Walmart first major retailer in North America to deploy hydrogen semi truck | Hacker News Reader

Walmart first major retailer in North America to deploy hydrogen semi truck

electrek.co

27 pointspeutetre19 comments

Hydrogen and electric are often seen as a zero-sum game. But they're not. Since hydrogen can be made with clean energy, it's really "just another kind of battery".

I imagine in the future one or other approach will "win". Or maybe both will survive (just like we have petrol and diesel now.)

Meanwhile, while oil proponents keep telling us its impossible to wean ourselves off of gas, small things (like this) keep happening anyway. While coal keep telling us solar doesn't work, we're on track to pass a thousand gigawatts of installed solar power towards the end of this year. (As a reference, a power station is typically in the 1gw to 10gw range, with the median on the lower side).

So go on, keep telling us its impossible, we'll just keep doing it anyway.

It's not impossible, of course.

It's just not a very smart use of hydrogen, classed at "D" in the clean hydrogen ladder (that goes from "A" = unavoidable to "G" = uncompetitive).

> Somewhere between half and three quarters of the input power is wasted, and this is not going to change much – there are fundamental thermodynamic constraints.

https://www.liebreich.com/the-clean-hydrogen-ladder-now-upda...

> Since hydrogen can be made with clean energy

It, economically, cannot and will never be.

That's very last century of you.

    OCP Group and Fortescue Energy have announced a 50:50 Morocco-based Joint Venture (JV) focused on the supply of renewable hydrogen, ammonia, and fertilisers to the Moroccan, European and other markets.

https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/ocp-fortescue-hydrogen-an...

Andrew Forrest of Fortescue Energy has been building out Australian solar farms at scale and generating green hydrogen and ammonia for a little while now.

He's done the numbers and intends to increase global hydrogen production by at least a third, all of it "green hydrogen" - and is using it locally to power a multi billion dollar mining operation.

Obviously because a company announced they were going to do it, it is 100% possible and economically viable.

It's not like companies have been putting out press releases for centuries for things that never come true.

That's a new partnership.

    Fortescue has dozens of green energy and green hydrogen projects under development globally.
 
    Currently we have projects in Norway, Australia, Canada, Kenya, Congo, the United States, Argentina and Brazil.

    Our early customers are industrial companies in the USA, Australia and Singapore, as well as large energy companies in Europe.

These partnerships are contracting for Hydrogen | Ammonia from plants that are already near completion that will open next year in 2025.

They've additionally built and tested various green hydrogen based transport vehicles and power stations (usually ammonia):

eg: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/ammonia-powered-fortescue-gr...

> That's very last century of you

I thought his was going to be a reference to production of hydrogen and ammonia in the 20th century via electrolysis, by the likes of Norsk Hydro in 1927 and for about half a century afterwards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Hydro_Rjukan

I could have, and almost went there but for a few details:

* Norsk Hydro was economic and made a profit for most of last century (the claim was that hydrogen was uneconomic)

* I didn't know the details of how Norsk Hydro sourced hydrogen - from water via hydroelectricity seemed obvious and would have made a great example of an economic green hydrogen use.

Norsk definitely used "green hydrogen" from 1911 - 1929:

    The first potassium nitrate was shipped out on 8 December 1911, and two years later the plants were making a profit. 

    The 1920s were a tough time, and production decreased, but in 1929 the electric arc technology was replaced by the Haber process

( from: your link )

It was unclear to me a few hours back whether hydrogen was still extracted from water for the increasing demands of fertilizer and explosives or whether it was sourced from biowaster | natural gas.

Reading about a bit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vemork

suggests that Vemork kept up the hydrogen production for the heavy water trade at the very least.

I err towards caution when not particulalry certin <shrug>.

Good call though.

Why not?

If I'm not mistaken, Europe is proceeding with green hydrogen quite well. With an oversupply of electricity at certain times, and electricity from solar/wind being very cheap, it seems like a good option for grid storage and long-haul trucks (short-haul trucks and cars not so, because batteries are way better there).

When the cost of solar/wind gets lower than 1/3rd of coal and gas (which is likely to happen), it will make more sense to have hydrogen grid energy storage than burn coal/gas during winters in Europe.

https://www.cepsa.com/en/businesses/commercial-clean-energie...

Hydrogen made with Green energy is absolutley possible. Not just possible its already been done on the lab bench and at large scale.

"economics" is a sliding scale.

So your statement is patently untrue. All it takes is for that slider to move a bit in the right direct, and the slider for fossil fuels to move in the other direction.

Not really a difficult prospect to realize.

A better analogy might be airplane fuel and car fuel. Both are gasoline, but a different kind and not really repleacable.

Batteries, without a significant technology improvement, will not work on semi trucks due to weight issues. But they require way less infrastructure to bootstrap, and they are easier and cheaper to maintain, so they are ok to use with consumer vehicles.

On the other hand hydrogen is the only green solution that can be feasible with long haul trucks, buses etc - especially the ones running on set routes.

> with long haul trucks

Ironically, this is clearly not a long haul truck, it's a cab over, and the sleeper space is taken by hydrogen storage. This also gives it an unusually long wheel base which is not what you'd typically want in a truck constrained to local operations.

> will not work on semi trucks due to weight issues.

Two areas where you might make inroads are in the Auxiliary Power Unit. Truck stops could cover parking areas with high mast solar panels, providing shade to the trucks and the pavement, and capturing power in batteries nearby or directly underground. If the APU was electric and had a battery, it could be recharged there, and the truck could get "shore power" from the stop instead of burning diesel all night.

The other would be "reefer" trucks, which usually have a small diesel motor, with a separate tank, which runs the compressor to keep the trailer cool. There might be some trade off in replacing that with a battery driven system, again, if it could be conveniently recharged often enough to prevent service outages.

> The other would be "reefer" trucks, which usually have a small diesel motor, with a separate tank, which runs the compressor to keep the trailer cool. There might be some trade off in replacing that with a battery driven system, again, if it could be conveniently recharged often enough to prevent service outages.

Further complicating electrification is reefer box trucks, which (in my experience) have a belt coming off the engine to power the compressor for the refrigeration system and have the box put on the back by an upfitter or other third party.

: the ones I work with have a capacity of 2, 4, and 6 pallets. (gas, gas, and diesel engine, respectively)

I've never seen those in an OTR configuration or deployed as such. I was thinking more about these[0].

[0]: https://cooling-concepts.com/trailers/53-foot-refrigerated-t...

>> A better analogy might be airplane fuel and car fuel. Both are gasoline, but a different kind and not really repleacable

Well, if we're gonna get technical...

There are 2 kinds of airplane fuel. AvGas (which is basically gasoline with a high octane) and JetA1 (which is basically paraffin.)

I'm not sure JetA1 falls under the term 'gasoline' but obviously ymmv there. You can use AvGas in a car, it's the same stuff. AvGas has more kick (more octane) so its not necessarily great for the engine. I worked on an airfield a long time ago, and on occasion AvGas was used on cars (blended with normal gas it's not too bad.)

Avgas is used on piston engined planes, JetA1 on jets and turbo-props. JetA1 is just good quality paraffin so can be used wherever paraffin is used.

New batteries are being tested in China. They are effectively 2x less dense than jet fuel when accounted for turbine losses which started to make them very feasible for 50-100 passenger planes.

The weight savings on jets were always to save fuel. When fuel is almost free it doesn't matter that much anymore. All weight savings go towards range.

Hydrogen (HFCEV) is electric. Electricity is produced directly from the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is not combusted, although that [1] is an alternative.

I'm hoping for a future with hybrid hydrogen fuel cell and battery EVs. The battery could be small because you'd have hydrogen as an option for longer trips, and it would still be all-electric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_internal_combustion_e...

Same site published a story shortly after saying that Volvo trucks have driven 50 Million miles on battery:

https://electrek.co/2024/07/01/volvo-trucks-have-logged-over...

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