Fuel Cell Powered Scooter

!Freeky2BGeeky writes "In an article by Fuel Cell Works, Samsung Engineering announced that they've developed a Hydrogen-based scooter which can go 140Km on 6 liters of hydrogen. The downside? The process that produces the hydrogen uses a component in short supply."

Comments

Re:It's either the infrasture....

[Bruce Perens]

The problem is not efficiency, it's storage. Liquid hydrogen lives in a dewar at cryogenic temperatures and high pressure, and will outgas right through the walls of its container. The most effective storage strategy might be to synthesize a liquid fuel with the hydrogen and then burn that.

Efficiency is not as important as the fact the fuel won't be depleted and burns cleanly. There is lots of energy in inconvenient places like deserts, if you can figure out how to make the fuel there and ship it elsewhere, it's a win.

Bruce

Re:uh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

well, we know where Bush will be sending the troops to next year.

Do you mean to secure the worlds sodium borate supply, or to prevent this source being used?

Re:It's either the infrasture....

[orzetto]

I thought most models/prototypes we have so far were less energy efficient than gasoline powered cars

Fortunately you thought wrong. The real roadblock is the price of fuel cells, which everybody expects to plummet once mass-production is commenced (today most production is pretty much manual), and of course the missing infrastructure.

electrolysis is simply not the most efficient way

Hard to substantiate. Current efficiencies in electrolysis processes rank up to 90% energy efficiency. This is however the "reported" one, which might be away from the standard operating point of equipment; 80% and 94% are reported here. Compare with the 20-30% of internal combustion engines, which does normally not account for dead time in queues, where some gas is being consumed, which does not happen in fuel cells as there are no major moving parts to keep spinning.

Of course there are other considerations than just efficiency, as usability of current distribution networks (which favours the use of liquid fuels as methanol, formic acid), presence of existing technologies (reforming of natural gas, oil and hydrocarbons in general).

Remark: efficiency is often given (faultily) as the ratio of Work obtained / Available enthalpy ("W/Delta_H"), which is BS: Gibbs' free energy should be used, "W/Delta_G". This causes electrolysis processes to look a bit better than they atually are, since the reaction enthalpy is ca. 286 kJ/mol, while the Gibbs' free energy is less, about 237 kJ/mol. Therefore, we actually need a minimum of 237 kJ to split a mole of water. Don't be surprised when someone will claim "over 100% efficiency in electrolysis", because that is well possible if you use the enthalpy definition.

Re:Hydrogen is not the answer

[kfg]

We need very efficient solar panels for the hydrogen economy to start.

In other words, it wouldn't be a hydrogen economy at all, but a solar economy, and I'd cheer for that.

Ra, Ra, Ra!

KFG

Re:uh oh

[WalksOnDirt]

Borax is a sodium borate, and it's cheap enough to throw away with the waste water when we wash clothes. While there is not a lot of borates in the world, there are several highly concentrated deposits that are easy to mine.

It's be obvious to experts for a long time that we may end up regretting using up so much of our borate deposits washing clothes, but given a free market economy and the time value of money, no one has found a way to stop it.