Under Hyundai's plan to build a hydrogen fuel cell plant in China, "castles in the air" has taken off.

While accelerating the promotion of lithium power, South Korean automakers are also aggressively promoting their hydrogen energy plans, which have been targeted at China.

According to the latest report from South Korean technology media Korea Bizwire local time on Tuesday (5th), industry insiders said in a telephone interview on the same day that Hyundai Motor, South Korea's largest carmaker, will build its first overseas hydrogen fuel cell system plant in Guangzhou, China, in order to seek access to the local hydrogen market.

According to it, Hyundai is currently in talks with a Chinese company to form a joint venture to jointly build the plant, which is expected to be officially announced this month. Hyundai has not yet confirmed the plan to the media.

However, a South Korean government source said that after the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy reviewed the impact of hydrogen fuel cell system exports, South Korea's Ministry of Commerce has approved the plan, saying that the construction of a hydrogen fuel cell system plant will pave the way for increasing the export of South Korean auto parts to China, the world's largest auto market.

Hyundai, South Korea's largest carmaker and leader in electrification of the country's auto industry, has long been involved in hydrogen fuel cells. As early as 2018, the company announced that it would invest 7.6 trillion won (US $6.9 billion) in hydrogen-powered vehicle production facilities and related research and development activities by 2030, and planned to produce 500000 hydrogen-powered vehicles in 2030.

Last September, Hyundai said it had exported four hydrogen fuel cell systems to Europe, when it said it planned to expand sales of hydrogen fuel cell systems in global markets, including the US and China. Just recently, the company once again announced the launch of a fuel cell system brand called HTWO, with a goal of selling 700000 hydrogen fuel cells on the global market by 2030.

"substituting awards for compensation" has taken a substantial step forward in reducing costs and promoting industrial development.

In China, hydrogen fuel cells have repeatedly attracted the attention of investors.

Wu Chenghao of Guolian Securities reported on November 23 that the core advantages of hydrogen energy are clean and efficient, can be stored and transported, rich application scenarios, solving abandoned scenery, and so on. At present, our country is facing the double test of environment and energy security. The goal of carbon neutralization requires our country to speed up the transformation to clean energy. Therefore, the development of hydrogen energy will become a key supplement to China's energy transformation.

In September last year, the plan of "substituting awards for compensation", which had been brewing for a long time, was officially launched and was hotly debated. According to the analysis of the minutes of the conference call of Guojin Securities on December 23, 2020, the business logic of the fuel cell industry is the positive feedback of quantity and price:

The policy promotes the increase of the installed capacity of fuel cells, which in turn promotes the reduction of costs to a certain extent, so that the full-life cost of fuel cells in the field of heavy trucks is competitive, and the price will trigger the start of the heavy truck market.

On this basis, the importance of policy landing as the first step in the development of the whole industry is self-evident. The landing of the policy will bring tens of billions of subsidies. Assuming that a car needs a subsidy of 500000 yuan, the scale of subsidy of 50 billion yuan can promote the scale of 100000 vehicles, while with the production scale of 100000 vehicles, the cost will come down.

The report of Wu Chenghao of Guolian Securities on November 23 also believes that the industry has entered a virtuous inner circle of scale-cost reduction-market development under policy support. According to its estimate, by 2050, the domestic hydrogen demand will be close to 60 million tons, the annual economic output value will exceed 10 trillion yuan, the number of hydrogen filling stations will reach more than 10000, and the annual output of fuel cell vehicles will reach 5.2 million.

It is different from the development of lithium electricity and the future industrial scale is the same level or even larger.

It should be pointed out that although hydrogen fuel cells and lithium batteries are the same power batteries for electric vehicles, they have shown differences in their development paths.

First of all, in terms of commercialization, hydrogen fuel cell is more suitable for commercial vehicles such as heavy trucks. Compared with lithium battery, hydrogen fuel cell has the advantages of high energy density, long mileage and strong load capacity, so it is more suitable for heavy trucks in the field of long-distance and heavy-duty transportation.

Secondly, from the cost point of view, lithium battery does not have the concept of fuel, the price of commercial electricity is fixed, while the fuel hydrogen price of hydrogen fuel cell can be very low in a wide range of 15-45 yuan / kg,.

If it reaches 100000, the cost of 100kw's fuel cell engine will be reduced from 500, 000 to 600, 000 yuan to more than 100, 000 yuan. If subsidies are taken into account, more than one million fuel cell vehicles can reach 300000 yuan after subsidy, which is similar to that of fuel vehicles.

According to the report of Zhang Shuai of Guojin Securities on November 23rd, by 2024 and 2025, the price of the whole fuel cell system will reach more than 100,000 yuan, and the price of a car will be 500000 yuan. If the hydrogen is less than 30 yuan / kg, the hydrogen energy heavy truck can be more economical than the diesel heavy truck (the purchase cost of diesel vehicle is about 400000 yuan / L, the use cost of the whole life cycle is 3 million).

If you look at it for five years, the fuel cell is expected to load 100,000 vehicles, and the industry will eventually be of the same order of magnitude as lithium electricity or even larger, and the market capitalization of the leading enterprises is more than 100 billion yuan.