Eight shareholders - Air Liquide, Daimler, Linde, OMV, Shell, Total Energies, Hyundai, Hy24 - have joined forces in a joint venture to expand the network for hydrogen filling stations in Germany. They want to accelerate the ramp-up of hydrogen and offer maintenance from a single source. Diplomatisches Magazin spoke to Sybille Riepe, Communications Manager of H2 MOBILITY Germany, about this..
DM: Ms Riepe, do hydrogen cars have advantages over electric cars?
Sybille Riepe: Hydrogen has enormous advantages over battery electromobility when it comes to longer ranges. And when the issue of time plays a role, for example in taxi fleets, for which long charging times are simply unfavourable. Or when the issue of payload plays a role. Because with battery electromobility it's like this: larger vehicles need larger batteries, and the greenhouse gas emissions footprint is correspondingly larger. And the bigger the battery, the heavier it becomes. You can imagine that if you want to fit a 40-tonne truck with batteries, then the batteries alone weigh six to eight tonnes. If up to a fifth of the load is needed for the battery, correspondingly more trucks are needed on the road to be able to transport the same amount of goods.
DM: What about hydrogen cars?
Sybille Riepe: The hydrogen truck fills up with 80-100kg. The total weight of the hydrogen and fuel cell does not reduce the payload significantly in comparison.
DM: What about the range of hydrogen vehicles?
Sybille Riepe: The range of hydrogen cars is comparable to conventional diesel and petrol cars, as is the refuelling time: 3-5 minutes of refuelling for a range of 500-700 kilometres.
DM: Experts say hydrogen is inefficient and expensive because an enormous amount of energy is needed to produce it.
Sybille Riepe: When it comes to hydrogen, you have to look at the overall context: The application of hydrogen in mobility is only a small part of the areas of application. We can use hydrogen for various purposes, for example in industry to melt steel. Or for the chemical industry.
This puts the issue of efficiency into perspective, but also the issue of "How much will hydrogen cost us?" Because the price will fall because of the quantities. At the moment hydrogen is very expensive because we don't yet have the large electrolysis capacities to produce it from renewable energy. This will change, as will the costs for the filling station infrastructure, when it comes to its use in mobility.
It is assumed that as early as 2025 the price of hydrogen will be €5. With one kilo of hydrogen, you can travel about 100 kilometres by car. Even today, you pay less at the filling stations than for petrol and diesel. In the future, we will actually have to pay even more for diesel and petrol at the filling station, because taxes will rise due to the CO2 levies.
DM: But there aren't very many hydrogen filling stations yet?
Sybille Riepe: With hydrogen, the filling station infrastructure is still being built up. The big difference is that we need far fewer hydrogen filling stations than charging stations. Logically, because we fill up in three minutes, just like at conventional filling stations, and then we're gone again. So we don't block the system for several hours. The large metropolitan regions are accessible for hydrogen cars, as are the connecting axes. The infrastructure has to be prepared in advance so that the market ramp-up can take place. We are currently at this threshold. So the ramp-up is taking place everywhere, both in the production of green hydrogen and in the vehicles and infrastructure.
DM: Where does the hydrogen that is currently needed come from?
Sybille Riepe: In Germany, there is currently not enough green hydrogen to supply all our filling stations. Today, we only produce about 28 % green hydrogen. The rest is still produced from natural gas or is the waste product from the chemical industry that would otherwise remain unused. The goal is to be able to offer one hundred percent green hydrogen by 2030. What is very important is that we get away from small plants and can produce large quantities of hydrogen in large plants in order to get the price down so that we get cheap hydrogen.
Interview Marie Wildermann
Further information at: www.h2-mobility.de