Hyundai hydrogen upgrade highlights the real problem with climate action

Big business like carmakers, governments and corporates all struggle being green. Sounding green is dead easy, but accountants don’t get it…

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Best example of the massive speed hump on the road between here and future green utopia, is buried between the lines of this recent press release from Hyundai Australia.

Hyundai’s been dancing around with its hand on hydrogen’s arse for something like 15 years now.

Back in 2010, I was producing a mini documentary on Australian resources watching iron ore from the Pilbara get turned into steel, and then cars in South Korea, before heading home. While there, I drove a prototype ix35 SUV powered by a fuel cell, inside a super-secret R&D facility outside Seoul. This is 12 years ago.

Fuel cells sound very hi-tech, but they’re really just a black box where hydrogen gas combines with oxygen gas, and makes water, a process which releases energy in the form of electricity.

So it’s just a box, inside which anti-electrolysis happens.

A fuel cell-powered car is therefore just like an EV that you’d see on the road today, only it doesn’t have an enormous battery. The electricity comes from hydrogen, which is compressed to about 700 atmospheres, in a tank. 

A fuel cell EV poops out chemically pure water, and it can be refuelled in minutes - provided you can find a bowser labelled ‘hydrogen’. Good luck with that, at least here.

It’s yet another reason to be sceptical when you hear the words ‘net zero’ or ‘zero emissions’ in the car industry…

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There are three hydrogen refuellers I know of in Australia - one of them is at Hyundai’s head office in Sydney. They’re going to upgrade it. Terribly late; it’s hardly a management priority, but yay.

Now, forgive me if hydrogen sounds like green utopia. It’s really not. Hydrogen is one of the filthiest gasses - in practise. Hydrogen gas is very rare on earth. Hydrogen - the element - is everywhere, but the gas is rare. They’re different things. So, if you want the gas, you generally have to make it.

And this is where ‘green utopia’ crumbles, today, and for many years to come. You can, of course, make hydrogen by sticking electricity in water. Kids do it at school, in science. Lesson 15: Electrolysis. But the cheapest way to make hydrogen, for industry, is simply to crack methane gas with superheated steam, twice. 

Methane is the cheap, raring-to-go gas.

Methane is, of course, natural gas. The stuff that comes out of the gas main. It’s a fundamental hydrocarbon, composed of just carbon and hydrogen. You crack it with superheated steam, twice, and you get hydrogen gas, plus a shit-tonne of CO2, and you just throw the CO2 away, into the sky, because, hey, it has no commercial value, and of course you keep the hydrogen.

Plus, obviously, you need to burn something to generate the heat to get the steam up to 1100 degrees C for stage one of the cracking process. So that means even more CO2.

Importantly, 95 per cent of the world’s hydrogen gas production in 2020 was made in this entirely filthy, debauchery of CO2 production. That’s about 70 million tonnes of hydrogen gas. And you get 11 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of hydrogen gas - so that’s about 770 million tonnes of waste CO2, not including the CO2 produced from burning shit to get the process hot enough to run.

Liquid (compressed) hydrogen must come from electrolysis if it’s to be actually ‘green’, otherwise it comes from cracking methane.

So, obviously, this is one of the filthiest processes imaginable, from a climate perspective, even if your Nexo SUV or Xcient truck manages only to emit chemically pure water while you drive it down the road.

There’s another problem. Second Law of Thermodynamics says we’re all in a big ‘available energy’ casino, with only two house rules: You have to play, and you have to lose.

This means: every time you do a process, you lose available energy. So if you need hydrogen gas to make something - such as making glass sheets for a flat-screen TV or computer monitor, okay, live with the energy loss.

But if you need hydrogen to be a fuel for transportation, just burn the methane in an internal combustion engine, instead. Similar CO2; more available energy. Methane’s a good fuel.

In other words, using hydrogen made from methane for transportation is another example of ultimate bullshit greenwashing, as well as being a complete thermodynamics ‘fail’. The car is clean, certainly, but the fuel is properly filthy.

Hyundai’s had a refueller at its head office in Sydney since 2014, and has been talking about fuel cell technology for transport to politicians and industry at every opportunity. And its refueller has been running on filthy hydrogen, for eight years, which kind of erodes the message, in my view.

I should point out that fuel cell tech sounds new and exciting. But the tech itself got usable almost 90 years ago, thanks to a guy named Francis Bacon, and of course, NASA used fuel cells in Apollo. It was the liquid oxygen tank for the fuel cell that exploded on Apollo 13, so famously, giving Tom Hanks work. 

There’s no oxygen in space, to recombine with the hydrogen and make water, so they had to carry it, obviously. Fuel cell cars don’t have oxygen tanks, because air is 21 per cent oxygen gas.

The Apollo 13 explosion was not caused by the fuel cell. Liquid oxygen just does some properly spooky shit in zero gravity and it needs stirring from time to time, to remain homogenous. So they powered up the stirring system inside the tank, it shorted out, there was a Main Bus B undervolt, and the rest is Hollywood.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the reason nearly all the hydrogen gas we manufacture as a species is made in this filthy, methane-cracking, anti-climate way is simple: It’s cheap. Businesses are run on the balance sheet. Accountants select every option on the basis of cost - especially commodities, like hydrogen gas. 

If you choose clean hydrogen gas from electrolysed water, for your business, with electricity from a massive solar array, your product gets more expensive. If your competitor’s product is cheaper, you lose. This is the fundamental impediment to every green initiative. It’s what stalls effective climate action. Hence government incentivisation is an imperative.

Hyundai’s hydrogen station is getting a long, long overdue update to be a proper, grown-up water electrolyser.

Hyundai’s even got skin in the hydrogen gas game, right, and it’s taken them eight years to get on the front foot here, because of the accountants. Sure, they’re talking up their new refueller, because it’s a $1.7 million investment, and now they’re finally going with that electrolyser. (They’ve already got the solar panels.)

This upgrade will allow them to make 20 kilos of hydrogen gas per day, which is quite a lot. They’ll need to rip apart almost 200 litres of water to do that, which takes quite a lot of energy.

I imagine the local council, when the development application landed, wondered ‘What the hell is this?’

However, this is, in fact, a tiny investment for a business like Hyundai Australia, and yet, it took them eight long years to find the cash. Congratulations, but, Hyundai sold about 70,000 cars here just last year. Let’s call it $40,000 each, on average. That’s $2.8 billion in economic turnover, not including the lucrative parts business to support (I’m guessing) about a million Hyundai vehicles out on the road in service here.

So, finding a little under $2 million to make your company’s flagship hydrogen tech actually green should be dead easy for them. A no brainer. But it wasn’t.

They could’ve said, “Dear politician, here are the panels, the water, the electrolyser, and the Nexo.”

Tell them it’s the greenest and most hi-tech vehicle in the country - spearheading sustainability and national energy security with an in-house closed loop fuel production system. Sucks water in. Poops water out. Runs on sunlight. Sign here, minister.

Politicians would understand that, and still, it took eight years of management inaction. And we’re not there yet. Maybe later this year. It is a done deal.

They’re not even the first in Australia to achieve this. The ACT Government got there first. Mainly because governments don’t have to be economically rational. They can just do cool, green shit and lead the way - in fact, that should be one of their core functions.

If you’re not from around here, the ACT - the Australian Capital Territory - is like a proper, grown-up state, except its balls never dropped. It’s really just Canberra’s backyard.

Canberra is like Antipodean Pleasantville. It pretends to be the nation’s capital, but everyone knows that’s really Sydney. 

So it seems oddly fitting that the ACT Government has a fleet of fuel cell cars for which it makes its own fuel by electrolysing water onsite. Well done,

Hyundai Australia is about to clone that refueller, a carbon copy of Canberra’s electrolyser-type refueller is about to go in, in Sydney, albeit almost a decade late, in my view.

But don’t get me wrong. This is still a significant achievement. Infrastructure is the real problem with rolling out hydrogen for transport, and someone has to take a stand and actually make this happen. And so far in Australia, only our most tiny state government, and Hyundai, are taking that stand. 

Once the Sydney one is up and running, you (as, you government employees) will even be able to drive between them, and back. So that’s nice.

There are two fundamental problems with hydrogen for transport, and technology’s not one of them. That’s sorted - Hydrogen fuel cells work. They’re not perfect - in fact, they are very intolerant of contamination, and I’m not totally sure about durability in mass production/automotive. But the tech is sound. It works.

The first problem is purely economic. Doing it dirty is cheaper than doing it clean, with hydrogen, for now. But that can change.

The second problem is: Leadership. Governments should be incentivising the shit out of green hydrogen infrastructure, in order to get it out of its economically irrational blocks. Hydrogen is one of the few fuels you can make onsite. Anywhere, no matter how remote. And the vehicles don’t require toxic heavy metals, like batteries do.

If we transition to hydrogen, we divorce our dependency on foreign oil. We become impregnable, from an energy security perspective. This means a lot more for national security than those useless submarines (against the world’s largest air force) and disgracefully inadequate F35 Lightning IIs - the Land Rover of the sky. Way to go, Defence procurement morons.

Why isn’t the NSW Government kicking the tin for hydrogen? I’d suggest it’s because the premier, in my personal opinion cannot understand that the health of the population is inseparable from the health of the economy. Flipsides of the same coin. In the same way the climate crisis is kinda inseparable from the overpopulation of humans on earth, and he’s about to have a seventh kid.

In Victoria, Daniel Andrews isn’t helping by greenlighting the production of the filthiest hydrogen ever, made from brown coal in the Latrobe Valley. Filthier, even, than cracking methane. If that’s not a regulatory climate-trashing consummate disaster act - because there are votes in it, and it’s so easy to greenwash - I don’t know what is.

And then there’s Scott Morrison, at the top of the climate-inaction pyramid. Mr ‘Net Zero Integrity’. As I understand it, his particular faith requires him to believe that the future for humanity lies vested in the outcome of the ongoing, current-day battle between Jesus and Satan. 

I guess it takes the edge off the climate emergency if Jesus and Satan will work things out, ultimately, one way or the other.

I think the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, has a similar view on fixing the climate problem by promoting coal. 

Thus, I wouldn’t be looking for any real climate action from these Muppets. Well done, ACT government, therefore, for shining the torch down this track, and heading off in this brave direction, despite the bigger governments trying hard not to.

And well done, Hyundai. Better late than never, I suppose.

But shame on you, highly placed elected officials with the resources actually to take effective climate action, and overcome accountant-driven inertia in the free market, but instead choosing to brown-nose the coal industry for donations.

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