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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) 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.