Slashdot Mirror
Los Angeles City Employees To Drive Hydrogen Power
mace_15 writes "According this CNN article the mayor of Los Angeles has signed a lease with Honda to allow city employees to drive experimental hydrogen powered cars. The cars can reach speeds up to 93mph and Honda claims they have a range of 220 miles before refueling. More information on the car can be found here. Mercedes-Benz has a similar car."
A CNN article on hydrogen cars details this as well. Now, the question is, which comes first: hydrogen refueling stations so that people will buy cars, or hydrogen powered cars to drive the need for refueling stations?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
They can travel on congested freeways at speeds up to 6 miles per hour for 13 miles.
The expression is "I could NOT care less." Think about it.
Picture this. You go to buy a car and decide to shell out the extra $$$ to get an efficient gas/electric hybrid so that you can do your part to sustain the environment. Next thing you know, it's two years later and everyone is driving hydrogen cell cars which are even more environmentally friendly. Now, everywhere you go you get dirty looks for being so irresponsible.
- These pretzels are making me thirsty. -
They had the same problem when they first introduced gasoline autos.
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
What happens if one gets laid off and gets pissed? Having that much hydrogen in a car could sure put a dent in the LA skyline.
Don't mod this down if you think it might happen, follow the mod rules.
Medevo
What lessons there are here for alternative energy cars, I don't know. Aside from the folks who burn used french-fry oil in their diesels, opportunities to run alternate-fuel vehicles without special support appear to be few and far between (save for block-heater-friendly Canadian cities being EV-friendly)
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a storage medium. All this will do is lull people into a false sense of 'I'm green', when all that's going to happen is a redistribution of the pollutants. So instead of having cars pump out pollutants, power plants will.
...
The real long term solution is for people to stop being so damn energy intensive for every little thing. Walk. Bike. Relax.
But this won't happen until it's way too late. People won't change, they will want their comfort above all. This is why Max Planck said that for ideas to change, people must die. It's too bad the life expectancy is so long now.
And what will happen when every car is pumping out steam? Do people think smog just hangs around because it's smog, but water vapor will just float away immediately? When cities will be turned into saunas, we'll see
please enlighten me, i fail to see your logic, and please don't tell me you're thinking about tritium used to add some 'zip' to nuclear weapons...
Anyone remember those "fly-wheel" cars that were all the hype a few years ago, which involved having a big-ass flywheel spinning at 50k+ RPM mounted in the back of a car, well one of those could certainly do a lot more damage than a tank-full of hydrogen, and i don't remember anyone even mentioning what would happen if someone got into an accident and allowed a 55,000 RPM flywheel to take off down the sidewalk...
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
From this article
To use either methanol or gasoline on a PEM fuel cell vehicle, the fuel must be converted to hydrogen with an onboard fuel processor - every car would have to be equipped with essentially a high temperature mini-refinery or chemical factory to convert methanol or gasoline to hydrogen. This is an enormous challenge. Converting gasoline to hydrogen in a stationary plant operated steady-state 24 hours per day is feasible. But making hydrogen onboard a moving car to meet the full start-up and transient response of an automobile would be a complex task, with unknown cost and reliability implications. The differences between stationary fuel processing (such as the H2Gen HGM) and onboard mobile fuel processing is summarized in the following chart, where green indicates superior performance, yellow is cautionary, and red indicates inferior performance.I had such high hopes that the global warming from current vehicles would eventually make Northern Canada a decent place to live. Now all my dreams are shattered... Thanks a lot.
Sorry, the Hindenburg didn't use hydrogen for fuel, it used it for buoyancy. The motors were good old Diesels.
And it was the aluminum paint on the fabric that caught FIRE, not the hydrogen. Hydrogen EXPLODES with a nearly invisible blue light.
It's easy to make your own hydrogen with a home-made electrolysis setup and verify that for yourself.
While the idea of a Hydrogen-powered vehicle is a great one, if Slashdot readers are interested in a "more" environmentally-friendly vehicle there are options right now.
Biodiesel (more info here and here) is diesel fuel that will work in any new-ish diesel-powered vehicle with out ANY modifications. Benefits?
- Availability of the vehicle. Volkswagen produces a line of turbo diesel injected vehicles right now. They are available from about US$15k - $30k, depending on which model and features you ask for.
- Availability of the fuel. Biodiesel is NOT as wide-spread as diesel - not by far. But it IS available. There's a station in my hometown, Portland, OR and one down in Eugene, OR. According to the map of refueling sites provided by biodiesel.org, there are nine biodiesel stations in California.
- Cost of the fuel. B20, that is 20% biodiesel and 80% regular diesel, costs about US$1.75/gallon in Portland, OR. That's about what premium/super goes for here, give or take 10 cents. I don't have info on what B100 costs - probably around $2.25 or more or possibly less. Depends on your supplier.
- Biodiesel benefits the American (or local) economy. Biodiesel is created from plants. Soy and such. Soy beans can be grown locally in many places of the world. Oil can be had in America, too, but there's not much of it and one it's gone, it is GONE. More soy beans can be grown at any time.
- Biodiesel is "environmentally friendly". According to the US EPA in this PDF document, use of B100 biodiesel will reduce the output of carbon monoxide from a single veh by 50%. B100 will reduce particulate emissions by 70% (less smog). Total hydrocarbon emissions reduced by 40%. Reductions in sulfate emissions by 100%.
- Biodiesel takes less energy to make than diesel and much less energy to make than gasoline.
- Diesel vehicles, particularly the TDI's from VW, are VERY fuel efficient. Expect to get 40/city, 45+/highway (expessed in miles per gallon). Many people report getting 600+ miles to the tank.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles will be great when they are mass-produced in 10 years. Until then, look at Biodiesel. I think the benefits far outweigh the added expense of the fuel.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
Energy can be "produced" much more efficiently at a large scale power plant than it can be in a car's engine. Car engines don't burn very hot, compared to power plants. The hotter you burn the more efficient it generally is. Also it's much easier to change the energy source at the supply point(i.e. change from coal to wind or solar) than it is to change at the vehicle. As for the steam, well to produce hydrogen you absorb water vapour from the air, use electricity to split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and then sell the hydrogen again.
Let me clear things up a bit...
1. The car runs on a fuel cell with only a small battery for regenerative braking energy storage and near line use.
2. Fuel cells can be used to generate heat very effectivly. They are even starting to use fuel cells as primary heat sources in many buildings.
3. The water output of a fuel cell is similar to that of an equivilant strength gas engine (his mistake, not yours)
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Why are you spliting hairs? He obviosly meant that traditional cars run using an energy storage medium that is found with the energy already in it, while hydrogen cars use a fuel where we had to invest slighty more energy than the car can extract in order to obtain it from something that can not be used as fuel in the state in which we find it.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I imagine that the same thing will happen if you set you gasoline powered car on fire. It's going to go BOOM. I'm not sure on the math but wouldn't you get less of a bang from hydrogen? Isn't the energy density of hydrogen less than gasoline? Or maybe it is that gasoline burns quicker. I forget.
here in australia there have been reports of ppl making their own biodiesel for about 25-30% of what normal diesel sells for
Besides the other problems with batteries, there's the environmental one- production and disposal of noxious chemicals. Batteries used in cars have a very limited lifespan, and would have to be replaced every 2-5 years. Hydrogen is a much better storage medium on a mass scale.
Overall, hydrogen costs energy to produce. You can't just go dig it up out of the ground. You have to produce it somewhere, and then store it, transport it, and eventually burn it. By the time you do all that, you've used considerably more energy than just using the electricity, or heat, or whatever energy source you used to create the hydrogen.
Remember last summer, when California had rolling blackouts because they couldn't source enough electricity? Now why would they, of all places, want to increase their energy demands?
Gasoline, for all its faults, still provides more energy than it costs to make it.
I don't think hydrogen is nearly as good an answer as we're being led to believe.
If you want to see more effecient, cleaner burning engines on the road, you should start pressuring the auto manufacturers to bring over more of the small diesel engines that are running in Europe.
I drove one of those four years ago -- it was a Vectra, made by GM, and was a midsize, four door. There was no discernable performance difference between that vehicle, and a similar gasoline powered vehicle. It had plenty of passing power at 85+ mph, and it regularly got 50-55 mpg.
We should be pushing to make these vehicles generally available in the states, instead of trying pie-in-the-sky methods that use more energy, instead of less.
Help find a cure for Gidget.
bush is going to fight tooth and nail to keep his oil interests in power... granted, this article talks about electric cars, but still, it is clear that our current administration's long term energy policies are all about PETRO!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
In America, according to various sources I've read on the web, the "for non-road use" fuels are dyed. If a law officer catches you driving with dyed fuel you will supposedly get a hefty fine.
Additionally, I believe that you are supposed to report the use of homemade fuels for road use, but I don't know what the tax rates and such are for that sort of thing.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
Electricity is not an energy source, so these zero-emission vehicles still cause pollution via the power plants. The zero-emission law is pretty stupid because how are cars going to achieve that without being entirely electrical? That means they are either solar or battery powered. Either way it sucks for the consumer because the energy density of the battery will be too low to go long distances, say over a hundred miles. Plus batteries have short lifetimes and are environmentally damaging in their construcion and disposal. So who's winning here with this law? People that only drive short distances. They get the efficiency of the power plant in lower per mile energy costs, but that's about it. I don't think the electric car is a long term solution the environmentalists want to pursue. They should stick with biodiesel and hybrid cars for now and push for hydrogen in the future. But not electric and certainly not this zero-emissions crap. That's just monkey-wrenching the whole thing.
--hydrogen is certainly a good fuel, but sheesh, it requires massive infrastructure changes, think every gas station needs more stuff there. Ever go and just get your propane tanks filled? they have to be filled by the attendant, I haven't seen anyplace that allows the customer to do it. Hydrogen I bet is even more restrictive, maybe anyway. Plus retrofitting cars with compressed hydrogen tanks. Tear out the existing tank or lose your trunk with an additional tank? Be forced to buy a brand new car in THIS economy?? Huh?/ No thanks right now I just drive ole paint for a few more years, big debt is *not cool* in this economy, not for most people anyway. I look around at the new car dealers local, they are almost dragging people off the streets getting them to buy but people aren't. Now liquid methanol, now that's a different story, it could be done quickly, big advantages in emissions, in fact they could probably lose the bulk of that stupid emissions crap and have cleaner exhaust, no problems with getting it to the masses of drivers, it's just another liquid fuel, could fit right in one of the tanks they have there already(I think that "mid range" tank would be the most useful), will probably burn in most cars either "as is" right now, or perhaps with little more than a different chip, maybe not even that. A long time ago I burned some ethanol in only very slightly adjusted small engines. They ran just swell, the small experiments I did anyway. I think methanol makes lots more sense for this transition away from gasoline.
where will it come from? No link handy but quite awhile ago (years now) I was reading of a bacteria that would react with any cellulose and make methanol that could be distilled out. That tech still has to be out there, and cellulose we got by the cubic mile, called "trees" and maybe we could save the west from burning down every year by sane harvesting, plus put a lot more people back to work. this would be a MUCH cheaper win/win/win scenario, IMO. Hydrogen someday,perhaps, methanol for now.
Just a thought
Recent reports have shown these cars are prone to floating away when a speed bump is hit.