Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hybrid Powertrains and Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Posted by michael on from the stick-shift dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes "Nice article from cars.com detailing a panel dicussion with reps from Chrysler Group, Ford, General Motors and American Honda agreeing that hybrid powertrains and hydrogen fuel cells are the future of automotive propulsion, and discussing their companies' different approaches in both areas."

9 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Hydrogen is not free by augustz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.

    So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale). The advant of a clean and cheap way to get massive amounts of hydrogen is I understand a ways off.

    Love to get links / info to the contrary.

    - August

    1. Re:Hydrogen is not free by Krapangor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, but the main point is that you get a clean and efficent form of energy storage. This would enable cars to use energy form many different sources, not only petrol like today.

      --
      Owner of a Mensa membership card.
    2. Re:Hydrogen is not free by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Insightful
      So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale).

      I think you are underestimating the value of centralizing production of energy. It is not feasible to produce nuclear-powered cars. However, we can get the same effect simply by making hydrogen-powered zero-emission vehicles and producing the hydrogen with nuclear power. The benefit of centralizing energy production is total freedom in how the energy is produced. It also easier, cheaper, and better for the environment to have one big, expensive, highly advanced pollution scrubber at a fossil-fuel powered plant than to have jillions of less-efficient catylitic converters all over the place, and eventually taking up space in landfills.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    3. Re:Hydrogen is not free by augustz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I understand, but to get the electricity to perform the hydrolysis you have to generate it, usually using some pretty dirty fuel. I think it is clear that cheap usable hydrogen is not going to becoming from hydrolysis. Some of these other methods look excellent.

    4. Re:Hydrogen is not free by HalfFlat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think that is what is usually called a straw-man argument.

      Few if any people are promoting the idea of electric-only cars powered by traditional batteries, and refilled by plugging it into the wall socket. For the very reasons you describe, it would be expensive and ineffective.

      As described in the article, and often on slashdot, the idea is to have a fuel cell in the car which uses hydrogen very efficiently. The problem then becomes a matter of storing and generating the hydrogen. Storing it (and there are a number of options) is expensive but possible. The fact that there are working experimental hydrogen-based cars demonstrates this. It is a one-off cost though, so shouldn't be taken too seriously.

      Generating the hydrogen can be done at the site of another form of power generation. Even if this is done with coal and oil plants (which of course is a very poor way to create power to begin with when compared with (say) natural gas) one eliminates the losses due to power transmission etc. Further, the pollution that eminates from the burning of fossil fuels is much more easily contained at a single site (like a power station) than it is when it's generated by 234723849 cars.

      There are much more efficient ways of generating hydrogen though, from natural gas or methane directly, which completely bypass the very dirty and relatively inefficient coal and oil power production systems.

      The only reason why hybrid cars are the best solution right now, is that there is a lack of a hydrogen supply infrastructure. Fix that, and hydrogen as energy storage comes into its own.
      Again, as described in the article, a promising avenue to this is through converting local bus services to hydrogen-based, which even in the absence of an established hydrogen infrastructure, can then be cheaper to run. This in turn creates a market for distribution,

  2. Seems to me... by Xeo2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Even if we do change over, where are we going to get the energy to liberate the hydrogen from where is is sitting now? Fossil Fuels, maybe?
    T( H)GSB Apr 21-27

    --
    ___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
  3. Your efficiencies miss the point by Goonie · · Score: 3, Insightful
    As you've pointed out, hybrid cars are more fuel-efficient than pure gasoline-powered cars. What you seem to have missed is *why* - basically, they don't waste fuel idling at traffic lights, and they turn the energy from braking back into battery charge rather than pissing it away as heat.

    Any half-intelligently designed pure electric or fuel-cell electric car is going to do exactly the same thing, and therefore your in-practice efficiency is going to go up - I'd hazard a guess to the point where the energy-efficiency is about the same.

    --

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
    --Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
  4. Protectionist conspiracy theory by frankie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Who makes hybrid gas/electric cars right now? Toyota and Honda.

    Who showed hydrogen concept cars early this year? Ford and GM. When do they expect to be ready for market? 10 years.

    Which technology is really better? They're comparable .

    What did President Bush decide to do? End support for hybrids and spend money on fuel cells instead.

    Connect the dots?

  5. Re:Hydrogen is like Electricity by mamba-mamba · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your implied criticism is entirely unwarranted. Christine Sloane obviously gets the idea that hydrogen is an energy storage system, much more than it is a new fuel. She calls attention to this fact in the statement you quote by emphasizing that before you can use hydrogen, you need to make hydrogen, and the energy for doing that has to come from somewhere else.

    It is not the least bit trivial (from an energy standpoint) to "make" hydrogen out of water. You always have to put in more energy that you will get back when you use the hydrogen. So when she says "you can make hydrogen from almost anything" she is making a statement that is reasonably accurate but hopefully won't confuse the masses who don't have a good knowledge of thermodynamics and simple chemistry.

    MM
    --

    --
    By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.