British Hydrogen Bus Supplier Aeristech Collapses 72
A British manufacturer of hydrogen fuel cell components for London's double-decker bus fleet has collapsed into administration, jeopardizing a $15.8 million government-backed project to cut transport emissions. Aeristech Limited, which was developing high-powered compressors for hydrogen fuel cells, was working on Project HEIDI to retrofit London buses with hydrogen technology. The project received $7.84 million in government funding last year, with additional investment from project partners including University of Bath and Equipmake.
Thank Goodness (Score:5, Funny)
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> is anyone in continental Europe successfully riding the hydrogen bus economically?
If it fails there, then maybe there's a reason. That's why they should share R&D.
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Most people could not identify a hydrogen bus, unless it is very fat H2 painted on it.
If you are scared about a hydrogen bus, you should avoid vehicles in general.
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Read an article a while back that got into it. Basically all the European hydrogen bus trials have failed once government funding ran out. Dealing with those tiny atoms is hard. Storage, transporting, filling up the bus tanks and such is a hard problem with hydrogen.
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There are problems like you describe. That was 50 ago.
The only two problems are:
A) Most hydrogen tests are combustion engines
B) hydrogen's per mile is more expensive than gasoline
Electric busses just beat them in every aspect except fast refueling.
Re:"Collapsed into Administration" (Score:4, Informative)
Administration is like chapter 11 bankruptcy, liquidation is like chapter 7.
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Oh, the huge manatee!
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Thank goodness they collapsed instead of exploded!
The British can't seem to get a break with hydrogen.
First, the R101, and now, this.
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Only posting because I've been looking into it on one of my obsessions lately, but the R101's crash was mostly structural exacerbated by bad weather. It did eventually ignite, but that was long after it had run into serious problems making a crash inevitable.
Oddly enough, hydrogen, while a factor in enough rigid airship explosions to be a serious concern and a reason to avoid hydrogen in the first place, was not the principle cause of most peacetime rigid airship failures. I say peacetime, because while tec
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That, if true (the inquiry didn't find conclusive evidence) contributed, along with dubious instruments on board - but leaks happen, the design should have allowed on some level for that, including providing information to the crew so they could land safely.
The R101 was in general a fiasco, largely because of politics - the more conservatively designed rival R100 was eating its lunch and the people in charge for some reason wanted a "Government project vs Private project" thing because they were trying to p
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I say peacetime, because while technically hydrogen igniting was the leading cause of rigid airship accidents, in the vast majority of cases the ignitions were intentional - generally by an RAF pilot.
Hydrogen filled spotting balloons were a popular target in World War Part One. (I put it that way because it is conceivable to see WW2 as just the second half of the same war with a 20 year "halftime".) They'd apparently create quite a fireball when pierced with incendiary bullets fired from a machine gun, to the point the Germans called them "dragons", or rather the German word for dragon which escapes me at the moment.
(Non-rigid including semi-rigid is another matter, but the safety history of those isn't great either. Just not nearly so bad.)
The Goodyear blimps, non-rigid airships, have a great safety record, but they've been
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The more recent semi- and non-rigid blimps have a better safety record but there's been a surprising number of failures given the extremely small build numbers over the last few years, including a death in 2011. One death since 1959 is obviously too small to make a proper statistical comparison with, but given the luck involved in many of the other failures, I'd contend it's probably safer to drive on I-95 through West Palm Beach than it is to ride on a Goodyear airship at this point. Possibly even safer to
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First, the R101, and now, this.
I know, right? It hasn't been even a century since that happened, almost like it was yesterday. Clearly we need another century or three before this is viable.
In case people didn't pick that up I'm at least half joking.
I don't understand the fascination with hydrogen fuel cells. The first problem is producing hydrogen is quite inefficient and expensive if not sourced from fossil fuels, and if the hydrogen is from fossil fuels then that kind of defeats the point of using hydrogen. Another problem is that
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Hydrogen is fascinating because it's still a fuel, but carbon-free. The real reason there's a lot of investment into hydrogen is because the fossil fuel industry sees it as their future - blue hydrogen (hydrogen derived from fossil fuel sources) remains the most economical way to produce hydrogen today,
So the fossil fuel industry wants to promote the use of hydrogen because it keeps them relevant. And fossil fuel countries want to keep promoting it as well because it keeps them relevant. Places that produce
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Hydrogen is fascinating because it's still a fuel, but carbon-free.
That's great but it doesn't address the question on why the fascination of putting that hydrogen through a fuel cell versus some kind of internal combustion engine.
But given BEVs are practical today...
BEVs are practical for commuter cars, short haul trucks, some industrial vehicles, training and recreational aircraft, short haul cargo ships and ferries, and certainly other similar applications where moving long distance or heavy loads is not necessary. If BEVs were such a success then nobody would be talking about fuel cell vehicles, and not
Dumb idea anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
Hydrogen is a horrible way to power vehicles except in niche use cases. Just power the buses with batteries and charge them up at depots. If necessary develop a battery swap tech.
Re:Dumb idea anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a niche use case.
The battery tech that can run a bus for a full day isn't there yet and a hydrogen bus could be refilled a lot faster than an BEV bus can recharge.
Still, hydrogen is a crappy solution unless we can find a way to pump it directly out of the sun.
Either it's made from a fossil fuel an is just as dirty as an ICE engine, if not worse because of the extra steps involved.
Or it's incredible wasteful by using 3 times as much electricity per mile as a the same size BEV in the case of hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
EV busses with a relatively small battery pack that can recharge from overhead connections built into bus stops have existed for a decade already.
And within 10 years even those will be outdated because of advancing battery tech, completely leaving hydrogen in the dust.
But I bet the busses from this article sounded really good in the brochure.
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This wasn't a pure-hydrogen/fuel cell project,it had a battery/hybrid component.
https://aeristech-24932539.hs-... [hs-sites-eu1.com]
Re: Dumb idea anyway (Score:2)
All HEVs have a battery. The fuel cell is only efficient in a small load range. It is essentially a range extender in almost all designs.
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Most hydrogen vehicles have a battery in addition to the fuel cell to cope with high power draw. The fundamental issue is it takes a lot more energy to make hydrogen and store it and convert it back to electricity than it does to just charge a battery. So it's nuts to use a fuel source except in situations where energy is otherwise going to waste. For a bus company in the middle of a city, it just becomes a cost and burden that makes it non-viable compared to battery electric buses.
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Yes it is, and London is running a fair number of them right now. Try taking a bus on the 94 route for example, then you will see that battery electric buses are definitely ready for prime time now, at least for local routes. Maybe for regional routes it isn't ready yet, but they are other operators such as Oxford Tube, not Transport for London.
Re:Dumb idea anyway (Score:4, Informative)
Either it's made from a fossil fuel an is just as dirty as an ICE engine
It is not. Diesel buses emit their crap right into the most densely populated areas. Hydrogen fuel cells emit water. There's more to pollution than carbon. Though I do not think hydrogen is the way forwards.
But I bet the busses from this article sounded really good in the brochure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They were pretty good, starting in 2004, long before battery buses were practical. Given pollution kills 4000 people per years, I reckon it was worth a look even if technology went a different direction.
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> This is a niche use case.
It absolutely isn't, though. It's a bus.
> The battery tech that can run a bus for a full day isn't there yet
Quick search says Londonâ(TM)s red double-decker buses drive less than 200 miles per day in city traffic conditions.
The electric buses they use in Sidney, Australia are good for 250 miles and recharge in 90 minutes. Assuming the bus driver takes a lunch break at some point, a 20-minute mid-day charge session would easily push the daily range close to 400mi.
And you
Re:Dumb idea anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
The battery tech that can run a bus for a full day isn't there yet and a hydrogen bus could be refilled a lot faster than an BEV bus can recharge.
Filling a hydrogen bus takes between 30min and an hour. People have this fantasy that hydrogen is poured into a container like diesel, it's not. It needs to be compressed, chilled, and then loaded in slowly enough to prevent adiabatic compression from causing issues. Do it too fast, and you end up with issues like the refuelling handle freezeing into the vehicle requiring you to wait a long time for it to release.
Additionally refuelling stations have limited capacity for hydrogen storage, and don't store it at pressures that vehicles use (because that would be insane) so you're rate limited by the compressor as well. On top of that there's upstream issues as well with most hydrogen refuelling having limited storage with a small electrolyser behind (a concept not unlike those fast chargers with batteries, that charge your car from a battery at high speed, and then slowly refill that battery while they wait for the next car to come).
Purchasing a hydrogen refuelling station involves not only selecting a technology and capability related to how long it takes to fuel a vehicle, but additionally how many vehicles can be fuelled in a row at full rate, followed by how many vehicles can be fuelled in any given day.
That on top of the other reasons it's crappy.
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A hydrogen bus is fueled in ten minutes.
And there are no freezing handles.
You must remember a bad movie from the 1980s - perhaps a blade runner clone?
You have high compressed gas in the fuel station, and release it to about 200 atmospheres pressure into the vehicle.
At least that is how it works at the gas stations I know in Karlsruhe and Nuremberg.
We have them since 20 or 30 years.
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A hydrogen bus is fueled in ten minutes.
They are objectively not. I know this because we tendered to build a refueling station and precisely zero vendors could offer that on a standard H350 dispenser.
And there are no freezing handles.
Of course not. For the reasons I mentioned.
You have high compressed gas in the fuel station
No you don't. You have a relatively low pressure (compared to required) compressed gas, and you compress it as it goes into the vehicle. But... thanks for mentioning 200bar. We can now see where your problem is. 200bar is a standard for compressed natural gas busses not hydrogen. It's a completely different
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Or it's incredible wasteful by using 3 times as much electricity per mile as a the same size BEV in the case of hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
There's ways, many ways, to produce hydrogen than electrolysis or fossil fuels. Many require high temperature heat to be viable, and fortunately we can get that heat from nuclear fission, an energy source that has proven to be safe, abundant, and reliable. We need only some development to make it cheap.
EV busses with a relatively small battery pack that can recharge from overhead connections built into bus stops have existed for a decade already.
I've seen that tried before with trucks and trains only to fail to prove viable, I doubt buses will see any better success.
And within 10 years even those will be outdated because of advancing battery tech, completely leaving hydrogen in the dust.
Battery tech has hit physical limits so hard that we are seeing movement backwards
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We absolutely have batteries large enough to run a bus all day. Or rather, the Chinese do, I'm not sure if anyone in Europe manufactures something equivalent.
There are buses available with megawatt hour batteries. Most don't need anything like that - a London bus does around 130 miles/day on average, max about 200 miles a day for non-express coaches. Average speed is under 7 MPH.
If we take the worst case scenario of 200 miles, which is about 320km, and energy consumption of 0.68km/kWh for a double deck bus,
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You are an idiot.
We are talking about buses. Not passenger vehicles.
Of course we have the "technology". There is no damn " technology " needed, it is a damn battery and a bus is huge.
The buses in Bangkok run just fine on electricity, on batteries.
All day, and a smaller shift, all night too.
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Transport for London already have more electric buses than hydrogen so I'd say they've determined that hydrogen is no use for this case either. They probably trialed didn't like the expense and went with electric. I assume that's why the bottom fell out of this company's business and it went bankrupt - lack of interest.
And yes you can refuel faster but I expect most London buses need to be charged once for an entire day's worth of operation, then they return to the depot and charge overnight for the next da
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The battery tech that can run a bus for a full day isn't there yet and a hydrogen bus could be refilled a lot faster than an BEV bus can recharge.
Horse puckey. They could change out battery modules and charge the batteries outside of the bus. Ideological limitations are just stupid. There is absolutely NO REASON to force the battery to stay inside of the bus.
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Hydrogen is a horrible way to power vehicles except in niche use cases. Just power the buses with batteries and charge them up at depots. If necessary develop a battery swap tech.
Wow, it's amazing - your proposed solution has probably never been considered before, it's really quite ground-breaking, and to think you were able to come up with such a brilliant suggestion when you know absolutely nothing about the use-case or any of the considerations involved is really quite remarkable...
Re: Dumb idea anyway (Score:2)
It's a bus. The considerations are well understood and heavy vehicles are typically ideal candidates for battery swaps because of their design. Hydrogen is a dream, and a dumb one.
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When evaluated based on a small-scale deployment, battery-electric buses have clear economic advantages over fuel-cell battery-electric buses. However, when evaluated based on a large-scale deployment and considering the technology constraints of both the buses and the refueling infrastructure, strictly from a cost perspective there is no one technology that had a clear advantage over the others. With economies of scale, the purchase price of both batteryelectric and fuel cell battery-electric buses are expected to be similar, so performance, infrastructure, and operational advantages will be the main drivers to separate the two technologies.
Battery-electric buses have the advantage of lower maintenance and predictable fueling cost; however, complexities associated with scaling charging infrastructure, including power management, energy storage, back-up generation, equipment maintenance, and charger management will drive significant operational changes which may necessitate significant additional investment.
Fuel cell battery-electric buses have superior range, predictable mid-life overhaul cost, low large-scale infrastructure cost, and would drive no significant operational changes; however, the cost of hydrogen could be a barrier to unlocking maximum savings. If low-cost delivered hydrogen could be sourced, the potential lifetime savings from fuel cell battery-electric buses could be on par with, or better than, battery-electric buses. If Transit is restricted to producing hydrogen fuel on-site, operational savings are likely to be only moderately better than diesel buses.
https://info.winnipegtransit.c... [winnipegtransit.com]
I have no dog in this fight as I don't use transit, but I'm glad they are looking to spend my tax dollars as efficiently as possible.
Re: Dumb idea anyway (Score:2)
Hydrogen is expensive, fuel cells are expensive, most hydrogen is made from natural gas, there are considerations beyond price.
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Hydrogen is expensive, fuel cells are expensive, most hydrogen is made from natural gas
This is Canada, we have lots of natural gas, but apparently we are going to trial making our own H2 anyway. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada... [www.cbc.ca]
there are considerations beyond price.
Not if you want to get (re)elected. Tax dollars are in very short supply here. As the report I referenced concluded, H2 is much closer to a "drop-in" replacement than batteries from an infrastructure and logistics standpoint. And we have no money for new infrastructure, we can barely maintain the old. Replacing diesel with EV or H2 buses is already expensive enou
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Seems to be lot of buses running on natural gas here in BC, a much simpler solution though not perfect. It's much simpler to convert a diesel to natural gas, burns much cleaner too. The trolleys have been getting batteries added too, allowing them to get off the main roads for at least a few miles.
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Seems to be lot of buses running on natural gas here in BC, a much simpler solution though not perfect. It's much simpler to convert a diesel to natural gas, burns much cleaner too. The trolleys have been getting batteries added too, allowing them to get off the main roads for at least a few miles.
I don't disagree. Incremental improvements are to be welcomed not decried. We are going to reduce emissions at the rate we can comfortably afford, and in many cases this will not mean an immediate conversion to net zero, there will be experimentation and many steps along the way.
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Agree
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This is making a huge assumption that someone will actually put a hydrogen engine into mass production and that parts and replacements will be available. Since these do not exist at this moment, "predictable" is probably not the correct term.
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Ha!
This is making a huge assumption that someone will actually put a hydrogen engine into mass production and that parts and replacements will be available. Since these do not exist at this moment, "predictable" is probably not the correct term.
"Engine" is not the correct term either as they use fuel cells. In any case, we build them here. For lots of people. They are not new.
https://www.newflyer.com/ [newflyer.com]
We have a long standing relationship with New Flyer. I'm quite comfortable there will be parts.
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Mirai owners were enjoying 14x the cost of driving their vehicle vs an EV. It's not cheap and a bus company is going to be very sensitive to operating costs. Also I wouldn't be so sure about the service costs over time because as Mirai also discovered, fuel cells have serviceable / expendable parts like the membrane which were not cheap to service.
Buses are also like delivery vans in that they tend to have very predictable routes and mileage demands - 10 miles one way, 10 miles the other, hour after hour, d
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BMW has a fuel cell car coming in 2028 as well. It is good to have options. I plan to keep driving ICE so I'm waiting for e-fuels to become more available. There are going to be a lot of different so
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Thanks for your sarcasm. The point is electric buses do work and are viable. But be a prick if you like.
Re: Dumb idea anyway (Score:2)
14 years (Score:2)
The company that went "into administration" had many, many activities outside this one bus project, and to be honest there's no clear statement that it was this one project that brought the company down. The report is that the company that was working on a high-profile project went broke, but it could easily have been one of their other projects... this wasn't a single-product venture, they'd been in business for 14 years.
"Aeristech Limited" (Score:3)
Probably got driven out of business by Sephiroth Engineering Inc.
[Spoiler] (Score:2)
Aeristech dies.
Here's an idea... (Score:2)
Instead of trying to get battery and hydrogen power to work, buses can collect electric current from wires strung above the road. This will make the buses lighter, more efficient, safer and enable them to run all day and night.
I've even come up with a name for them: "Trolleybuses".
I also thought of a more advanced concept where these electric buses run on rails set into the road but I don't want to start a revolution here.
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Instead of trying to get battery and hydrogen power to work, buses can collect electric current from wires strung above the road. This will make the buses lighter, more efficient, safer and enable them to run all day and night.
I've even come up with a name for them: "Trolleybuses".
All good ideas for the middle of high traffic areas (cities). The ROI for long haul rarely traveled routes, however, is low.
Re: Here's an idea... (Score:2)
You can have a hybrid trolley bus with a battery on board and a lowering pantograph.
Re: Here's an idea... (Score:2)
electric buses run on rails set into the road
You really just hate bicycles, don't you?
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Re: Here's an idea... (Score:2)
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You sure they were trolley wires? Usually there's a pair of 2 wires or 2 pair in the odd 4 lane road and while intersections can get complicated, it is nothing like the telegraph wires that used to strung up everywhere.
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http://www.prairie-towns.com/w... [prairie-towns.com]
http://www.prairie-towns.com/w... [prairie-towns.com]
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It's individual preference. I don't find either picture bad, perhaps because I grew up taking trolley buses so it's normal. I'd still prefer the wires compared to diesel exhaust and noise.
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That's great when you have wires and rails everywhere they need to go. But congrats on solving the problem for 2% of use cases.
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The vast majority of buses in cities travel the same routes, day after day. A bit more than your made up 2%, don't you think?
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Instead of trying to get hydrogen fuel cells to work maybe we can try hydrogen ICEs. Or using the hydrogen to synthesize carbon neutral fuels for the ICEs already in the existing diesel buses.
Hydrogen is a great research project (Score:2)
It's NOT ready for widespread deployment, not even close
Fuel cells? I found your problem. (Score:1)
I don't understand why there's a fascination with trying to put fuel cells on over-the-road vehicles. Just burn the hydrogen in an ICE. Better yet, mix the hydrogen with some methane and burn it in an off the shelf compressed natural gas vehicles, or CNGVs. Hydrogen has a lower energy density than natural gas so it won't provide the same miles per gallon (or however CNG is measured) but that can be made up with adding some extra ethane and propane to the natural gas and hydrogen mix. https://en.wikipedi [wikipedia.org]