Cars with hydrogen internal combustion engines won’t to pose a threat to the dominance of battery electrics, dashing the hopes of automotive lubricant blenders that the future of transportation will still need engine oils.
Few companies have experimented with hydrogen ICEs. Toyota’s Mirai has not bee the success it had hoped for. It was abandoned by the International Olympic Committee as the car of the games. To add insult to injury, Ukrainian soldiers repurposed one as an improvized explosive device.
According to a report issued this week by U.K.-based technology research company IDTechEx, the physics of hydrogen make it unlikely that cars can use it as a very-low emissions combustion fuel.
Hydrogen internal combustion engines use the gas instead of conventional fossil fuels. This is attractive to original equipment manufacturers, who only need to tweak existing ICE technology to accommodate the gas’s properties. Lube blenders would also like hydrogen ICEs to take off because they still have moving parts that need to be lubricated. Drivers would like the refuel times comparable to fossil fuel ICEs.
The physics are not in hydrogen’s favor. Despite it being the most abundant element in the universe, releasing about 40 kilowatt hours of energy when combusted in oxygen (three times more than diesel) it’s also the lightest the lightest and has very low volumetric density.
In short, to make it a useful fuel it has to be compressed into a liquid. Even then, it has a quarter of the energy density of diesel.
“This means that for a passenger car to run on hydrogen combustion and achieve a range comparable to a petrol/diesel ICE, it would need an enormous storage vessel,” according to IDTechEx. A hydrogen ICE car would need a cylindrical tank four times the size of a gasoline car’s tank, which can be any shape, to match range.