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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."
According to the International Energy Agency, global oil production is set to peak in 2014. For many years now, researchers around the world have been striving to develop alternative methods of propulsion to ensure that mankind remains mobile irrespective of the state of the world's oil supplies. Some of the most promising reports from the field come from research engineers at DaimlerChrysler, who are intending to have a fuel cell auto ready for series production by 2004. The best thing about this item of news is that this car of the future will be every kilowatt as powerful as the ones we drive today, every bit as comfortable and just as much fun to drive.
The facts
To prove their point about the serviceability of fuel cell automobiles, DaimlerChrysler have now built NECAR (New Electric Car) 5. In this Mercedes-Benz A-Class the propulsion system fits neatly inside the sandwich floor, without compromising either seating or
luggage capacity. NECAR 5's 55 kW/75 bhp motor gives it a top speed of over 90 mph and a range of several hundred miles before it has to take more methanol on board.
In the global race to be first to market with a fully serviceable standard production fuel cell model, NECAR can safely be said to be leading the field. "We're aiming for market leadership in this sector as well," says Jürgen E. Schrempp, Chairman of the Board of Management of DaimlerChrysler. "We've got the technology on our side, we're securing the industrial property rights, and we're creating new jobs." At DaimlerChrysler and its partner companies in this venture, over a thousand people are already working flat out on the fuel cell project in Germany alone.
The technology of fuel cell propulsion
In NECAR 5, DaimlerChrysler is banking on the methanol fuel cell - one of several options for passenger car applications. It helps to imagine a fuel cell as a kind of miniature on-board power station, generating the electric current that ultimately powers the car, and there are different ways of operating these power plants. Fuel cells need oxygen, which they obtain from the surrounding air, and hydrogen. So one option is to fit the vehicle with hydrogen tanks. The result is a zero emission vehicle with just water vapor coming out of its exhaust.
Although methanol cannot quite compete in an ecological life cycle assessment with hydrogen generated by solar power, there are good reasons for using this compound as a source of hydrogen for the fuel cell. Emission levels are far lower than with even the most eco-friendly of internal combustion engines, and emissions of pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and soot particulates drop to almost zero.
Compared with an internal combustion engine, overall emissions of carbon dioxide can be reduced by thirty percent, and if the methanol is generated from renewable resources such as biomass, organic raw materials or waste wood, then the overall cycle leads to no additional carbon dioxide being created at all. Today tests are already under way at a plant near Cottbus in Germany aiming to generate 100,000 tons of methanol a year from domestic waste.
Given the variety of ways of producing methanol, the automotive sector would no longer be dependent on the oil-producing countries. And we could finally put a stop to the enormous waste of energy currently practised at oilfields around the world. Instead of flaring off the natural gas which is a by-product of oil production, it could be converted into liquid methanol on site by relatively simple technical means. The American Methanol Institute estimates that if just one-tenth of the flared-off natural gas were to be converted into methanol it would be enough to power some ten million vehicles.
The fact that, even in the long term, adequate volumes of methanol can be produced from a number of different raw materials at low cost is not the only argument in its favor. For unlike liquid hydrogen, methanol can be transported, stored, distributed and handled in much the same way as gasoline or diesel. The only difference a driver would notice when filling up would be the sign saying 'methanol' on the fuel pump. That said, providing a market-wide supply infrastructure for methanol will still call for substantial investment. It is not just a case of rinsing out empty gasoline tanks and tankers and filling them with methanol. The problem is that methanol is more aggressive than either gasoline or diesel - too aggressive for today's tanks, fuel lines and sealants. Aluminum fuel tanks, for example, would have to be replaced with stainless steel ones. But for all the cost involved, the total investment required remains realistic and with the conversion measures in place, it would be 'business as usual' for most of the existing network of filling stations.
The NECAR 5 - tried and tested
According to Professor Klaus-Dieter Vöhringer, the Member of DaimlerChrysler's Board of Management responsible for Research and Technology, methanol has so many practical advantages that he is expecting to see the methanol fuel cell make the breakthrough into series production. "In terms of the technology on board, NECAR 5 is effectively a prototype of the cars that we could be bringing to market maturity in just a few years' time. Our next task at hand is to build test fleets to bring the technology to full readiness for series production. We need to focus on developing the production technology for the various components and bringing costs down to an acceptable level."
One important step down the road to this goal takes the shape of a large-scale project that DaimlerChrysler initiated in California. The California Fuel Cell Partnership is a joint venture involving a number of automakers and public institutions as well as representatives of the oil and energy sectors.
From now until 2003, project engineers will be testing more than fifty fuel cell vehicles in everyday use. DaimlerChrysler alone will have fifteen vehicles on test, with the latest NECAR due to cover some 25,000 miles in the next three years on the streets of California to check out and improve its serviceability.
Clearly, the fuel cell car has made the transition from an object of research to a development project. Now it's up to the developers to teach this infant to walk. But instead of closing the file on the fuel cell, the researchers have turned their attention to the next-but-one generation of fuel cell vehicles.
At the end of last year, a young DaimlerChrysler researcher by the name of Jens Thomas Müller made a striking impression at a research symposium by zipping around the congress hall in a softly humming go-kart. Although the kart itself was nothing very special to look at, it demonstrated for the first time that a direct methanol fuel cell was in principle capable of powering a vehicle. For in this version of the fuel cell, there is no need to reform the methanol into hydrogen - and this could be where the future of fuel cell propulsion.
fyi, the car uses methanol, not hydrogen. still highly flammable, but at least you get a bit of a kick out of it.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
I don't consider this as bad. Humanity's CO2 exhaust contributes only a small part to the climate change which is mostly natural, and car exhaust is only a fragment of that.
Also remember that fuel cells are not an alternative energy *source*, but only enable a different way of storing it. Hydrogen production consumes a lot of power and is today mostly done with fossil resources, because splitting water eats even more energy. Fuel cell cars are a good way to become independent of petrol, but the main problem that there is not yet a real alternative to fossil or nuclear fuel will persist beyond 2010.
Mass-produced fuel cell vehicles might speed up science in that direction, however.
To stay on that topic: I've read about a guy who got silicon to react with nitrogen, producing sand. His idea was to use solar energy to extract silicon from African desert sand. Does anybody know anything about that?
The article should have said something about the oil companies. I'll bet that most major oil-drilling companies will fight fuel cells with all they've got.
I am well aware that not all oil is made into gasolin and that some fuelcells can convert gasolin and that they could use the excess gas (which comes up with the oil) to power the cells. I am also well aware that it is posible through cracking to reduse the raw oil to more usable components.
Still the oil companies would suffer serious losses and so would some oil dependant contries. This might in turn lead to I price war where oil companies would subsidize traditional cars (especially american motors which uses way too much gas compared to their effect.) The fuel cell cars would then have few economical advantages over gas cars. Who would subsidize them? Green Peace?
Look a monkey!
The European standards body that does this stuff has its results here and one to note is the abysmal results on this MPV. I quote The Voyager did so badly in the frontal impact that it earned no points, making it the worst of the group by some margin. The body structure became unstable and the steering column was driven back into the driver's chest and head.
So while there may be concerns about these cars if all cars had to get decent scores in these tests that it would ensure that everyone was safe. As it is the gap between the worst and the best is enough to make the fuel inside it only one of the considerations in safety.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
For those of you who don't already know, GM has shown a concept car called AUTOnomy which is fuel-cell-powered too, but has a bunch of other interesting features.
Roughly speaking, of man-made CO2 emissions, roughly half is from industry/power stations, and the other half is vehicle emissions. That's a bit more than a fragment - more like a very significant amount.
There is a big debate on whether the current measured climate change is being caused by human activity, or whether it is something that would have happened anyway. You certainly can't claim the case has been made that it is not due to human activity. In either case, it seems sensible to do something about it before it is too late.
One big advantage of fuel cells is that they fuel can be generated from renewable resources. For example, you could use wind turbines to generate electricity to electrolize water. I think fuel cell reactions are also reversable, so you could put 'green' electricity into a methanol fuel cell to get methanol out. The advantages are obvious compared to using up a finite non-renewable oil resource.
As I see it, most of the people who push for hydrogren powered vehicles don't want to make clean cars, they want to make expensive cars. They seem to feel that if they can just make it a legal requirement that all cars cost US$100K and US$10/kilometer, then we will all happily stop driving cars and go back to walking.
Why do I feel this way? Because the folks who push hydrogen never seem to consider the facts that make hydrogen a poor fuel choice, and never consider that better alternatives exist.
First, let's consider the goals of alternative fuels:
Also, let's review the barriers to adoption of any new system:
Now, consider hydrogen in light of those requirements:
Now, let us consider biodiesel - made from peanut oil, canola, corn, hemp, or whatnot.
So, if your goal is to reduce pollution and dependance on a non-renewable resource, you logically would be pressing for biodiesel. So why do so many of these people push for hydrogen? I believe it is because they want cars to be expensive in the mistaken belief that this will push us toward their utopian ideal of us all living in bark houses, wearing bushes and eating bugs.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
Here is an article on hydrogen fuel cells and safety, including results of BMW's simulated collisions:
<clip>
Many real-life tests have demonstrated the safety of pressurized hydrogen storage. Simulated 55 mph crash tests left the car totaled, but the hydrogen tank intact. To prove the safety of its hydrogen vehicles, BMW tested its hydrogen tanks in a series of accident simulations that included collision, fire and tank ruptures. In all cases, the hydrogen cars fared as well as conventional gasoline vehicles. And hydrogen-fueled cars are designed to preclude the possibility of leaked hydrogen collecting within the vehicle.
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Traveling time was 85 hours over a span of 16 days, an average of about 38 mph, but DaimlerChrysler says the car reached speeds of more than 90 mph.
In other news, late yesterday, state police officials from Nevada arrived in Washington, D.C., for the extradition of the driver of the Daimler-Chrysler fuel cell powered car.
Crime Scene Investigators from Las Vegas confirmed that a vehicle with tires matching those of the unique fuel-cell car was responsible for running over a Wayne Newton billboard near the entrance of the Mustang Ranch.
"We think the testimony the engineers gave to CNN will clinch this case and help to save America from terrorist speeders."
"Provided by the management for your protection."
An alternative fuel cell technology extracts hydrogen from hydrocarbons on the way to combustion. These are more likely to see implementation because there is a hydrocarbon deliver infrastructure in place. Probably will start with laptop fuel cell batteries that have triple lifetime over alternatives.
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!
which is that it doesn't matter how the hydrogen is created, all the vehicles run off of the same power source.. this means that if petroleum can be cheaply used to make hyrdogen, than it will sell the best.. if it happens that methane can be used cheaply, than it can be.. it would go a far way from divorcing the current "it has to be gasoline, or nothing can run" mono-culture that prevails now.
What I would love to see, is something that used solar or wind power to trickle charge a fuel cell.. so I could just set something up in my backyard.. a distributed source of energy would be less vulnerable to attack than the current system is.
ChuckyG
Actually, there are a few other advantages to running biodiesel fuel:
1. Because of its purity, biodiesel fuel has no issues of sulfur dioxide emissions or particulate emissions. That means with a relatively low-cost catalytic converter a biodiesel-powered vehicle could easily meet the current ULEV and possibly even the SULEV standard for exhaust emissions.
2. Diesel engines by nature if properly implemented can actually offer the same power output of a gasoline engine but consume way less fuel for that same output. For example, GM's amazing Duramax engine for the large pickup trucks has easily as much pulling power as their top-end gasoline engine for that truck, but instead of getting 9 mpg pulling a 9,000 lb. trailer you get 18 mpg!!
3. People forget that when Rudolf Diesel first developed this engine design the primary fuel he used was peanut oil, of all things. That means he knew that using oil extracted from any high-carbohydrate plant it could fuel this car.
In short, with the right policy in place we could take huge tracts of farmland here in the USA and grow any high-carbohydrate crop (corn, wheat, sorghum, alfalfa, sugar beets, sugar cane, sunflower, and rice) and turn a large fraction of the production surplus into the distillate needed for biodiesel fuel. Even a diesel fuel with a 30% biodiesel and 70% mineral diesel fuel mix that has sulfur particles reduced to 80 parts per million could result in cars and light trucks getting 35-45% better fuel mileage, given diesel's natural efficiency.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I think fuel cells are going to be more important in the near term for stationary power generation.
I love raining on environmentalist's parades. It turns out that diesel particulates are really, really bad for you - much more so than previously expected or understood. One researcher concluded there may be NO safe level of exposure to micro-fine particulates.
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However, unlike most enviromentalists who ignore things like this (and I'm trolling a bit here, for sure) and worst, I never see quotes regarding what it would take to match any signifigant fraction of current raw energy consumption.
Good reading:
http://www.ems.org/diesel/facts.html
http://www.google.ca/search?q=diesel+particulat
I'll take my CO2 from a fuel cell anyday. It'll all be moot once we start fighting over who gets the last of the oil, anyhow.
..don't panic
This car didn't store H2 onboard. It used a fuel processor that reformed methanol into H2 on demand and was immediately consumed by the fuel cell stack.
Hmm...
- people who hate SUV's because they can't see over them.... or just get mad when they see someone in a bigger car.
Vehicles that obstruct the view of the road for drivers behind them increase the risk of accidents for themselves and everyone else. In the case of large transport trucks it's unavoidable, but passenger vehicles can avoid this consequence.
- "Limousine environmentalists" who rail against SUV's and "greenhouse gases" while driving one themselves. Al Gore is one of these.
Agreed. I have little respect for those who don't practice what they preach.
- People who want to force automakers to make smaller flimsier dangerous cars with less passenger and cargo capacity that get more miles per gallon.
Smaller cars are only dangerous because they risk being involved in an accident with larger cars. If everyone's cars were smaller, everyone would be safer because collisions would, on average, be less energetic. Also, since smaller cars have shorter braking distances and better handling, the absolute number of accidents might be reduced as well. As far as cargo capacity, I can get myself, my wife, our kid, and a month's worth of groceries in our Honda Civic which gets >35mpg. People who claim they 'need' an SUV to go grocery shopping are lying, plain and simple. It might be useful for buying furniture, but that's not something you do on a regular basis. Rent a truck when you do, it's cheaper than paying for the gas you'll burn in the meantime.
- Centers for science in no-ones interest who perpetuate tentative and unproven manmade global warming theories.
There's a lot of good and bad science thrown around in the debate, but if there's even a chance that it's correct, it seems prudent to look for ways to reduce emissions - if it can be done without excessive cost. Driving more efficient cars is hardly excessively costly, in fact it generally has a negative cost.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
The car is interesting, but the real work is all in the fuel cell. It's kind of like Dell saying, "We made this super fast computer, and it's rated at 5 gigaflops" without mentioning who made the CPU, motherboard, etc, etc.
I did some poking around - Ballard made the fuel cell, and here is their press release summary page:
Ballard Powers DaimlerChrysler's Fuel Cell Vehicle on a 3,000 Mile Drive Across the United States
Traveling time was 85 hours over a span of 16 days ,... DaimlerChrysler says the car reached speeds of more than 90 mph.
I have images of a subcompact full of sleep-deprived, coffee-fueled engineers on the interstate shouting, "Let's take this hydrogen rocket to the moon! Yeee ha!" as they pin the speedo needle.
> people who hate SUV's because they can't see over them
More like the other way around--yesterday I was nearly run off the right lane of a freeway by a patriotic American in a good-for-the-economy truck because he couldn't see my sedan over his high passenger window sill.
> or just get mad when they see someone in a bigger car
Yes, because in the end all people are motivated by the same Freudian need for larger things in life. The fact that some people might actually want more compact cars with less inertia and tight suspensions that can be thrown around corners (it's called "h-a-n-d-l-i-n-g") is obviously pure FUD thrown up by inferior foreign auto manufacturers that can't compete with the exquisite American sculptures-in-(lots-of)-steel.
> People who want to force automakers to make smaller flimsier dangerous cars
Structural rigidity decreases with increasing structure size, as any engineer will tell you. IOW, the larger a vehicle, the worse it does in collisions with objects of its own heft. Never mind that current trucks are not even particularly engineering for crashes--they feature inferior crumple zones and body rigidity. They are designed to survive crashes mainly due to the overwhelming odds that they will collide with a much smaller vehicle. Truck-on-truck collisions fare much worse than car-on-car collisions. Of course, in the US trucks are not measured on the same crashworthiness scale anyway, so they don't have to.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'd like to see some yield figures for biodiesel production. What quantity of diesel could be expected per acre of hemp? My gut feeling on this is that the US alone consume way more fuel than could reasonably be produced on all arable lands, not considering that you wouldn't want to grow hemp on every empty spot of real estate anyway.
There are a couple of problems with biodiesel. The first is the sheer land area needed to grow enough crop to extract the necessary amount of fuel (also add the manpower to harvest and process it). The second is that Carnot's Law, where by burning a fuel to extract energy you can only get a maximum of 40% efficiency (fuel cell theoretically you can get 100%). This makes biodiesel a good intermediary fuel to help wean us of fossil fuels whilst we get the hydrogen economy in place, but not a long-term solution. Finally watch out if you have an older car. From memory (please correct me if I am wrong) biodiesel will ruin any rubber seals in the engine but this is not a problem in newer cars which only use plastic seals. There are lots of interesting articles on biodiesel at Future Energies magazine.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Interesting you mention that, because Porsche (the professor, not the car company) built the FIRST hybrid car, the first all-wheel drive car, and the first front-wheel drive car. Almost 100 years ago.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
First let's look at your hydrogen comments:
# Hydrogen is hard to contain - you either use expensive cryogenics, or you have to use zeolite entrainment to contain it. It weakens steel containers by diffusing into the container and migrating to the ever-present microfractures and expanding them (hydrogen embrittlement)
There is plenty of research going on in this area, which are going in two different directions. The first is in using new materials for reinforced containers, and the second is storing the hydrogen within another material, such as boron, and using a catalyst to release it on the fly as you need it. Both are making good progress.
# You have to make hydrogen from something - you therefor have to have some other energy source. Either that source is burning carbon in some form, or it's splitting atoms. Wind and wave are cool, but not universally available nor do they have the power density to meet all needs (not to say that they shouldn't be harvested....)
It can be using solar power, which is available everywhere. Wind and wave can be used to produce hydrogen, which can then be shipped or piped anywhere in the world like any other fuel. Heat can be used but it doesn't need to be burning carbons, it could be the excess electricity from a CHP (Combined Heat and Power) station.
# There aren't hydrogen stations on every corner. Until there are, anyone driving a hydrogen car will have to plan any long trips very carefully. True, this would correct itself if enough people drive H2 vehicles, but they won't drive them until the stations exists, but the stations won't be built until the cars are bought....
There weren't LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) stations on each corner before it was invented, now they are available everywhere in the UK. Stick a solar array in the garden and connect it to an electrolysis kit and you might be able to produce enough hydrogen to get to work each morning (I haven't tried calculating this one). You can certainly buy ones off the shelf today that plug in the mains (and no that doesn't necessarily mean you are just pushing back the burning of fossil fuels back to the power station, there are electricity companies these days that supply 100% Green electricity).
# Hydrogen requires a special engine to burn - either a fuel cell, or a modified internal combustion engine. If you DO take a trip and screw up your planning, you are stuck.
Screw up your planning? That makes no sense. Do you mean break down? In which case you use your insurance, though since fuel cell engines have few moving parts the chances should be slim.
# Hydrogen engines DO reduce the low-altitude pollution - no unburned hydrocarbons, and fuel cells produce little NOx and no SOx
If we skip straight to pure hydrogen as a fuel, then there will be zero pollution.
# Fuel cells are expensive right now. They might get cheaper later, however
There is no 'might' about it.
As regards biodiesel, the major problem is that it doesn't scale. Can you imagine the surface area needed to produce enough crops to then extract sufficient energy to then drive all the world's cars? Secondly it _does_ need energy to extract the fuel: machines are needed to go harvest the crops, then to process them, not forgetting the transport of all the workers needed to operate these machines.
Still, well done on opening up the debate. You can learn much more about the merits of fuel cells and biodiesel at Future Energies magazine.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France