China’s government set out a target of 2-million new electric
vehicles (NEV), including hydrogen-powered vehicles on its roads by
2020, a figure that Benny Oeyen, the new head of marketing at Anglo
American Platinum and former senior manager in various car companies,
extrapolated to use up to 500,000oz of platinum in the systems
converting hydrogen into electricity.
The question raised by analysts is the offset of platinum used in
autocatalyst systems on diesel engines to scrub noxious gases from
exhaust systems and whether the new environmentally friendly trucks and
buses will cannibalise the long-standing source of platinum demand over
the longer term.
A visit to major cities in southern China showed the nascent hydrogen
fuel cell industry that is gaining traction on the back of generous
national and provincial government subsidies and incentive programmes
from local authorities to encourage the uptake of hydrogen vehicles to
cut pollution.
The subsidy, which flows through to the maker of the fuel cell driven
commercial vehicle, could reach 1-million yuan, which is about
$144,000, compared with the sales price of about 800,000 yuan, providing
the critical subsidy to underpin nascent vehicle makers as they strive
for critical mass and stand-alone profitability.
The key bottleneck is refuelling stations, which are scarce, but the
government has a plan to roll out 500 stations in the Yangtze River
Delta by 2030, particularly on major arterial routes between cities,
facilitating truck and bus uptake by operators.
The $2m it costs to build a 1,000kg a day hydrogen refuelling station
would receive a subsidy from the government too, encouraging their
construction to drive the state strategy.
The potential scale of the market for these vehicles with sustained
backing from the government for another five years beyond the current
2020 deadline is immense, dwarfing similar such industries in the US and
Europe.
The Chinese government set a target of 20% of all automotive sales to
be made up of new-energy vehicles by 2025. These vehicles include those
using hydrogen fuel cells, batteries recharged off the grid and hybrids
using fossil fuels and batteries.
As one market commentator says, battery vehicles are essentially coal
burners, with the majority of the world’s electricity supply coming
from coal-fired power plants.
The same argument can be made about hydrogen, which is created from
pumping electricity into water to split hydrogen and oxygen, but the
relative efficiency of hydrogen, which is used to create electricity
rather than store it, puts it ahead of prevailing battery technology,
certainly for larger industrial vehicles.
China has 150GW of electricity generated from renewable sources like
solar and wind in the north of the country that go to waste each year,
says Jun Wang, deputy secretary-general of the International Hydrogen
Fuel Cell Association.
This would make an ideal source of electricity to convert water to
hydrogen. There is a loss of energy in the conversion, which makes using
coal-fired electricity impractical, but using electricity that was low
cost and going to waste would be an ideal opportunity, she said.
One way to move hydrogen around China could be to deploy a system of
attaching it to a special oil produced by SA’s Sasol at a plant in
Germany and creating an inert, incombustible liquid, said Daniel
Teichmann, CEO of Hydrogenious Technologies.
One cubic metre of the reusable oil can carry 57kg of hydrogen,
giving a passenger car a theoretical range of 5,700km using the ratio of
1kg of hydrogen providing 100km of travel, he said.
“It will shake up the gas monopolies by providing a way to easily and
cheaply transport hydrogen and then introduce competition,” Teichmann
said.
The development of a manufacturing base of new electric vehicles
(NEV) and their sales to the domestic market is one of the key policies
in the Chinese government to address some of the world’s worst urban
pollution problems, especially in cities that are home to tens of
millions of people.
Passenger vehicle sales in these cities are tightly controlled, with
regular lottery-style allocations of licence plates. New electric
vehicles are given green number plates and these are freely granted,
with commercial vehicles showing green plates given easier access to
cities, marking out one of the major incentives for consumers to switch
to carbon emission-free vehicles.
Statistics from the Chinese government show the growing uptake of
NEVs, with sales more than doubling in the first half of the year to
412,000 vehicles, with production rising by a similar quantum to 413,000
vehicles, keeping China firmly as the leading market for NEVs. In 2017,
the NEV market accounted for 777,000 vehicles.
In SA, total sales of passenger and commercial vehicles reached
558,000 in 2017, putting the size of the Chinese NEV market into
context.
In China, 12-million passenger vehicles were sold in the first half
of 2018 and 2.3-million commercial vehicles were sold, resulting in a
total 6% increase on the same period the previous year.
Source:
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/mining/2018-11-20-chinas-infant-hydrogen-fuel-cell-industry-gets-vital-help/
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