The latest edition of the Reimagining Mobility Podcast series. I'm here with John Kassab. John is a technical expert in fuel cells. John, tell us a little bit. Fuel cells been coming and going for the last I don't know. Some people tell me almost 50 years. I don't think it's quite that long. No, it's it's fifth year. Okay. So there you go. So I'll say it's been a it's been a long running joke for over 50 years that fuel cells have only been five years away from production.
And what I can tell you is that in the 17 years or so that I've been working in the fuel cell space, products are actually here now. So it's actually arrived, right? You can actually go you can order something on the fuel cell in it. It will show up in a reasonable amount of time. So as someone who's been working in this space as a consultant, it's a very exciting time right now. Good, good.
So it is is it now also to stay you think, or is it we have something now, but maybe it goes away again before it really comes back full storm. I mean, we've EVs, we've had that right over the years. What is your take on that? I would say that it feels like it's definitely going to be part and certainly in the vehicle space, part of the light duty and heavy duty world going forward.
Fuel cells have certain advantages over battery only vehicles for sure, but they're that adds some complexity, right, to have the fuel cell system, to have the hydrogen fueling system on a vehicle. So it may not be the right mix for all light duty vehicles, for example, going forward. You know. I don't know.
So for us at all, it's actually a very exciting time because there lots of options in play right now and there isn't yet a convergence on a single best solution than where there had been earlier, a convergence on internal combustion engines for example. And so it's a it's a very unsettling time in some ways. But again, as somebody who works in the space as an engineer, I think it's great that lots of stuff going on. Uncertainty always demands for a solution, and that's what engineers are for.
Exactly. So if you had to if you had to take, let's say, the top three challenges we have, let's just put it this way, making fuel cells on a cost parity with with diesel, let's not go with vs, but with diesel. Okay. What still has to happen? Yeah, I would say certainly one part of the picture is that as production volumes increase. Right.
That will help bring down costs of the fuel cell systems and all of the other kind of vehicle level components, both fuel cell lives, leverage a lot of the existing infrastructure. Right. So you still have, you know, an axle or similar electric machine for traction motors. You do still need some battery capacity. Obviously not as big a pack as if it's battery only, but they all have a battery pack on them. Similar power electronics.
So so the fuel cell vehicle space is certainly able to leverage what's going on in the broader EV world. The second big challenge really has to do with the on vehicle hydrogen storage. So right now, the best solution is nominally 700 bar pressure vessels and there's been a move of the carbon fiber composites. It's not really a technology where the costs come down a lot as the production volumes increase, unfortunately.
So I know that's an area of active research to try to find something that has better energy storage density. And then the third is kind of the related infrastructure question. You know, there's one part where does the hydrogen come from? How do we make sure that that's a sustainable fuel rather than having it come from fossil fuels? And then also, how can we make sure that if you have a fuel cell vehicle, you can actually go and refill it? Right.
So here in Michigan, where we are, there aren't fueling stations. So you would get like 300 miles out of your Toyota Mirai and then you're kind of stuck until you can, you know, arrange for more fuel. But in California, you know, I know we've been looking at our California Tech Center. There are like three or four hydrogen fueling stations are close enough by the coast. You know, you could easily have a vehicle there and not worry about it. Right, you see.
Let's talk about stationary power for a moment. Sure. Do you see an advantage for the fuel cell technology for the medium and heavy duty truck space? Mm hmm. Because volumes or adaptation or necessary technologies, etc., etc., can be shared between. Between the transportation space and the stationary power space. Yeah. Or is it to separate? And you can't really. Yeah. They need, you know, they need this stack, they need hydrogen. But that's when it ends and everything is off. I know. I'm just.
Yeah. So for stationary power, it's reliability and uptime. Right. Are the especially if it's your primary source of power and then you're effectively using the grid as your backup. There have been systems for sale for a while that take that approach, but it's more akin to like heavy duty vehicle applications in terms of the number of operating hours that are necessary. Right. So for trucks, we've been talking like 30,000 our lifetime.
I think for Marine and locomotive applications, we're looking at 40 to 50000 hours. And that's really more where I would want stationary power to be. You know, it's 8500 to 9, not quite 9000 hours a year if it's round the clock. Right. And so if you want five years, that's effectively 45000 hours operating life. So it needs to be that reliable. Now, for stationary systems, you know, certainly people have been looking at to leverage the advances there.
But the there's a high temperature fuel cell technology called solid oxide. And one of the big advantage of solid oxide systems is that they're more fuel flexible. So you can start with something like natural gas because the oxygen comes across to where the fuel is. So you can oxidize carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide in addition to hydrogen to water and make energy out of that. And so when we're thinking of stationary applications, I would tend to think solid oxide systems rather than.
Okay. But do you see PEM more than on the transportation? Yeah. Yeah, it's lower temperature, it starts up faster and it has a better profile for mobile applications for sure. So for some of the applications that I've I've talked to people and they gave me this quite doomsday scenario, but scenario of the truck, is that a trucking stop? He or she has the fuel cell running because it's cold and they want to they want to stay warm. So the engine the fuel cell engine is running. Yep.
Is generating water. Mm hmm. And in the morning, where he or she wants to get out of the truck camp because there's just ice everywhere. What? Yeah. Reality or just somebody making up something or truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. I guess. I guess I haven't really thought through that scenario. I know fuel cells generate a lot of water. Right. That is the main thing. And with trucks, you wouldn't even necessarily want to route the exhaust. Let me think about that again.
So so with trucks especially, you would need a water traffic, the exhaust to manage that. But yeah, I guess there is a risk that you could end up with it icing up under the truck. Yeah. I haven't really thought about that before. Yeah. Yeah, that was just an interesting comment.
I'm like and I mean, I know, I know a little bit the has to be dangerous in fuel cells and then I want to sort of buzz like yeah, I mean, that truck is essentially I mean, I've seen them addressed areas they run, quote unquote, all night because of the mandatory rest time, whatever it is or but it runs. And again, if you're in a let's say, Michigan in the winter and it's it's cold, it's ten degrees. Yeah, that thing runs has to warm up generates water.
How is absolutely and I think this gets to where it would be a hybridized powertrain so one thing you could do is instead of running the fuel cell overnight where you're using, you know, like a 300 kilowatt power plant to generate the ten kilowatts of hotel load that are needed, use the battery pack instead to manage your overnight hotel loads.
And so then you're not generating all that water for if the fuel cell does need to spin up to kind of charge the batteries up overnight, it can do that without like shaking the car. Brake fuel cells are very quiet. It's just compressor noise primarily. So it's a thing where it could start and then go through its full freeze cycle. So it might not have to run overnight and be generating all that water while the truck is just sitting okay.
So that's probably how I would manage it from a controller point of view. Yeah. Engineering on the fly right now. Yeah. MTI Special Good. If you look at cost here, a lot of people say, hey, a fuel cell. No, we believe it's here. There are some application, but boy, it's just so cost prohibitive. Yeah. And and it's just like another almost like a hybrid vehicle, right, between a battery electric system and a diesel or gasoline engine system. So a traditional hybrid.
It is a hybrid. True. It is probably more complex than a pure bev. But what do you see from a cost parity? Is it is it. Sure. There is right now a discrepancy, but we see in X years that this is a parody and then, you know, how do you see it? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say our internal AVL analysis is that the fuel cell stack and system costs will come down pretty significantly, especially as the volumes increase.
I would say that the Department of Energy regularly funds cost, analyzes and it's the same story. You know, there are certain fixed costs with the materials that are hard to get around, you know, platinum costs, what it costs. And so the big challenge is, well, how can I make my fuel cell stack durable over the life I want, maybe with using less platinum at the beginning. So I still have the right end of life
performance. Right. And I know GM, for example, has been doing a lot of work in that area to try to get the amount of platinum I'd heard for their light duty system. Maybe comparable to what's in a three way cab. Okay. So in terms of first cost, I think there is a pathway to getting something that's comparable, especially if you think of, say, with heavy duty vehicles, the diesel engine with all the aftertreatment that's required, especially to meet ultra low NOx requirements.
Right. You know, criteria, pollution, emissions from a fuel cell, heavy powertrain. So you've simplified your life tremendously. That's the other part of the picture, though, of course, is the fuel cost. And, you know, again, dear, we have shown that there are pathways to getting hydrogen fuel at something in the 3 to $5 per kilogram, which is roughly a gallon of gasoline equivalent range. But it's nowhere near that now.
And I would say that is going to continue to be a barrier to adoption, except in areas where it's almost required based on local emissions regs. And you see the barrier from a from a fuel cost perspective, the barrier is in infrastructure and people willing to invest in production. The government willing to incentivize it.
Yeah. So I mean again, certainly in the US Department of Energy has been very good understanding that it's a, you know, you have the vehicles and the fueling infrastructure both have to take the step forward together. And so there's certainly a place for government incentives to help that happen. I know in California, the California Energy Commission had committed over $100 million to build out a network of hydrogen fueling stations.
So it's not every fueling station, but it's no harder than if you had like a light duty diesel vehicle. All right. You kind of have to know where the stations are, but you're never that far from one. So it's that kind of support from a fueling infrastructure point of view. I think people know what the technology is to get to sustainable hydrogen production, right? So using solar or wind energy, using the electrolyzer to make the hydrogen, it's just expensive to compress hydrogen.
It's a small molecule. It doesn't like to get squeezed down to 700 bar for transport and so that definitely adds to the costs. And it also has to do with how much hydrogen are you dealing with? I mean, hydrogen is produced in large volumes right now, mostly from methane for use in refineries.
And so there are places to say, like near Rotterdam in the Netherlands, in Houston, where there are hydrogen pipeline networks, because it's just it's used enough regionally where it's worth that investment. Does that mean that there going to be hydrogen lines to southeast Michigan or even to Chicago? I don't know. If there are still. Be some amount of local transport that's required that may add to the cost.
Our strategy or a consulting organization put a report together, I think a year or two ago talking about this cost parity and what it takes from a complete vehicle system. Right. So they looked at the cost of a vehicle, the cost of the other components of the technologies in it and the cost of the fuel that you just mentioned. And I remember reading that and walking away from the report and thinking there's a lot of assumptions in there, which every report does.
But at the end of the day, I felt like there was a lot dependent on government incentivizing it and for government punishing with either additional costs or taxes or whatever on somebody that continues to use diesel or gasoline. Right. Do you see that as as a as a prohibit or in this country where we're less maybe focused on punishing motor users, at least more or less until till now.
Yeah. Yeah. Versus Europe, that is much more willing to to use that, let's say that instrument that they have right. Pushing people into a new direction, into a new technology. I'm going to take that in two parts. Right. So in the light duty market, where in the US it's almost all gasoline fueled vehicles right now. I mean, obviously it is, but gasoline, fuel, I think it may be easier to create incentives in the way that California has started to do. Right.
Looking ahead to their 2035 deadline, effectively, and there are several other states that have already announced are going to follow California's lead. So that is going to create a strong regulatory incentive to to look at other options. And so and it feels like there are enough other options that are kind of ready to go where that transition might be smoother. And then go. You know, 13 years is a long time and not that long at all.
I mean, it's effectively two product cycles in the light duty business, right? It's a challenge as you start getting to heavy duty is that diesel really makes the economy go right now. And it's a very energy dense fuel. You know, there's an existing network for it and I think it's going to be slower to provide that kind of incentive to transition everyone over. But, you know, I know people are thinking about it. Right.
I've seen at a conference earlier this year in marine applications, people are beginning to look at, you know, even leaving aside transitioning from bunker fuel to diesel, moving from diesel to some other kind of combustion fuel that would have a lower CO2 emissions. And certainly in the trucking world, there've been lots of announcements and partnerships announced over the last few years to kind of look at that transition as well.
I'd say more so in Europe than here, but there's been a lot of interest in hydrogen fueled internal combustion engines, especially for heavy duty applications. I see that as kind of a transitional technology approach, but it would help create demand for the fueling infrastructure. So I think it's going to be slower. But also if people hang on to commercial vehicles and for a lot longer, like locomotives have a 50 year life. Right. So it's not even if that, you know, 2035, it's a hard stop.
They're going to be lots of diesel locomotives on the rails for decades to come. Right. But I think it's worth looking at, you know, and I know CARB does this. I'm sure EPA does as well. Like, well, what are the major contributors and let's work on those and squeeze those down first. Right. And then we can you know, when things like locomotives start to become a large piece of the carbon pie that we can, you know, bring our attention to them. Right. Right. Okay. Last question.
So you've been involved in fuel cells, like you said, for many, many years. Yet what's the most exciting thing? You look forward to in five years related to fuel cell technology? Oh, yeah. So I would say kind of the continued development of fuel cell powertrains and getting them integrated into vehicles and really starting to get the technology into real people's hands. So you can see it right. I'm just thinking of like the Ford F-150 lightning. They they literally cannot make them fast enough.
Right. People are just very excited about them. And and I think Ford was been very pleasantly surprised with the demand, quite unpleasantly surprised because they aren't prepared to handle it right. And so I'm thinking that, you know, there's just a lot of potential advantages of fuel cell vehicles. I mean, I'm just thinking, for example, with transit busses, right. One of the issues is occasionally busses have to idle at the end of the line and they have a diesel engine in them.
And so it's just kind of like rattling their, you know, for some minutes before it turns around and does its return round. Like, well, fuel cell vehicles are silent and are much quieter diesels right now. And you have this option of, well, you could put it into a battery only mode for a bit if you didn't have a large power demand from needing to run the AC or something like that.
And I think for urban environments, that is potentially a much friendlier application just from a noise profile point of view, even leaving aside, you know, the benefits to criteria, pollutant emissions and so forth. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that it it like I said at the beginning, I'd say one of the really exciting things is that, you know, the, like the real products and that we're really moving from pre development into product development type of activities.
And so that puts it into a much more exciting world from an engineering. Yeah, I can feel your excitement. Very good. Good. Thanks, John, for your time. Yeah, my pleasure. And thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening to Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you'd like to episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.