A Toyota Mira at a public hydrogen station in Kelowna, B.C. There are five active stations in B.C. and only one public station in Quebec.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
I had to come out to the West Coast to drive Toyota’s Mirai sedan. It’s for sale here and in Quebec but nowhere else in Canada because it’s powered by hydrogen – and the only refuelling stations are in British Columbia and Quebec.
There are plans for more stations, but it’s not as simple as putting in gas pumps or electric chargers. The refuelling stations cost millions of dollars to install and there aren’t many vehicles to be refueled – the busiest station, in Burnaby, B.C., handles no more than 150 refill visits a week. Government grants and loans, and substantial private investment, are all needed before going any further. And to do that, drivers need to be convinced that hydrogen is the way to go.
Two years ago, Globe Drive reported there was one public hydrogen station in Quebec, with two more expected in 2023, and four public stations in British Columbia, with nine more expected by 2024. Today, there is still only one public station in Quebec, and now five active stations in British Columbia. Another is scheduled to open in the Vancouver area before the end of the year. When equipment breaks, it takes a while to be repaired because it usually requires specialized parts. Ambitious development plans are on the books but progress, clearly, is slow.
Toyota has only sold a few hundred Mirais, but there are plans to build many more fueling stations.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
So just suspend your disbelief for a minute and pretend that refuelling isn’t an issue. Just imagine we’re in an alternate future where hydrogen is as easy to find as gasoline. Does it make sense now?
Of course it does. Just like a gas car, they only take a few minutes to fill and vehicles equipped with fuel cells powered by hydrogen already exist, though they’re unremarkable in appearance and performance. Honda and Hyundai both produce fuel-cell cars sold in California and internationally, and the Hyundai Nexo is also sold in Canada, but the bestseller by far is the Toyota Mirai that I’m driving.
“Bestseller” is a relative term: Toyota says it’s sold more than 300 Mirais to Canadian buyers since it was first imported in 2019, though many of those have been to commercial and corporate fleets. It was redesigned for 2023, changing its platform from front-wheel to rear-wheel drive, but its looks didn’t change much. So far this year, the company has sold 19 Mirais, but as Globe Drive’s Jason Tchir noted recently, one Mirai has been sitting on the lot of Lévis Toyota, near Quebec City, for about a year, and it’s been marked down to $45,995 from $54,995.
The appeal of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles is that they produce no carbon emissions at the tailpipe. The Mirai is an electric car, and its electric motor is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, not by batteries that are heavy and time-consuming to recharge. A fuel cell harnesses power by passing pure hydrogen through a membrane to combine with oxygen from the air, and the only byproduct is water. The earth has an abundant supply of hydrogen, which is the most common element in the universe, but it’s always found in combination with another element and the process of separating and purifying it to use as a fuel is complex and typically produces carbon, reducing the environmental benefit.
There are three different ways to produce hydrogen – reformation treats organic materials and waste, gasification uses high-temperature steam to separate elements and electrolysis uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – and they all produce their own emissions in doing so. The greenest production comes from electrolysis, but only if that electricity is sustainably and cleanly sourced. In British Columbia and Quebec, electricity comes mostly from hydroelectric power, but many countries still use coal and the Canadian Prairies use oil sands companies to produce electricity.
The hydrogen that filled up my Mirai tester at the station in Kelowna, B.C., was created in Vancouver through electrolysis and delivered as a gas in a diesel-powered truck, but the station operator, Hydrogen Technology & Energy Corp. (HTEC), says it will soon be delivered as a liquid in hydrogen-powered tanker trucks. When it’s a liquid, the truck can carry at least 10 times more hydrogen in the same space. As well, a new electrolysis plant being built in Burnaby, B.C., will have 20 times the capacity of today’s fairly small plant.
Under the hood of the Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
“We are a strong believer that we need options for people who want to make the choice on how to decarbonize their lives,” said Patric Ouellette, HTEC’s vice-president for infrastructure. “We’re not quite there. It does take time. We now have fabulous vehicles, which we did not have 20 years ago. And we now have more opportunity for [producing] local hydrogen, which we did not have 20 years ago. We now have more pieces of the puzzle that are in place to be on a solid footing for growth.”
HTEC has big plans. With the help of a $337-million loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, it announced in May that it will invest $900-million in “Operation Gateway,” which will build three new hydrogen production facilities in B.C., starting in Burnaby, followed by Nanaimo and then Prince George. It will also establish 18 new refuelling stations in B.C. and two in Alberta. Its focus is not on the Mirais and Nexos of the early adopters, however, but on the medium- and heavy-duty transport trucks that will probably benefit most from using hydrogen as a fuel.
Trucks, unlike private cars, have fairly predictable driving schedules and can remove more emissions from the air when their diesel engines are replaced. HTEC intends to buy 100 Class 8 heavy-transport trucks, powered by hydrogen, and lease them to fleet operators that distribute goods around southern British Columbia and Alberta. When everything is in full operation, it estimates greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by 133,000 tonnes each year.
Ultimately, it’s money that talks, and today’s small scale of production and distribution does not make for cheaper driving of personal vehicles. A non-discounted Mirai is more expensive to buy than a fully loaded Toyota Camry, and hydrogen fuel is more costly than its gasoline equivalent. One kilogram of hydrogen currently costs $14.70 in B.C. and will power the car for about 100 kilometres. A Camry Hybrid will burn an average of 5.1 litres of gasoline to travel 100 kilometres – this will cost about $10 if gas is $2 a litre, which it frequently was in Vancouver this summer.
So there’s no money to be saved today by driving a Toyota Mirai, and you cannot travel farther than a few hundred kilometres east of Kelowna without becoming stranded for lack of fuel. Its total claimed range on a full tank is about 650 kilometres. The public hydrogen fuelling stations use complicated and specialized technology to deliver fuel that’s compressed to 12,000 pounds per square inch, and they’re frequently out of service – the station we drove to here to fuel up was out of commission, and the car made it to a different station on fumes, if that’s such a thing with a fuel cell. Conventional electric cars, which also produce no significant emissions, can cross the country, and have been doing so for the best part of the past decade.
But if, and when, companies scale up to support the mass production of hydrogen and its effective distribution, and they’re assisted by like-minded governments, then it will be thanks to the foresight of those engineers and drivers who also supported the development of the Mirai and the Nexo and other hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. The fact that the Mirai is also very comfortable and a pleasure to drive is just icing on the cake.
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to remove the impression that oil sands produce electricity through burning oil.