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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:52PM
Interesting, but I wonder how the costs compare to Wrightspeed
http://www.wrightspeed.com/ [wrightspeed.com]
Regardless, happy there are more players in this sector.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:57PM
the range on these trucks may allow them to make it from on hydrogen refuelling station to next, but I still don't understand why diesel-electric hybrids aren't a better bet for the short-to-medium term.
Especially for things like garbage trucks, with continuous start-stop, high-torque and plenty of opportunity for regenerative braking.
Retro-fitting existing petrol/gas stations to sell hydrogen won't happen soon.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by chucky on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:36PM
The garbage trucks in our area have a hydraulic press inside, so I tend to think the electric part of the diesel-electric would just become extra weight. This town also bought hybrid buses -they start/stop a lot too- and then it turned out you can't really turn off A/C for most of the year. I'm not even sure that the possible advantage of regenerative braking will ever justify the costs of the bus. Hybrids hardly ever fit to anything but a very narrow use case.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:45PM
You're thinking myopically with your "use case" jargon.
Think of the big picture -- the quicker we as a nation can wean ourselves from the oil, the quicker we can destroy Saudi Arabia. I'm getting a hard-on now just imagining the destruction of Saudi Arabia. By the time those goat-fuckers start fleeing, Europe will have its doors closed to Islamic savages, and Islamic refugees will be shot through the border fences.
O' Jesus Christ, please make it so!
(Score: 1) by chucky on Sunday December 04 2016, @11:02PM
You as a nation - I assume you're American. I happen to live in a state with a border fence. However, my comment was about the diesel-electric option. It's great for trains for sure, but I doubt it would be so good for garbage trucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @06:34AM
We have the largest already tapped natural gas fields on the planet.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 05 2016, @04:47PM
You'd think that, but the reality is sadly lacking. My numbers are doubtless badly misremembered, but the gist is that for natural gas use to reduce the rate of global warming, you have to keep leakage below 5-10%. (methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and generally ends it's time in the atmosphere by breaking down into... CO2)
Unfortunately, real world estimates put the leakage from current infrastructure at closer to 20%. So sadly, despite lower direct carbon emissions per watt, with current infrastructure natural gas is worse than coal with respect to global warming.
LNG could offer less leakage, but only if you assume that it's "bottled" at the well head, rather than being shipped through existing pipelines and bottled nearer where it's to be used.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:20PM
So the first name company and the last name company are in the same field, selling basically variations of electric vehicles. How isn't this a legal dispute already?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:38PM
Because, unlike the Beatles and Apple, [wikipedia.org] people in the automotive industry behave honorably and don't insult the intelligence of their users in knowing that those users can tell the difference between a sedan and a semi and a first name vs. last name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @07:19PM
heh good one.
If automotive industry were not evil, you would be able to replace a failed light yourself, in under 5 minutes. You know, like you did back in the 1970s.
Also, have you seen the plastic caps over the battery? Is that possible that a 5$ micro sd card is sold in a sturdier plastic package than the caps in a car who is supposed to last at least 10yrs?
If I ever seen a signature of Evil, it is that.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:56PM
Tesla Motors doesn't sell semi-trailers, and Nikola, I gather, doesn't sell automobiles. However Tesla Motors has announced that it is "working on heavy-duty trucks and buses."
https://www.trucks.com/2016/07/21/tesla-electric-trucks-buses/ [trucks.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @11:49PM
Do you have insider info? Like, is Musk looking at buying this new Nikola company?? He already bought Solar City, might as well take on some more debt while he's at it.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday December 05 2016, @01:39AM
I'm no insider; I don't even know much about the topic.
An earlier report about Nikola said that methane, rather than a hydrogen, would be the fuel for Nikola's trucks:
Nikola’s trucks will be powered by an electric-natural gas hybrid system, similar to what drives electric-diesel locomotives. The truck will contain a large natural gas tank system that will fuel a turbine, which in turn will power the electric motor.
-- https://www.trucks.com/2016/07/21/tesla-electric-trucks-buses/ [trucks.com]
That would have been a more workable choice, in my opinion.
The company's CEO speculated that Tesla Motors would use a storage battery:
If Tesla were to put a full megawatt battery in the truck, 11 times the size of what goes into its more than the P90D sports sedan, there still would be only get enough power to go four or five hours, far below what is needed for long-haul trucking, [Nikola CEO] Milton said.
-- https://www.trucks.com/2016/07/21/nikola-tesla-trucks/ [trucks.com]
I suppose there could be synergism in combining the companies. For instance if they're thinking of making hydrogen from solar electricity, SolarCity makes PV cells.
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday December 05 2016, @12:09AM
Natgas is cheap and plentiful and pollutes much less than diesel. Why not shuffle some of those tax credits around to encourage natgas trucks, and fuel stations for refueling?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(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.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Ayn Anonymous on Monday December 05 2016, @08:42AM
For a start, hydrogen might be abundant, but it is not a primary fuel. It had to be turned into a useable fuel by employing methods that involve using other fuels. Electrolysis is the main method used to extract hydrogen from water, and most electricity is currently produced using fossil fuels.*
Never mind, let's ignore this energy usage for now and continue making hydrogen. Once we have extracted some pure hydrogen from water (or natural gas, as if often the case - but shhh! don't tell anyone!) we will notice that it is incredibly light and fluffy. To get it into a liquid form we'll have to compress it using a compressor. 10,000psi should do it so that it's usable for a car. Of course, it'll need to be stored in a very thick and heavy high pressure tank.
Okay, so now we've arrived at the stage where we've burned up loads of coal, natural gas or even uranium making water into liquid hydrogen fuel. We have compressed it and stuffed it inside a heavy steel tank ready for using. Can we just store it there until we might need to use it? Well, actually this is also problematic as hydrogen has a boiling point of -253C — which is damned cold by most accounts. Anything above this and it will boil off and evaporate. So forget filling up the tank of your nifty "green" hydrogen car and leaving it sitting on the drive for a few days — you need to use up your fuel before it disappears, which it typically does at a rate of 3-4% a day.
Does it still seem so attractive? Leave you car for a couple of weeks while you go on holiday and you'll likely come back to an empty tank.
Anyway, assuming none of the above really bothers us, what about our good friend the Second Law of Thermodynamics — you know, that old Cassandra party-pooper who endlessly repeats that energy is lost at every stage of conversion, increasing entropy as it does so — does he have anything to say about hydrogen powered motoring? Well yes, quite a lot actually. It turns out that using electrolysis to create hydrogen, compressing it and storing it gives it an energy return (EROEI) of about 0.25. Yep, that means we have to put in four units of energy to get one back.
If anyone still thinks this is a good idea go and grab the nearest six-year old and ask them to explain it to you.
But ... assuming you don't care about the energy loss, the burning of fossil fuels to turn natural gas feedstock — sorry, water — into hydrogen, the compression costs, the storage losses and the fact that your hydrogen car weighs twice as much as a normal one due to the giant onboard tank — assuming none of that matters — where are you going to fill it up? According to the US Department of Energy there are 31 stations nationwide where you can fill up your vehicle. Yes, that's 31 that have hydrogen, compared with about 90,000 that have gasoline. As far as I can tell, there are around two in the UK "with another four planned". Yep, the hydrogen future is already here.**
So, for our hydrogen fuelled cars — which will inevitably also feature lithium ion batteries — to be usable to those people who don't live across the road from a hydrogen fuelling station and who like to travel more than 10 miles from their homes, we'll need to retrofit more or less the entire energy infrastructure.
Need I go on ...?
So, here we are, still waiting for the great hydrogen future ("It's everywhere! The only pollution is water vapour! The fossil fuel industry doesn't want this to take off!") It probably has some industrial application that could be useful but if we think that hydrogen is a straight substitute for petrol we're going to be sorely disappointed.
In the meantime, here's a "zero emissions" train that's just hit the tracks in Germany. Apparently it is entirely pollution free and "runs on water" (like Jesus, but faster?***) Want to play a fun game and lose all you friends in the process? Every time one of them posts a link to the train on Facebook, leave a simple reply saying 'BS' and link to this post. It works wonders — I've already lost several friends as a result, and expect to lose more in the future.
But don't mind me, I'm just a dumbo, and I'm 10% hydrogen.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 05 2016, @10:01AM
Diesel can work, but we essentially need nuclear power to synthesize enough to make it carbon neutral.
(Score: 1) by Ayn Anonymous on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:06AM
"nuclear power"
Are you mentally disturbed ?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:44AM
Nuclear reactions are much more energetic (6 orders of magnitude) than chemical reactions. Unfortunately, many current reactors only burn about 1% of their fuel.
-Source [ossfoundation.us]
That produces two problems:
If we are able to produce reactors that instead burn 99% of the fuel, those problems go away. However, there are still weapons proliferation concerns.
However the million to one reduction in material handling (per unit energy) gives you some counter-intuitive results. If you burn fossil fuels like coal, you will always have some contamination. The counter-intuitive result is that the waste from coal plants can have more radioactive energy than waste from nuclear power plants (assuming 99% fuel use) (per unit of energy produced).
There is also the problem that Thorium is considered a waste product from rare earth mining. It is currently thrown away (as tailings) in the US, in part due to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that requires the regulation of Thorium and Uranium. However, due to blind opposition form the Green movement, no politician wants to move to regulate Thorium in a way that it can actually be used. China dominates the production of rare-earth minerals because they are not afraid of storing the Thorium they find.