BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 25
By Sadraddin Aghjayev - Trend:
Hydrogen vehicles are the main competitors of electric cars, Deputy Director of the International Institute for Energy Policy and Diplomacy of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, expert of the Sustainable Development Center under the Institute, Igbal Guliyev told Trend on June 25.
“Electric cars are more suitable for an ordinary buyer as the car is usually idle at night and a big part of the day and the owner has time to recharge it,” the expert said. “The hydrogen technology has great competitive advantages for the professional transportation industry - where the car is used around the clock.”
"Refueling a car on hydrogen fuel cells lasts from three to five minutes while the range is over 500 kilometers," Guliyev said.
“CEO of the Volkswagen concern Herbert Diess, who relied on electric vehicles in his company, said that the time of widespread use of hydrogen in transport will come only in the next decade (in the 2030s) but it will be used mainly in other modes of transport, namely, trucks, railway locomotives and ships,” the expert added.
"Hydrogen is a promising fuel for air transport although it has not yet been sufficiently studied from the point of view of industrial application,” Guliyev said.
“At the moment, hybrid engines are quite actively used in aviation, where traditional aviation fuel is used for the period of takeoff and climb while hydrogen is used when switching to cruise mode,” the expert said.
“Russia (jointly with China) also has the projects for using hydrogen in air transportation, but they are still limited to small aviation," Guliyev said.
“In general, hydrogen, in case of the appropriate infrastructure (a network of hydrogen filling stations), can be used quite successfully for personal vehicles,” the expert said.
“For example, the BMW carmaker produced a limited number of 'Hydrogen 7' cars that could run on both gasoline and hydrogen in 2007,” Guliyev said. “But the car was not cheap and an 8-kilogram gas cylinder was enough for 200-250 kilometers.”
“The first car with a hydrogen engine was Toyota Mirai, produced in 2014,” the expert said. “The Japanese company is currently planning to increase production volume of Toyota Mirai tenfold.”
“Until now, 3,000 cars were produced annually,” Guliyev said. “A decision was made to increase the production volumes of the new generation of this model up to 30,000 a year.”
“Today, many big car manufacturers such as Honda, Hyundai, Audi, BMW, Ford and others have hydrogen models," Guliyev said.
“Japan is already implementing a plan agreed among the government, automakers and infrastructure companies to bring the number of hydrogen cars on the country's roads up to 800,000 by 2030,” the expert said.
"There is a government plan in Germany to bring the number of electric vehicles up to 7-10.5 million by 2030,” Guliyev said. “South Korea has launched a pilot project to use hydrogen cars in three cities at once.”
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