cell in the world.”
It is Toyota’s plan to bring the price of fuel cell cars to the level of hybrid cars by 2025, but “personally, I am not very comfortable with that target,” Hirose admits. “To change the world into alternative fuel, we need to provide the fuel cell cheaper than conventional vehicles. That is my personal objective. I think it can be done.”
This may sound like an outrageous claim, but according to fuel cell engineer Matthew Klippenstein, who is also co-author of the industry-standard Fuel Cell Industry Review, "Toyota's optimism on fuel cell costs is quietly shared in the industry, even as batteries have deservedly earned headlines. As the production of fuel cells scales, their cost will plummet.”
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I ask Hirose when he thinks that a fuel cell car will cost less than a Corolla.
After a pause, he says:
“It depends on how serious we are about truly sustainable transportation. It can’t be done only by Toyota. If society is willing to provide the resources, it’s possible. I’m now 63 years old, I think I will live to see it.”
The debate about the fine nuances between batteries and fuel cell stacks has not ended, and it will rage on as long as factories have to be amortized, and as long as there is government money no one wants to share with the other camp. While battery power gets all the headlines, support for hydrogen is growing around the world. During the World Economic Forum 2017 in Davos, a Hydrogen Council was founded with 53 energy, transport and industry companies as members, and with Hirose as Toyota’s spokesperson in that forum. China announced plans for 350 hydrogen stations by 2025. Germany wants to have 400 stations by that date. Japan threw the heft of the world’s third largest economy behind fuel cells and announced plans to turn the island nation into a “hydrogen society” anywhere between 2030 and 2050. Japan’s capital Tokyo wants hydrogen in a greater hurry, and aims to realize the hydrogen society by 2020, when the Olympics roll into town next year.
Hirose is an outspoken man, and he doesn’t “like the term hydrogen society,” as he admits. “Hydrogen society means we fully bet on hydrogen. Instead, we should bet on a portfolio of solutions for a sustainable society. Of course, the government can incentivize, but in the long term, we need to provide what the customer likes to choose. This is not about batteries vs. fuel cell. It is about sustainable, zero emission transportation, and about customer choice.”
“A sustainable society is a lot of work,” Hirose says as he collects his things to catch his Shinkansen back to Nagoya, “but if we postpone decisions about matters like global warming, we steal the future of our children. As a company man, I should not say this,” he tells me, “but maybe you can.”
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