Stellantis, the automotive large behind Chrysler, Citroen, Fiat, Jeep and Peugeot, is pulling out of hydrogen. The corporate mentioned it’s killing its gas cell growth program within the face of “restricted availability of hydrogen refueling infrastructure, excessive capital necessities and the necessity for stronger shopper buying incentives.” To place that one other means, it’s realized hydrogen EVs are dealing with the identical set of challenges it’s not been in a position to overcome within the final two or three many years.
It’s a stark shift in tone from January 2024, when the corporate promised to roll out a fleet of economic gas cell automobiles. Stellantis sells a lot of Europe’s hottest panel vans together with the Citroen Jumper, Fiat Ducato, Opel Movano and Peugeot Boxer. Again then, it mentioned we’d see hydrogen variations of all these automobiles (in addition to its smaller siblings) with most ranges of 500km (310 miles).
The choice to tug the plug got here comparatively late, with the corporate saying it was resulting from start manufacturing at its crops in France and Poland “this summer time.” It added the choice to kill the vary is not going to impression staffing in manufacturing or R&D, with workers transferred to different initiatives. It would, nevertheless, should delicately negotiate its exit with Symbio, the gas cell maker it purchased a one-third share of again in 2023.
Stellantis isn’t the primary firm that pledged to place its weight behind gas cells solely to tug again. Toyota has thrown a variety of time, effort and cash behind hydrogen, believing gas cells could be preferable to battery electrical automobiles (BEVs). Sadly, as time progressed, the corporate has needed to cede an increasing number of of the market to batteries, and solely advertises its third-generation gas cell as an influence unit for heavy industrial automobiles.
Hydrogen was, and has been for a while, an article of religion for fossil gas firms, the automobile business and even some nations that lack their very own vitality reserves. In spite of everything, the promise of with the ability to pull (theoretically limitless), emission-free vitality out of water is the stuff of goals. To not point out, it requires a lot of the identical information and infrastructure utilized by the standard oil and fuel business, and refueling can solely happen at a business website.
Had hydrogen made extra of an impression, it will have probably preserved the established order or one thing very similar to it, for these industries lengthy into the longer term. However whereas the hope was that hydrogen might be a cleaner, greener substitute for oil and fuel, its inherent flaws all the time made {that a} non-starter.
As an example, hydrogen is much much less vitality dense than oil and fuel, and much much less bodily dense — it’s so liable to leaking that it’s a must to go above and past to seal it in. It’s tough to mass produce cleanly, particularly if you wish to energy each automobile on the planet, except you employ a unclean course of just like the steam reformation of methane. So, quite than shifting away from fossil fuels and emissions, you’d be additional entrenching them into the system and including to the issue.
And when you did need to simply use renewable vitality to tug hydrogen from water, you then’d require an unprecedented quantity of funding. Again in 2021, I requested Tim Lord, who had beforehand been accountable for the UK’s decarbonization technique, about that kind of industrial-scale hydrogen technology. He mentioned that you simply’d basically must double your entire electrical energy technology output to get shut.
That’s earlier than you get to the opposite components, like hydrogen’s effectivity as a retailer of vitality or the funding essential to equip each fuel station on the planet with a hydrogen tank. Which isn’t probably going to repay on condition that Toyota’s Mirai, arguably the flagship hydrogen gas cell EV, has solely offered 28,000 fashions since its launch in 2014. Within the US market, there’s solely the Mirai, the Hyundai Nexo and the Honda CR-V e-FCEV knocking round, nothing in comparison with what number of BEVs are on sale. I feel it’s time for everybody to confess that we’re performed with hydrogen gas cell EVs and focus their consideration elsewhere.