Why Benz prefers fuel cell to battery power

Forget about batteries, says Benz alternative energy expert -- hydrogen is available here and now
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The long-awaited 'breakthrough' in battery technology may still be some way off, but we have all the technology we need right now to harness hydrogen, says Peter Froeschle of Mercedes-Benz. And he should know, since he's the company's Senior Manager for Strategic Energy Projects and Market Development for Fuel Cell and Electric Vehicles.

Froeschle spoke with motoring.com.au later in the evening after Daimler AG Chairman, Dr Dieter Zetsche, had called for the automotive industry to get behind the establishment of a global hydrogen economy. Like his boss, Froeschle is right behind hydrogen as the fuel for the future, but his zeal goes even further.

"We have to support this energy - change thinking," he said.

Among other reasons for his support, hydrogen could end Germany's dependency on nuclear power without any ill effects. According to Froeschle, the Fukushima powerplant incident had merely served to "accelerate" the recently announced move to shut down nuclear plants in Germany.

Whatever the fundamental reasoning, Germany has set in place a 12-year plan to decommission all its nuclear powerplants. As each powerplant reaches the end of its effective working life, it will be taken offline in a phased strategy.

Renewable energy systems, with hydrogen as a chemical means of storing that energy, can be a relatively cost-effective and easily implemented means to replace the nuclear plants within that 12-year timeframe, said Froeschle, who appears highly motivated to see the world move into a new, cleaner space.

Every counterargument the motoring.com.au correspondent put to Froeschle was hit to the boundary. Hydrogen is hard to store and transport? Not if you compress it, he said.

"When it's under pressure [the tank] is like a glass bottle," he said. "Hydrogen cannot pass through."

Germany has massive underground tanks used to store compressed natural gas, Froeschle continued, and these could just as easily store hydrogen.

Froeschle explained that these tanks, up to 100 metres high, but buried below ground, were used to hold reserves of CNG for those occasions when the Russians, who supply Germany with its natural gas, are being a bit bolshy about the price. Yet another example of the way ubiquitous hydrogen could provide energy security for countries.

As Germany moves away from nuclear power, it will be more reliant on renewable energy, but there's a question arising with that. How does the country store baseload power for when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?

"If we go more and more to renewables, storage is very important," Froeschle explained, but if homes start to migrate back to electric stoves, electric hot water and electric heating, there'll be no further need for CNG to be piped into the homes, nor the need to store that gas elsewhere. Instead, the existing infrastructure for CNG could be co-opted by Hydrogen.

Leaving aside the broader implications of hydrogen in society, what about in fuel cell vehicles, we asked? These cars have been traditionally expensive to develop and build, highly dependent on an expensive metal, platinum, for the fuel cell stack.

"By 2025, fuel cell technology will be comparable with combustion engine technology," Froeschle replied to the question of purchase price.

Asked how that was likely to be possible, Froeschle explained that Benz was working on achieving similar operational results from fuel cell stacks using much lower quantities of platinum — and it doesn't end there.

"In the long-term future the idea is to have no platinum at all," he said.

Froeschle admits there's a need to bring down the price of fuel cell vehicles — and it needs to happen fairly quickly.

"No one will come to you and say: 'I want a very expensive car, because I'm environmentally friendly'," he said.

Some of the means of cutting development and manufacturing costs come from perhaps unexpected quarters.

"All this electrification of the car is helping," Froeschle said. "It helps to bring down the cost dramatically."

'Electrification' can mean such things as electrically-assisted steering systems, for instance, now linked into the vehicle's electronic network, but there's also R&D money to be saved in software, Froeschle explained. In modern cars, the software used to control drive systems and regulate energy flow is modular. Newer versions of the software can be developed from older versions — for considerably lower cost than developing a new software package from the ground up.

So, the automotive equivalent of DOS 3.0 has grown, over time, into DOS 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0? And that makes the development cost for a fuel cell vehicle progressively cheaper?

"Absolutely, yes," Froeschle replied.