Hi, I’m Adrian Maidment, and this is EV Quest.
Hi i’m adrian mademon and this is eeveequest in this episode we’re talking hydrogen power specifically the hydrogen power of the hyundai nexo owned by phil major phil made the news at the end of 2021 when he bought his nexo because he lives in the south island and there was no publicly accessible refueling station for him to use so in this episode we catch up with
Phil and see how his nexo is going hi phil okay andrew how are you doing good good thank you so um you’re in the news a few months ago about buying buying the uh nexo with hydrogen nexo there was three in the country and uh the story was there was nowhere to uh put the fuel in again so fill it up did you so you sorted that problem out yes we did uh i was very
Lucky um there’s a place down here in uh rollerskating called global bus ventures and they built a hydrogen new zealand’s only hydrogen bus for auckland transport and so i knew if they built one they must be able to fill it so i went and met a guy called mike out there is more than helpful tripping over himself to help me and um get it filled down here albeit
A wee bit slower but at least i’m getting um a result oh yeah so there’s a pressure isn’t there was it 700 something could rather 700 bar supposed to get to isn’t it yeah well um trucks go to 350 bar because they’ve got they’ve got large tanks because they’ve got plenty of room to put like the large tank on um my car’s got three what you’d call almost like um
Underwater diving bottles and that’s 75 mil thick um carbon fiber they’re made of and they go to 700 bar which is nine on ten thousand psi oh okay yeah and so apart from the fuel situation is it how’s it been running oh it’s fantastic it’s it’s it’s great a buddy of mine’s got a uh model 3 tesla and that’s not but it’s relatively heavy whereas my car is very
Light it’s sort of it just it goes it’s lovely it’s fantastic to drive really is yeah so does it drive more like a traditional car or is it more like an electric car for the driving oh it drives like a traditional car but it’s quiet yeah yeah yeah and uh what about the mileage because that’s a big very roughly speaking um it holds just under seven kilograms of
Hydrogen because that’s all done on weight so seven kilogram hydrogen for roughly 70 dollars and it takes me 700 kilometers roughly when when when the new um fueling stations happen uh down here um they take about it happens to be seven minutes to fill it up with with that much fuel are they planning more hydrogen fueling stations down south well one of the they
Are that there’s uh there’s a company called haringa who are doing a whole lot in the north island um they’re working on coming down here i know there’s a big company in from invercargill is seating one up in edendale so it’s sort of attacking me from both sides at the moment so that’s good um i’m incidentally on the board of a company called transwaste which
Runs a big landfill in wipra just north of christchurch and uh one of the things you a couple of things you need for making hydrogen is a fair bit of power and a fair bit of water and we’ve got plenty of water there’s no problem and the power we have to because it’s a landfill we have to um scavenge so speak the methane off the dump off the landfill and not let
We have to be burned up in the sky but we we’ve got three four one megawatt generators and we pump power out to the um national grid so if we can get these guys coming in or a company coming in and getting power before we put it on the national grid because we only get probably eight cents a liter for the power whereas you and i buy it in their house for probably
Twenty eighty five cents uh sorry since that liter like um a megawatt hour or whatever it is a unit so if you can get the power before the meter it makes it very a lot cheaper to produce oh yeah so uh do you think the future is kind of hydrogen or is it um because now we’re sort of into the electric cars i think hydrogen cars are going to catch on we’re very the
Other thing we’re extremely lucky about here well i think yeah to answer your question heavy transport will be hydrogen you just cannot put tons and tons of batteries on a truck and expect to carry the same amount of payload uh so the the tanks for the hydrogen don’t weigh a hell of a lot more than the tanks for the fuel with the diesel in it in the truck and
Especially up at cape valley as i say at wipra if we can run our trucks on um hydrogen from up there they can fill up up there come into town pick up their load of waste take it out to cape valley wiper and dump it off in a zero cabin i thought that all it comes out water so fantastic yeah yeah yeah um yeah it’s great so yeah if you i guess you haven’t met anyone
Else on the road with the same car as you but if you’ve spoken to anyone else overseas with them to get any sort of what i did because because i say i’m on the transverse board i was interested i’ve had it before i was a counselor at a trucking company and i’m interested in new things and tracks and things like i was generally leaning towards it so i did a bit
Of homework on hydrogen cars and found out that they had um quite a there’s a real good following of hyundai nexos in california because they’ve got a good um refueling system situation over there so i rang my cousin up who runs the biggest hyundai uh dealership in the south island and said oh i’ll bring one of these in from america left-hand drive one i don’t
Care if it’s left-hand drive i just want to try one and give the goats we’re actually got three in the country and one of them is brand new and you can buy that if you like so so i did so i’ve got it um it it’s it goes it does everything you ever want and it’s it’s got it’s got heated seats it’s got cool seats heated steering wheel you name it it’s it’s got it
So it’s really good yes it looks like quite a luxury car as a um on the inside lots of buttons look the photos tesla one screen got your screen and then you go the yours is button button which i like the buttons everywhere being an elderly dinosaur that i am but it’s like hyundai have gone around and found every button that they’ve got left over from all the old
Grounded in there but it’s it’s simple it’s so easy you actually turn a knob and the volume goes up and down on your stereo and stuff like that so it’s it suits me the way i am so it’s great it’s really good anything you don’t like oh sorry well sorry i will say with the the other thing we’ve got here in christchurch is um an outfit called um a company called
A.f cryro chryogenic and they make a uh 20-foot container with lots and lots of things in it and you plug power in one side and water in the other you put 4 000 liters of water in per day you put 1.1 megawatts of power in per day and you get 450 kilograms just under half a ton of hydrogen out of it but the the the byproduct is um three and a half tons three and
A half thousand kilograms yeah three yeah that’s right of uh medical grade oxygen out of it as a body so these these um 20 foot containers will be quietly set up all over the all over the place and the the benefit of having medical grade hydro uh oxygen that someone can use i’m sure is going to be a plus yeah yeah there’s lots of opportunities opening up for
Hydrogen isn’t there it’s still very early days oh it is absolutely see you could have set up one of these hydrogen generators somewhere we’ll say say uh milk milk plant or whatever and you could run your um you could run your forklifts on them there’s all sorts of things and the good thing about it is because it makes it on site no matter where you put it there’s
No tanks like lpg tankers driving around all fuel tankers driving around the places right there and so i can if i’ve got one of these machines at my place even though they are pretty dear um it makes as i say 450 kilograms a day if i come and take 10 or 20 or 30 kilograms out if i’m a truck or whatever um i go away and while i’m away it just tops up and keeps
It topped up to just under half a ton of hydrogen all the time so it’s great yeah yeah it’s it’s quite exciting times isn’t it i guess you’d say oh couldn’t agree more couldn’t agree it’s more it’s it’s you get you go go on youtube and all sorts of things and you see them mining lithium now that doesn’t look like the the best thing in the world it sort of takes
A fair bit of effort fuel diesel you name it and sort of scares the planet a bit there’s a bit like um morning phosphate it’s uh it does a fair bit of damage to the planet so i think this going forward especially for trucks cars are probably just as easy you can plug them in and stuff like that but uh yeah hydrogen’s way to go as far as i can uh maybe just last
Thursday in 10 years time where do you see the hydrogen the industry i would say there will be electric cars will still be still be around and stuff like that but delivery trucks around town small delivery trucks around town and maybe even lion hall stuff like that the trans waste um things they’ll yeah they’ll they’ll they’ll be good they’ll be the yeah lion
Hall trucks will be the way it happens especially with your diesel and fuel going up the way it is okay there are phil thanks for your time that was all very interesting and i don’t know any more information please don’t hesitate to give us thanks for watching the video if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover in a future video let me know in the comments below
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Transcribed from video
Hyundai Nexo owner review | Hydrogen refuelling in New Zealand By EV Quest