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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday December 05 2016, @03:32AM
Capacity is my guess. My understanding is there's two ways to fuel a natgas vehicle: CNG and LNG. CNG is compressed natural gas, and does not have terribly high pressure. They tried to retrofit a bunch of cars back in the early 00s with that, and it didn't work too well: the storage tanks have to be pretty thick (heavy) but can't store enough fuel to get any decent range. But at least you could refuel your car with your home natural gas supply, using a compressor in your garage. LNG is liquid NG, which is much more highly compressed so that it's now a liquid. This of course makes storage much trickier, for fairly obvious reasons. You need cryogenic tanks and refueling is problematic. According to Wikipedia, it has 2.4 times the energy density of CNG, and about 60% of the energy density of diesel.
So with a LNG-fueled semi, you'll need about double the storage volume for fuel, and those will need to be expensive and hard-to-work-with cryogenic tanks. Good luck with that.
With a CNG-fueled semi, the fuel's not hard to work with, but you'll need about 4 times the storage volume. I'm not sure where all these CNG tanks are supposed to fit on a semi-tractor. There's just not that much extra space on one of those things. You'd probably end up having to extend the wheelbase so you can fit a big-ass tank behind the cab.
For short-haul trucks (the "day trip" kind), the ones used for moving stuff around locally, it might actually make sense because they just don't need to travel that far in a day, plus the pollution thing is more of a problem in urban areas anyway. For the long-haul ones, maybe the extra length you'd need is too much? Not sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @05:23PM
One thing that actually has some traction is mixed-fuel diesels. They inject some CNG in the intake, it's compressed along with the air charge, but only ignites when fuel is injected. While the downside is obviously two types of fuel, with associated refueling hassle, it's a very straightforward and well understood development of standard diesel powerplants, and only part of your fuel supply is replaced with bulky CNG tankage. At cruise, you'll be burning mostly CNG with a bit of diesel (can be below 10%, depending on the particular implementation); for more power, the same CNG is used, with more diesel. And some implementations will run at acceptable power on diesel alone, if you can't refill the CNG tanks.
If one thinks in terms of a "methane economy" rather than the "hydrogen economy", where we use electrolysis + Sabatier process to convert electric (renewable or nuke) power to methane, rather than using electrolysis alone to convert electric power to hydrogen, and where both systems are bootstrapped using fossil-fuel natural gas (as-is for methane, or steam reforming for hydrogen), mixed-fuel diesels are a really attractive transitional tech.