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.

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)