MIT study: Diesel Beats Hydrogen For Green Car Power

An anonymous reader writes "Bummer story on Science Blog for people looking to gas up on the H. Even with aggressive research, the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle will not be better than the diesel hybrid -- a vehicle powered by a conventional engine supplemented by an electric motor -- in terms of total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, says a new MIT study. If we need to curb greenhouse gases within the next 20 years, improving mainstream gasoline and diesel engines and transmissions and expanding the use of hybrids is the way to go."

Comments

Not a problem.

[Henry V .009]

Don't worry, by 2020 the main problems with C02 emission will be from third world countries with exploding populations anyway.

Let the political ranting begin

[linuxwrangler]

Here in California we are old hands at eco-political ranting that disregards science. So what if diesel can make great strides in reducing polution - is it zero emmissions? No? We can't support it.

At least California recently backed off it's requirement for a certain percent of all new vehicles to be zero-emmissions (where zero means we moved the emmissions out of our neighborhood and over to the poor area where the power plants are located). The argument was that a better reduction would be had for lower cost by pushing for hybrids. Reaction was swift with the eco-types crying foul even though the switch to hybrid will yield far better results (ie. we can do it on a far larger scale sooner and using our existing infrastructure and it will yield great results).

A similar "get the cars off highways" by expanding the ferry fleet on the San Francisco bay movement has sprung up and they are trying every trick in the book to prevent acknowledging the fact that the ferrys burn more and pollute more than if every person they carry drove in a single car instead.

So kudos to MIT for following the science instead of the politics - I just hope they are wearing their asbestos underpants.

Re:Let the political ranting begin

[bcboy]

> (where zero means we moved the emmissions out of our neighborhood and over to the poor area where the power plants are located).

A single point of emission is easier to clean than millions of points of emission, and there are advantages of scale.

There are also higher air quality demands in high population areas that are better addressed by zero emissions vehicles. With millions of cars in a city, it makes sense to move the points of emission such that air quality is safe in all of California, instead of having localized unsafe areas.

While at school at Caltech, I got an up-close and personal view of the problems in LA. The mountains trap the air, leading to a thick haze right over Pasadena. Zero emissions vehicles are a very good technology to address this problem.

Re:Let the political ranting begin

[Eccles]

MIT did not use these because you could never generate more energy than was used to create the wind or solar generation devices in the first place

windpower.org claims an 80:1 ratio of produced energy to energy to construct and maintain for windmills. Granted they have a bias, but an 80:1 bias?

A real reason not to include wind power is the expectation that even by 2020, there almost certainly won't be enough wind farms to provide enough energy for a significant fraction of the world's autos. So in the short run, hybrids will have the most dramatic effect on fuel economy.

Re:water, anyway

[skaffen42]

A few years ago I read a lot about some guy who had his car running normally on plain old tap water, I even contacted him and got him to send me plans of how he did it (foolishly I lent these to friends).

Amazing! If you find the plans again you should publish them on the internet and end humankind's dependency on oil.

BTW, want to buy a bridge?

Hydrogen was overrated anyway

[chriso11]

Politically, for Bush, there were two cool things about pushing for Hydrogen cars:

1) It has a neat hi-tech feel that even the greenest couldn't complain about;

2) It means he didn't have to do anything about SUVs or CAFE or such, 'cause, after all, he supports Hydrogen.

Why is it any surprise that Hydrogen is not a real viable solution?

Re:Where do we get the H?

[Xunker]

Windmills, of course.

Tidal power, too.

Solar?

Some may argue the real draw of Hyrogen is not the clean-ness of the power as much as it is the ability to store it.

Electricity is hard to store; Batteries must be huge to store large charges, and even then the larger th battery the faster it loses it's power in parasitic loss. Hydrogren, OTOH, is easy to store; presurize it, freeze it, whever. It's not as easy as a fluid such as oil, but loads easier than electrons.

So you get windmills. No, not some nebulous organization, but YOU, the consumer. You have one or two that run all the time. They generate tiny amounts of power, and this power cracks water though hydrolosis to get your hydrogen and have it in a storage tank out back of your house (like propane). When you need it, you pull it out of the tank.

Long story short: you get the same amount of energy back from a power cell as the engery it took to get the hydrogren in the first place (minus pesky thermodynaics): the good part is that using H you don't have to generate it all at one time -- you can do it over time using power from low-yield-long-investment instalation like wind, solar. geothermal, etc.

(I still understand what you're saying, though -- until efficient molecule-crackers are common, we'll probably end up using hydrocarbon fuel to power machines to produce our hyrdo, or decompose hyrocarbons directly.. but we don't have many options at the moment)

Where is the nuclear option?

[jakedata]

Nobody ever mentions nuclear power in relation to hydrogen manufacture. It is undoubtedly in the back of some people's minds but they dare not mention it for fear of alienating many of the very people that support hydrogen.

Now I am not advocating the proliferation of today's (really yesterday's) messy fission plants but let's support research into modern nuclear technologies be they fusion or fission.

Nuclear CAN be clean. Give it a chance.

Diesel or Biodiesel?

[KillerBob]

There's a difference. Biodiesel is available today, and will run in all Diesel engines. It's clean and cheap: 1L of vegetable oil will make 900mL of Biodiesel. It's becoming even cheaper to manufacture as it comes into use, and with the rising price of oil, Biodiesel is approaching par with gasoline.

Take a look at the emissions here. Significantly cleaner than Diesel, which is cleaner than Gasoline anyway.

Biodiesel is definitely a much more viable and clean alternative to hydrogen fuel cells. It isn't quite as clean as H2 cells, but it's available now.

Re:Where do we get the H?

[mbogosian]

it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn

I call bullshit on this one.

There is no way it takes 5 gallons of crude oil to create a bushel of corn. A gallon of crude costs about $ .50, while a bushel of corn costs under $2.00. If this was true, every corn farmer in America would have gone broke a long time ago.

From this article:

One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn -- which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it -- Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square mile American habitat will go unchallenged.

From this article:

Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.

From this article:

The corn, in breathtaking defiance of economic common sense, sells for 50 a bushel less than it costs to produce, without regard to the foregone value of the water.

From this blurb about Frank Moore:

The amount of fossil fuel needed to produce one bushel of corn has been estimated at anywhere from one to six gallons.... Today's farm requires fossil fuels to manufacture fertilizer, power machinery and transport the final product. The short-term benefit is the corn gets to market more economically. The long-term effects are pollution, soil destruction and the depletion of a non-renewable resource.

These are just a few references availabe. The point is that corn production is subsidized and it uses a huge number of natural resources. In the words of South Park's portrayal of Johnny Cochrane, "this does not make sinse".