‘Clean, but expensive’
Hydrogen has recently been in the news regularly as a possible alternative to fossil fuels in combustion engines. Exactly thirty years ago, as far as we know, that phenomenon first appeared in public in the Netherlands.
When looking at the news pages of AutoWeek 42 from 1992, a report about a hydrogen car stands out. Unfortunately, there is only one (bad) photo of the cart in question spotted on Schiermonnikoog. The nose of the golf cart-style vehicle proudly read ‘water vapor as exhaust gas’. That must have attracted a lot of attention at the time. Hydrogen as a possible alternative to fossil fuels was, after all, still a fairly new concept in the car industry. Mazda was already experimenting with it at the time, by running a Wankel engine on hydrogen. Furthermore, it was still in its infancy.
It was an experimental vehicle from the Belgian company Hyrenco, in which a fuel engine burned hydrogen. We wrote: “During the combustion of hydrogen, only pure water is released and nobody can object to that. A wonderful solution, but… there is a catch, as usual. Firstly, hydrogen is not for sale everywhere and moreover “It is quite expensive. Hyrenco supplies a hydrogen generator with which you can make hydrogen gas yourself from water and electricity: compared to diesel, the gas costs about three times as much. The generator itself is also quite expensive: count on at least a few tens of thousands of guilders.”
You guessed it: we were far from convinced, even though it was an interesting idea in theory. “That makes the hydrogen option much less interesting. It is a new version of the old story: there are quite a few more environmentally friendly alternatives to petrol or diesel, but until now they have always been either (too) expensive or impractical.” Hyrenco’s experiment was, as far as we can find, no more than an experiment. The company itself seems to have been taken over in a dire condition later in the 1990s by the Dutch entrepreneur Joep van den Nieuwenhuyzen (the son-in-law of well-known entrepreneurs Gerrit and Toos van der Valk), but then the track comes to a dead end. Today there is still a Moroccan company called Hyrenco that focuses on the purification of seawater, but it is not clear whether this is related to the Hyrenco described here.
Hydrogen engine of 2022
The hydrogen combustion engine is still only sparsely available 30 years later. Toyota is currently one of the main interested parties in this area. The Japanese have, among other things, run a Toyota GR Yaris on hydrogen and are already racing in the homeland with a Corolla and GR86 that burn the stuff. It is also working with Yamaha on a V8 that runs on hydrogen. Renault and subsidiary Alpine also seem interested and Porsche is now also testing (albeit virtually) a hydrogen engine. Incidentally, BMW was there a bit earlier than Toyota, because it already let the V12 of an E38 7-series run on hydrogen in 2000 and did it again five years later with its successor. At BMW, they also make no secret of the fact that hydrogen can play an interesting role in the car industry. However, the focus is on fuel cells instead of combustion engines, just like Toyota with the Mirai, for example. Hyundai also sees more benefit in this.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl