Hydrogen Buses Hurt The People They Are Meant To Help – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 5th February 2025, 02:38 am

A sign of a great city is that the rich take public transit. Well, not really. They take light rail and subways. But they don’t take buses. In many cities, light rail systems attract a more affluent ridership compared to buses, highlighting a persistent disparity in public transit usage.

Studies have shown that wealthier commuters are more likely to choose rail over buses due to perceptions of reliability, speed, and comfort. Light rail lines often serve well-planned routes with dedicated tracks, minimizing delays, while buses face congestion and inconsistent scheduling. Additionally, rail stations are frequently located in higher-income areas or near business districts, making them more accessible to professionals.

In places like New York, London, and Tokyo, even wealthy professionals and executives take the subway because it is often the fastest way to navigate dense urban areas. High-income riders are more likely to use subways than buses due to cleaner stations, perceived safety, and more predictable schedules. However, in cities where public transit is underfunded or stigmatized, wealthier individuals may avoid subways in favor of private cars or ride-hailing services, reinforcing socioeconomic divides in urban mobility.

Meanwhile, buses are often the primary mode of transit for lower-income riders, reflecting economic divides in urban mobility. Transit experts argue that addressing this gap requires improved bus service, including dedicated lanes and enhanced frequency, to make bus transit as attractive and efficient as rail.

And so to one of the many, many problems with hydrogen buses: they reduce the total number of buses that are working at any given time so the less affluent are left stranded. How this happens isn’t remotely hard to figure out if you look at the data. But they also have a hidden challenge for the less affluent among the world’s population.

The first half of the equation is easy to figure out. Hydrogen buses have a significantly higher total cost of ownership than battery electric buses, never mind the pollution and CO2 spewing diesel buses that are a problematic solution in cities around the world.

It’s easy to figure out why. Fuel cells running on hydrogen remain a rounding error globally. Hydrogen cars failed miserably to compete with battery electric cars. That’s because they are more expensive, less fun, less efficient, have less room inside and can’t be refueled at home or on the street. Hydrogen is really expensive at the pump because even if it’s fairly cheap, it’s really expensive to move around, store and pump.

All of that applies to hydrogen buses too, but with the added proviso that they aren’t getting any of the benefits of the experience curve from hydrogen cars because homeopathic numbers of Toyota Mirais aren’t moving the experience curve needle, while absurd numbers of BYDs, Teslas and the like are burying the needle for battery electric vehicles.

This means that the cost of batteries, power management systems for electric vehicles and electric motors for electric vehicles are plummeting, while fuel cells, hydrogen tanks, hydrogen pumps, hydrogen thermal management systems, hydrogen temperature control systems, fuel cell water emissions temperature control systems, input air HEPA grade filtration systems, input air temperature control systems and input air humidity control systems aren’t plummeting.

Hmmm. That list suggests that there’s more going on than just Wright’s Law. And there is. Hydrogen vehicles are a lot more complex than battery electric vehicles, with a lot more fiddly components and a lot more that can go wrong. It’s not just the experience curve, it’s the number of components multiplying the costs of manufacturing, assembly and maintenance.

While battery prices plummet, battery energy densities increase hence battery electric buses cost less and go further, hydrogen buses stay expensive and hydrogen range remains the same. That’s not going to change.

And then there’s the cost of hydrogen vs the cost of electricity. Actually green hydrogen requires low-carbon electricity that wouldn’t otherwise be being used directly to displace fossil fuel. Electricity powering a heat pump and moving three units of heat with one unit of electricity is a lot more valuable than electricity powering an electrolyzer and end to end requiring three units of electricity to get one unit of hydrogen. Electric cars go four times as far on a unit of electricity as they do on the same electricity turned into hydrogen and flowing into a hydrogen car, so the unit of electricity is more valuable for electric cars. Even more so for overhead catenary wires for trains which are even more efficient.

That means you can only make hydrogen when there is a surplus of low-carbon electricity that would otherwise curtailed or building new low-carbon electricity that is additional, being generated or firmed with batteries to be delivered when the electrolyzers are operating, and in the same grid region as the electrolyzers. As everybody has been finding, that’s expensive.

Mississauga is running a hydrogen bus trial, foolishly, and is being offered a hydrogen fuel as a service offering from Enbridge, North America’s biggest natural gas transmitter and distributor, per the Mississauga report from January 25th, 2025 entitled MiWay Transit Hydrogen Fuel Supply. They have a hydrogen blending project 60 km away in Markham that’s already producing 1,000 kg of hydrogen a day. They propose to divert 300 kg of that daily for the ten buses Mississauga is planning to buy and operate. Enbridge is charging $3 million a year for that service.

The hydrogen is being produced from night time nuclear power at very cheap Ontario night time rates, rates put in because the province’s energy policies mean that they have too much inflexible nuclear. The electricity is low carbon and cheap, so the hydrogen should be cheap, right?

Not so fast. At $3 million for 300 kg of hydrogen a day, that’s $27 per kilogram for hydrogen that actually enters the buses. A kilogram of hydrogen will move a bus around 15 km. Because small electrolyzers are even less efficient and hydrogen leaks, that kilogram probably equates to around 110 kWh of electricity used in production. If that 110 kWh of night time, cheap electricity had been used to charge battery electric buses instead, it would have moved a bus over 50 kilometers, three to four times further.

The 110 kWh of electricity would have cost about $3.40 at Ontario’s very low overnight rates. The cost for energy per kilometer traveled would be not three times lower or ten times lower, but 24 times lower.

This isn’t an entirely fair comparison because Enbridge is offering the fuel as a service, which means that they are paying the capital and maintenance cost of the electrolyzer, compression services, hydrogen transportation by tube truck and refueling station.

By contrast, Mississauga will be paying for the electric vehicle charging system, buffering batteries and grid upgrades for the electric buses. But that will not multiply the cost of electricity by 24 times, and likely not by five or ten when amortized over the life of the system. Let’s make it somewhat fair for the hydrogen and instead of using the province’s ultra low rate for charging electric vehicles overnight of $0.028 per kWh, let’s pretend the all in cost is $0.10.

A hydrogen bus which travels for a 300 kilometer day would have a fuel cost of $540 while the electric bus would have a fuel cost of $66, eight times lower. Over a year, that’s $200,000 in hydrogen for the fuel cell bus vs $24,000 for the battery electric bus. Every five years at most you could buy a new battery electric bus for the fueling costs of the hydrogen bus. Over the purported 15 year lifetime of the hydrogen bus $3 million in hydrogen would have been pumped through it, over $2.5 million more than the battery electric bus’ electricity bill.

These aren’t unusual numbers for hydrogen. While the above numbers were all in Canadian dollars, in California they are seeing US$25 to $35 per kilogram at hydrogen refueling stations where the station operator is eating all of the same costs as Enbridge. In Europe hydrogen refueling stations are selling it at €15 to €25. That’s CA$23 to $50 for the range, with Enbridge’s price to Mississauga being at the low end of the range, but clearly within it. As a note, there are a lot of subsidies for hydrogen refueling stations and hydrogen in California and Europe, as well as a lot of costs that have been eaten by Toyota and firms trying to own the market buy spending investors’ money.

No matter how cheap hydrogen is to manufacture, and it’s rarely cheap to manufacture, it’s always expensive to store it, distribute it and pump it into vehicles. Enbridge and hydrogen station operators want to make a profit too.

The worst case example was Quebec, where the hydrogen fleet the government bought was so expensive that over the five years the hydrogen refueling station was subsidized to the tune of about CA$500 per kg delivered. It’s no wonder that Shell has exited the hydrogen refueling business globally and Everfuel shut down all of its Danish stations in 2023.

So the hydrogen buses will be more expensive to buy and more expensive to fuel, by an order of magnitude. But surely there hasn’t to be some place where hydrogen buses are cheaper. Perhaps they are more reliable? Nope.

California data makes it clear that hydrogen buses are less reliable than internal combustion buses, with 50% higher maintenance costs, and even greater splits from battery electric buses whose simplicity is a deep virtue.

As battery electric buses trend lower in cost to purchase due to batteries plummeting in price, hydrogen fuel cell buses are staying just as expensive. It’s already a lot cheaper to buy a battery electric bus, especially if you buy it from BYD, up to 50% cheaper. I expect hydrogen buses will cost twice as much by 2030.

Double the cost to purchase. 30 times as expensive to fuel. 50% more expensive to maintain. What that adds up to is transit agencies being able to buy a lot fewer buses if they buy any hydrogen buses. Given that hydrogen buses break down more than battery electric or diesel buses, that also means more service disruptions on the routes that they are supposed to be servicing.

Fewer buses and more breakdowns means much poorer service for the exact socioeconomic class that use buses most. Those eye watering maintenance and operational costs would eventually have to be funded at least partly out of fares as well, so in addition to inferior service, citizens would pay more for it.

This was part of Winnipeg’s realization years into their efforts to build a hydrogen bus ready depot, acquire hydrogen and buy buses from New Flyer. Their depot costs were skyrocketing as they tried to make it hydrogen safe and build electrolyzers. One of their first efforts to cut costs was to shift from local electrolysis, which would have resulted in quite low full lifecycle hydrogen due to Winnipeg’s absurdly low carbon electricity, to splitting methanol. Not long ago they put the entire hydrogen bus acquisition on hold and put in an order for a lot more diesel buses. Their logic was that more buses meant more people out of their cars and in transit for a net gain, and there’s a strong argument for that.

But wait, there’s more. While hydrogen buses can be lower emissions than diesel buses, due to the prevalence of gray hydrogen used for hydrogen buses globally, hydrogen leaking and hydrogen being a potent greenhouse gas, they will always have a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than battery electric buses. Back to Winnipeg, with the average carbon debt of methanol and throwing away all of the energy in the carbon, the buses would have been 6.4 times higher GHG emissions per distance traveled than diesel buses, never mind battery electric buses. Modeling I did for Brampton showed that the gray hydrogen that they were procuring would have resulted in 90% as many emissions as a diesel bus.

These aren’t remotely climate wins worth fighting for. And who is impacted most by climate change? The same demographics that use buses for the most part.

Hydrogen buses mean poorer service for their prime demographic, more expensive service and significant limitations on achieving climate goals. Battery electric means better service, less expensive service and very significant climate wins. Don’t let anyone — like Canadian transit ‘think’ tank CUTRIC — tell you otherwise.