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In a recent article on Jalopnik.com, Shep McAllister talks about the Nikola Motor Company and the Nikola One. The Nikola One will be the first hybrid hydrogen-electric class-8 semi.
Six months ago the Nikola Motor Company came out of nowhere and announced it was going to put the first electric-powered big rig on American roads. We've been skeptical, but Nikola just revealed a full-sized model that apparently works, and more importantly a plan to build and sell it at scale.
[...] The Nikola One is a semi-truck sleeper cab, meaning it's got a little apartment behind the driver's seat. The Nikola Two will be a day cab version that's a little shorter and cheaper, but running the same hyrdogen[sic]-charged electric motor set.
[...] So the Nikola truck is supposed to be able to cover 1,200 miles without refilling its hydrogen supply, but we've been hearing that figure and the 1,000 horsepower, 2,000 lb-ft of torque claims since the first renders of this thing were unveiled back in the summer.
It's an interesting concept and if it works out we might be seeing the end of diesel trucking in the US.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:32PM
It's very dangerous, less efficient (=more CO2) to produce than any common fuel, more expensive, hard to keep contained, and engines are harder to build and less reliable.
Hating diesel has become like a religious belief for some people, but it is the best fuel for heavy vehicles, and it's not really even close. And the only place where the pollution is even a factor is in urban centers, which is pretty much the opposite of long haul trucking.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:52PM
This is true. Like many "green" feelgood magic bullets, this only shifts the problem downstream to the power-plants.
And to address your point about diesel being nasty in urban centers, it's often due to the fact that that they're cargo endpoints (especially at coastal areas such as California's Long Beach where they're loaded directly from the container ships) and have to spend long periods of time idling and spewing collective shitloads of fumes into the air.
Kinda bummed diesel never caught on in the US like it did in Europe, though as a driver I don't like diesel vehicles -- sluggish feel, slow to react.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @12:16AM
Many locations (probably including all of California, I'd have to double check) now have anti-idling laws restricting diesel trucks from idling for more than a couple of minutes at a time. They used to idle all night long to run the heat or air conditioning for the driver. Now they have small generators to do that. Some places have even restricted the generators, and so some trucks now carry battery banks to keep the driver comfortable.
Loading & unloading should really always be done as efficiently as possible, but the nature of logistics is that it's hard to keep everything moving without any waiting. Trucks that spend a lot of time waiting for loading should really have hybrid drives (or diesel engines optimized for stop-start) so they don't have to idle at all. Since the truck probably only actually travels a mile or two at most during this operation, and at very slow speeds, even a heavy truck would need only modestly sized batteries and motors to deal with the bulk of the waiting.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 05 2016, @01:19AM
Relevant:
Hot Trucks and Anti-Idling Laws [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Monday December 05 2016, @12:06AM
H2 is the oil companies' answer to the inevitable rise of renewable sources of energy.
It's a con: H2 appears to be clean, but in fact it isn't because of the way it is currently produced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:28AM
As far as why it's being promoted prematurely, you're exactly right.
However, there is a reasonable possibility that, sometime in the future, hydrogen could make sense. Fossil fuels have the benefit of coming out of the ground in more-or-less portable form, give or take a little refining and cracking to yield the right properties for ICEs. Renewables, on the other hand, tend to yield mechanical (hydro, wind, wave, tidal) or electrical (photovoltaic) power at fixed locations, and if needed elsewhere, it's generally dumped straight onto the electric grid. That's great for every application except road travel -- and while we can use batteries to cheat for daily commutes, that quickly becomes impractical for vehicles that drive all day long.
Currently, of course, H2 is generated from fossil fuels, making the whole thing pointless wankery that could only be pushed forward by big oil's political power.
But given ongoing advances in catalytic electrolysis, we're approaching (but not yet at) the point where the best way to power road transport is to have fixed plants generating hydrogen from water + (nuclear and/or renewable) electricity, you fill truck tanks with hydrogen, and they burn it either in fuel cells or in suitable ICEs, releasing water vapor to the atmosphere, where it makes its way back to the fixed plants by the usual means. It's not clear this will be the most sensible option in 10-20 years (which is why we should not be converting our fleet to fossil-fuel-derived hydrogen as an interim preparatory measure), but it's also not clear that it won't. Other attractive options include biofuels (cellulosic ethanol is particularly appealing here, as it could complement rather than competing with food production), sufficiently advanced battery technology, and producing synthetic hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 + H2O, e.g. methane by Sabatier process. I would bet on the latter, but it's too early to tell, and too early to make massive investments in prematurely converting to any of them.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday December 05 2016, @12:56PM
It's a con: H2 appears to be clean, but in fact it isn't because of the way it is currently produced.
Also, it needs a distribution and retail network very much like the current fuel distribution network (who do you think is going to run that?) whereas electric opens the field up to all sorts of disruptive solutions like home charging, solar (or solar-supplemented) charging or small charging points anywhere there's a decent mains supply.
To start your new horseless carriage, first wrap the tail of your buggy whip around the starting capstan...
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday December 05 2016, @12:52AM
And the only place where the pollution is even a factor is in urban centers, which is pretty much the opposite of long haul trucking.
According to the article the company intends to sell into the U.S. market. For semi-trailers to enter urban areas is, I think, commonplace there: the placement of manufacturing and retail centres on the outskirts of a city is also common, but not universal. In 2014, sales were increasing at Wal-Mart's smaller stores, but declining at their larger stores:
The Neighborhood Markets are about one-fifth the size of Wal-Mart's supercenters, and they are located in urban centers — where incomes tend to be higher — while supercenters are typically located on city outskirts.
-- http://www.businessinsider.com/walmarts-supercenter-sales-decline-2014-8 [businessinsider.com]
Moody's expects Neighborhood Markets to eventually outnumber Supercenters, with the smaller stores relying on the warehouses as supply hubs. Wal-Mart now has 645 Neighborhood Market locations and more than 3,400 Supercenters.
-- http://www.businessinsider.com/wal-mart-plans-huge-neighborhood-market-expansion-2015-6 [businessinsider.com]
I would guess that even small stores still take deliveries by semi-trailer.
I too am sceptical of the practicality of hydrogen as a motor fuel; however, I see some other flaws in your criticism of it. It's true that carbon dioxide can be emitted in the production of hydrogen; if the hydrogen is made by steam reforming of coal, the carbon dioxide produced could be greater than for a comparable diesel system. However, when hydrogen is produced from methane, carbon black (a useful material) is the other product. Apart from the need for carbon black, I'm unsure what advantage there is in using methane in that way, since fuel cells exist that can run directly on methane. Compressed methane is a practical fuel for internal combustion engines, too. Such engines, even when burning hydrogen in air, can produce oxides of nitrogen, which are pollution (this could be avoided by carrying pure oxygen). Nikola Motors doesn't plan to use ICE engines, but rather will use fuel cells and electric motors. The air pollution, if any, will occur where the hydrogen is made. If the hydrogen is produced biologically, or by hydrolysis of water, there might be very little air pollution where it's made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Current_production_methods [wikipedia.org]
I agree that hydrogen can be dangerous, because it can readily burn and can even explode. However, this can mitigated (when it isn't worsened) by the fact that hydrogen gas is less dense than air and therefore tends to rise.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:13AM
Although Nikola is producing both short-haul and long-haul trucks, the focus of the article is more on the long-haul, where, IMO, the technology is quite useless. For short-haul, where the trucks spend most of their time in the city, and tend to spend more time waiting for things, pollution is important. You also have more flexibility to use alternative fuels because you are never all that far from your base. For long-haul, fuel economy and reliability are far more important, availability of unusual fuel is very limited, and the trucks spend much less time waiting (although still more than your average truck driver - or owner - would like). Your example of Walmart Neighborhood Markets, who pull their inventory from central warehouses, are typically short-haul deliveries. While I still wouldn't prefer hydrogen fuel even for short-haul, lots of short-haul trucks and buses are experimenting with natural gas, hybrid-electric, or other alternative fuels, and they're having some success.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday December 05 2016, @01:13AM
Correction, they aren't using a fuel cell, but intend to burn hydrogen in a gas turbine.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 05 2016, @01:14AM
Apparently somebody invented the hydrogen power storage plan I wanted to invent when I had a few hundred million to spare.
ITM Hydrogen Rally | Fully Charged [youtube.com]
TL;DW: You can cut the power companies out by generating your own power. You can even offer standby generation/ grid stabilization services are well.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Monday December 05 2016, @08:24PM
Do they pay you by the lie, or by the word?
The exhaust product of hydrogen fuel is H2O. And nothing else.
Creating it produces Hydrogen and Oxygen, neither of which is released in to the atmosphere. the oxygen is captured for medical and industrial use.
Generating the electricity to do it produces no more or less than any other electricity.