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Fuel Cell Car Goes Cross-Country
person-0.9a writes "CNN is currently running a story about Daimler-Chrysler's fuel-cell concept car completing a trek across America. The CNN article is more about the trip, but details about the vehicle can be found here."
Last year, DCX was driving a directly powered hydrogen car all around Germany, but you never hear anything more about it.
From what I remember, the car used liquified hydrogen and achieved normal speeds and fairly comparable mileage to gasoline. The only issue was keeping the liquid hydrogen cold.
Initial rear-end crash tests on this car showed that this wasn't any more dangerous than gasoline nor more explosive.
Gasoline burns like gangbusters. Safety concern is not that hydrogen burns. Concern is focused on hydrogen in the gaseous form (which burns explosively when mixed with oxygen). For gasoline to be explosive, you have to heat it enough to vaporize.
I do get tired of reading that burning hydrogen produces no emissions (NOx and others), but ignoring the fact that hydrogen as to come from somewhere (you can't just pump H2 out of a hole in the ground) that tends to be fossil fuels today in another forms.
Hydrogen is a storage technology, not an energy source. Now, methane based fuel cells are much more interesting because we've got lots of methane (pumped from the ground), but there is not an infinite supply of methane, and lots of CO2 is added to the exhaust mix.
I'm no Luddite. I want microfusion powered cars, or more realistically, some decent storage technology for transportation use, and nuclear or renewable resource for evergy generation.
I've been evaluating both fuel cell and another technology that is well on its way to mainstream use... biodiesel. http://www.biodiesel.org. This diesel fuel is made from vegetable oil and methonol. It runs on all existing diesel trucks and cars, has a 100% clean production cycle (no fossil fuels required to make it), heck, it can be made with recycled cooking oil! It mixes with petro diesel allowing a easy integration plan (use a little at a time...). Also, its production requires agriculture which equals oxygen... creating a method to take whatever CO2 is produced and convert it.
Now, this isn't as clean as burning pure hydrogen... but is MUCH better than burning gasoline or diesel. It reduces emmissions by more than 50% and eliminates sulfur, odor and reduces the stuff that make smog by a good bit (all this is commonly associated with petro) And when you take a look at what you need to do to produce hydrogen you're looking at producing electricity (fossil fuels/nuclear) or some other chemical process that is harmful. You still end up putting pollution into the air. It seems to me that fuel cells are a way around battery technology, but I feel it is a very inefficient way to do it.
Also, the fuel cell car cost 1 million to build and broke down once? The National Biodiesel Board drove to the nearest Ford dealership, picked up a diesel pickup, filled it with 100% biodiesel and have been driving it around with no problems for 500,000 miles. They just completed there 10th trip across the country! The fuel cell car got up to about 90 MPH... My Jetta TDI (VW) gets up to 90 everyday! The speedometer goes up to 140 and I have no doubts that it can do that. 750 miles per tank, 55 MPG, road rage baby!
So think about it. A fuel source that is renewable, is produced with no waste or by-product, and its growth produces oxygen and cleans the air. Its also a domestic product and is already in use in Europe and the States. It can also be used on all existing diesel vehicles. I say we take all that money we're burning in research and start to build some pumps, fund agriculture and kick start the future!
I think fuel cells are going to be more important in the near term for stationary power generation.