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California Drivers Can Tank Up WIth Hydrogen
Country_hacker writes "News site TBO.com is reporting ChevronTexaco has opened a hydrogen fuel station in Chino, California, and has plans to open five more. Servicing three (or more) Hyundai SUVs, these prototype fueling stations are a part of a five-year cost-sharing program put on by the Department of Energy. Could this be the 'egg' in the alternate fuels 'chicken or egg?' scenario?"
We've had hydrogen refueling in Washington, DC for months.
Now I can buy the 6 figure Hydrogen powered BMW supercar!!!!!
...Isn't it more cost effective to grow your own hydrogen with electrolysis and a solar panel back home?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
hmm.. it's easy for me to run outta gas (Never actually done it) but how easy is it for tow-trucks to retrofit to fuel up vehichles on the road-
Hey! no more sucking on the hose when I siphon gas!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Its about time we are actually seeing some real action on the Hydrogen thing. I always wanted water from my car. Now its there! Willy G
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Something like this could be really good for Korea (Hyundai is a Korean company) if it took off. This country desperately needs to look at alternate fuel sources. Air pollution here is pretty bad. If this was commercially successful, it could mean some improvements over here.
AHNOLD SAYS "JAH!"
First Pump?
Unfortunately, nobody's trying to hatch it. The "egg", of course, is the electrical grid, and despite the previous programs to promote electric vehicles there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Besides, why Chino, of all places... why not somewhere people might actually care to buy it, like say The People's Republic of Berkeley, of SF central?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Let's just hope the fossil fuel companies don't force the hydrogen fuel companies into bankrupcy in effort to take control of the market.
The 'egg' in this whole thing is demand. I'm totally for hydrogen powered vehicles but companies aren't going to invest the money in the infrastructure until there is a market for it. A refueling station is great, but there are only three cars that are going to be able to use it.
What needs to be done is some kind of joint effort between auto makers and fuel companies to simultaneously release H fueling stations and H powered cars. This is a nice first step, but it's not going anywhere until there is widespread adoption.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Not everybody gets that right: http://www.unmuseum.org/hindenburg.htm/
Maybe the egg for the USA - but considering that countries like Germany already have started a nationwide rollout of Hydrogen fuel station, in reality the US is just starting to catch up so that they won't be left behind when everybody else is already long running on cleaner fuels.
The egg has hatched elsewhere already!
With any luck, these hydrogen stations will mark the beginning of the end for Islamic tyranny from the Middle East. For too long, we have essentially financed terrorist operations by paying money for gasoline. They money goes to, for example, Saudi Arabia. The Arabs then secretly funnel a bit of that money to anti-American groups in the Middle East.
We end up financing the terrorists. Only a hydrogen-based economy will put an end to this nonsense.
Next question is "Can we build jet fighters and bombers that run off hydrogen?"
It makes its own hydrogen, though, from natural gas.
For the idiot with a gas powered car to refill at the station, and the frivilous lawsuit that will follow. Assuming they survive the explosion, of course...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Great, now I can finally gas up my blimp! Better still, remember doing the hydrogen experiment at school where you ignite a test tube full to make a 'POP'. Now it should be cheap enough to make a 'BANG'
Anyone wants to start a betting pool on how long it takes big-budget action movies to start featuring exploding hydrogen fuel tanks when car chases end in collisions?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Why do you insist slashdotting a news portal for a local news site in the Tampa Bay area for a story that happened on the complete opposite side of the country?
While I was in Brazil I noticed something unique. Ethanol AND Gasoline are both available at every gas station (I guess it should be called a fueling station). Here's an extremely informative website that shows some charts of ethanol.
0 04 .html
http://www.distill.com/World-Fuel-Ethanol-A&O-2
Why is the US going with Hydrogen instead of ethanol? I know that ethonal is more like "diesel fuel" so it requires the engine to heatup before starting the car in colder areas, but it seems that ethanol is already widely in use in other countries. Seems odd the US goes with hydrogen and everyone else is using ethanol.
We should also focus on Hydrogen Gas lines to residential areas. Imagine being able to heat your house with Hydrogen and use it in a fuel cell to provide electricity. You could even fill up your car at home. You could have a solar or a wind generator to covert rain water (through electrolysis) to Hydrogen. Or, instead of a compost heap you could have a "Hydrogen Pond" that uses bacteria to covert water to Hydrogen.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Did you see who put up and OWN those stations? That's right, Fossil Fuel Companies(tm). As has been repeated many times here on /., the oil companies are going to control this From the Git-Go(tm).
*bursts CompotatoJ's bubble reluctantly*
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I hope there is room to land & refuel my Zeppelin.
GWB is pushing to have the H2 be stripped from oil. IOW, the current ppl in charge of energy will remain in charge. In addition, the money will still flow to the OPEC for some time to come.
Now, with that said, if we have H2 cars, we could start developing alternative energy as well as using nukes to produce h2
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do you think they'll let me keep somkin' while filling up the SUV?
I LOVE the smell of a vapourised neighbourhood in the morning!
I remember watching something on TV where they were saying that producing Hydrogen requires just as much energy from different sources (like oil) as it is required to run a regular car with oil. Like at the end it would create just as much pollution.
I just hope I'm right out of it!
This is not part of a 'chicken and egg' situation. Lack of fueling stations is not what's holding back hydrogen cars. What's holding them back is: (1) lack of range (due to the low energy density of compressed hydrogen gas, and lack of practical alternatives), (2) cost of hydrogen itself, and (3) the still very high cost of fuel cells. The last point is important, since hydrogen as a fuel makes very little sense for internal combustion engines -- since the hydrogen is made from natural gas, you might as well just burn natural gas in the vehicle, or a liquid fuel derived from gas.
BTW, if it's oil independence you want, Fischer-Tropsch diesel fuel is already very competitive at today's oil price (it would be competitive with oil at $25/barrel.) Expect many more synfuel plants to be built if oil stays expensive.
Just need to stop at a Taco Bell enroute, right? Plenty of gas sure to be delivered!
Just wait until the Honda-Taco Bell crossover adverts start hitting the air...
That's some great reporting TBO.com is doing!
Where are the moderators?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As long as the hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels, as it is now, it would be silly not to build them as hydrogen/electric hybrids.
At a purely practical level, it'd make them more fuel-efficient, which would give you more miles on a tank of hydrogen, which would let you go farther before having to find a scarce hydrogen station for a refill.
ie, with a hybrid, you could get further out of Chino before having to return.
Of course, another way to get more efficiency, and more mileage, before having to refill, is to NOT BUY A HEAVY, INEFFICIENT SUV.
Bright idea, that. "Yeah, we'll have one station for filling up, and ask people to use the least fuel-efficient vehicle available, so they'll have minimal range on a tank of hydrogen."
Disadvantages:
- short range (only about 180 to 185 miles)
- higher purchase price (about $5000 more for a new car)
- limited number of CNG refueling stations (have to plan refueling stops ahead)
- cannot use the car for cross-country trips due to insufficient network of CNG stations
- There is the occasional moron who thinks I'm a carpool lane violator and turns on the high beams behind me
- There is the occasional dumb cop who thinks I'm a carpool lane violator and pulls me over, only to let me go 2 minutes later
I expect a hydrogen car to have similar advantages and similar disadvantages.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
For access to their Natural Gas reserves. That's a good source of hydrogen...
Too bad hydrogen is manufactured using the same electricity it takes to power anything else, about half the energy is lost in the process, and the hydrogen molecule is small enough to actually leak out of your tank in a few days.
Hydrogen is not the answer that everyone seems to think it is, and I worry. With everyone backing hydrogen, [b]real[/b] solutions like solar power might get overlooked.
"...Could this be the 'egg' in the alternate fuels 'chicken or egg?' scenario?"
If so, that's a damn small egg they've got. Three SUVs and 5 stations? I guess you gotta start somewhere.
perhaps, here is your chicken?
Frozen chicken
Thanks for the "egg"...now feed us some chickens, dammit! :)
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Why do you need 5 Service Stations for 3 SUV's? If this experiment succeeds, this country will be flooded with Hydrogen Service Stations?
don't the idiots in chino read popsci? URL:http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/artic le/0,20967,927469,00.html
This article adequetly explains with multiple reasons why the hydrogen community is lagging behind the ICE(internal combustion)
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask whats for lunch.
While much of the masses have been hoodwinked into believing hydrogen fuel is alternative, an important detail few realize is that hydrogen is NOT an energy source ... it's only a tranport medium.
... yep, "big oil"/energy producing companies, as some others have already pointed out.
Where is most of that hydrogen going to come from?
In the end, folks will pay more for more complicated vehicles which cost more to operate - and there will likely be about the same, if not more pollution than now when factoring in the production of the hydrogen fuel; producing energy is still a messy business - even solar and wind power create pollution, though admittedly much less than say coal, but I digress.
In a nutshell, "hydrogen" is NOT a energy source, but rather only a transport medium - the way to truly reduce pollution from energy production/use is less consumption and/or more efficient energy production methods.
Ron
It takes very little percentage hydrogen in a room to become combustible. Outside it might be relatively safe. but The SUV itself or the gargage or pump rooms in the filling station are potential bombs and fire hazards. The saving grace is that since it is a gas and not a liquid the total stored energy in a confined space is much less so it offsets some of this concern. Still I'd never put one in my own garage without adding a ventilation system.
hopefully they will add some scent to it like they do to natural gas. But in my experience hydrogen seems to find leaks better than any other gas. Heck when I used to build vaccum systems we used to use hydrogen to find the leaks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No, now you just have to breathe in really deeply.
Smoking is still a bad idea in either case.
I don't get it.
The love of oil leads to explosions!
So, if what we're talking about is a storage/transmission system, how does hydrogen add up? Very badly is the answer.
To store any usable quantities of hydrogen requires one of the following: extremely low temperatures, extremely high pressures, or some chemical to absorb it. Low temperatures are not practical for automotive applications because it requires constant energy input to keep it cold. Extremely high pressures or absorbing it into hydrides are sort of practical but you end up with either a very large, expensive high pressure tank that holds a small amount of hydrogen, or you end up with a large, very expensive bit of palladium or whatever that's going to hold a small amount of hydrogen.
So getting hydrogen requires a very expensive and inefficient process which (today) is derived from fossil fuels. It can only be stored in small quantities and the storage itself is extremely expensive. Oh, it also does best with fuel cell engines which also require extremely expensive catalysts (more palladium, etc).
So in the end we come out with numbers in the neighborhood of a $150k vehicles that has a range of 150 miles and has a cost per mile of 50 cents, just for the fuel. Sounds like a winner to me!
Compare this to electric cars. Electricity is distributed and available everywhere. There are green sources of electricity which are cost-competitive, and improving. The big expense in electric cars is the battery. Lithium is the best choice, and it is coming down in price rapidly. Range on a lithium battery cars can go over 200 miles.
When you look at the pros and cons, the only advantage we see in the end for hydrogen is that it can be refuelled quickly. You pump it into your car and go on, just like with gasoline. But are the downsides worth it?
I can't help but think that this whole hydrogen thing is an enormous, almost fraudulent exercise in scamming subsidies from the government to support a technology which is outrageously expensive. I would rather see natural gas refueling stations, rather than see stations that sell hydrogen extracted from natural gas.
I also have a feeling that part of the push for hydrogen is a push to maintain huge barriers to entry in the auto manufacturing industry. It will require enormous technology resources and patent portfolios to produce a hydrogen car. With electrics, on the other hand, anyone can do it in his garage, once batteries become available. That must be scary to the industry; they haven't faced any new entrants into the market in a long time.
Stop hydrogen!
After reading this page about a worst case scenario of what could happen after we run out of oil, I've come to wonder if its claims that we don't have enough platinum on earth to make fuel cells feasible for cars is true. Does anyone know either way?
One thing is a confirmed fact though, they cost a lot to make 1 million US$, and they may come down to $100,000 in 10 years. What a bargain!
I sure hope they can make fuel cells work, but everything I've read seems to indicate that best case, it's not a done deal quite yet.
Hydrogen and other alternative fuels.
if we switch to H2 as the energy medium, then it is easy to generate it from a large number of sources. Right now, it is to expensive to create Gasoline, except from Oil. While I have no doubt that initial H2 will come from Oil stock, later stuff can come from alternative/fission/fusion/etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As hydrogen flames are invisible, it wouldn't look like much.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
It's been done for only a few grand - http://unitednuclear.com/h2.htm Make your own solar powered hydrolysis machine in your backyard :)
Death by snoo-snoo!
...the last prayer of a outmoded and obsolete fuel distribution system...in other words, corporate welfare in a time of the entire executive branch of the USA under the firm grip of the old money texas billionaires.
let the high energy density battery wars begin!
This whole thing is a scam to keep auto manufacturers and the oil industry in business, at taxpayers' expense.
Now.. about that pipeline.
... 180 miles is a bit pathetic. I fitted an LPG conversion kit (ok, the gas density isn't the same) to a 2.5 litre 180hp Citroen CX, with a "standard" tank, can't remember the exact size, and it gets about 400 miles per tank, about the same as for petrol.
Platinum in in old school fuel cells.
Today, they use a plastic film called a 'Proton Exchange Membrane' which lets hydrogen atoms through...
Ballard Power in Vancouver has been using this tech for the last half dozen years, and you sometimes see a few fuel cell buses around.
My guess is that the industry is waiting for other people to develop fuel cell technology so they don't have to spend much money on a copycat tech.
I mean, SUVs consume typically 2 to 3 times more petrol than a small car - if one wants to be environmentally friendly, wouldn't it be more sensible to buy a hydrogen small car?
Need I say more?
What a strange argument. We can't use ethanol because it has to be grown, so instead we'll use vegetable oil, which is grown too.
BioDiesel lost out to oil diesel once, I'll be surprised if it is any different this time around. Even at current prices, oil it still pretty cheap.
That's where you get your news about California?
/ co mmercialize_tech/hydrogen_energy_stations.asp
/. can't link to it properly?
Why not get the news from the source?
http://www.chevrontexaco.com/technologyventures
Just because
CNG is available in the vast majority of service stations. It blew me away when I first got here - being an American, I had no idea it was in widespread use.
.40 AUD per liter vs. 1 AUD for gasoline (and Australia has some of the lower gas prices in the world)
Good points:
- It's a lot cheaper than gasoline, about
- A liter of CNG gets you (just about) as far as a liter of gasoline
- It's less polluting
Most of the Sydney-area taxis use CNG for precisely this reason. The one person I know who owns a CNG-fueled automobile for personal use has a brother-in-law who owns a taxi company, so he got a stock vehicle, and had it painted (Sydney taxis are white)... He loves it.
There was an article today in the San Jose Mercury News about the effects of India and China on the oil market. It's at
n es s/10932285.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/busi
Registration Required, but bugmenot.com has been very successful for me. Here's a snippet:
"China's, India's appetites for oil stir West's concern"
"THREAT SEEN TO ENERGY SUPPLY, ENVIRONMENT"
"India has joined China in a ravenous thirst for oil that now has the world's two most populous nations bidding up energy prices and racing against each other and global energy companies in an increasingly naked grab at oil and natural gas fields around the world."
Fun stuff, especially how they are building up their navies.
The sooner we get off of oil, the better we'll all be.
followed by the meta-mod "head in sand"
First heard when Chino driver ventures too far from the filling station, low on gas: "Welcome to the O.C., Bitch!" Much teen drama will ensue.
Refoming gasoline using catalytic converters.
Text to the article.
Instead of spark plugs and cylinders, environmentally friendly fuel cell engines may be under the hoods of the cars of the future. But first, scientists must find a practical and economical way to supply the hydrogen gas needed to power them. Chemical engineers at Argonne have developed and patented a compact fuel processor that "reforms" ordinary gasoline into a hydrogen-rich gas to power fuel cells. The technology was recently named one of the top 100 inventions of the year by R&D magazine.
Fuel cells convert hydrogen gas into electricity and water. Compared to internal combustion engines, the energy conversion is clean and efficient. "You can think of fuel cells as batteries that are continuously charged by supplying fuel," said Jim Miller, manager of Argonne's Electrochemical Technology Program.
A team of scientists in the Chemical Technology Division, led by Mike Krumpelt and Shabbir Ahmed, have synthesized new types of catalysts to form hydrogen by reacting gasoline with oxygen. Catalysts are materials that speed chemical reactions by cutting the energy required to start the reaction. While catalysts help some chemical bonds form and others break, catalysts remain unchanged. Using the Argonne catalyst, Ahmed designed and built an inexpensive, easy-to-manufacture fuel-reforming reactor.
Don't burn it, reform it
Fuel cell engines are clean. They efficiently convert hydrogen and oxygen into electric power with water and heat as the only by-products. The fuel cell is expected to be 60 percent efficient -- twice as efficient as today's internal combustion engines. And fuel cells should cut carbon dioxide output to half that of a combustion engine.
Using hydrogen directly to power fuel cell engines would be environmentally ideal, but it is not practical today. Hydrogen-storage devices are heavy and bulky, and no retailing infrastructure exists for supplying hydrogen to consumers. These challenges prompted scientists to investigate compact processors that could produce hydrogen from conventional fuels to power the fuel cell onboard the vehicle.
Researchers originally developed methanol reformers but switched to gasoline because its production, distribution and retailing infrastructure is established. Fuel-cell car owners would use the pumps at the gas station to refuel just as they do now, but they would only need half as much gas.
History
The first fuel cells were built in 1839, but their role as a practical power generator did not emerge until the 1960s when the U.S. space program developed fuel cells to power the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft.
The space program continues to use fuel cells -- they produce electricity and water for space shuttle astronauts -- while fuel cell research has expanded into stationary and vehicle power generation. Argonne scientists have been involved with fuel cell research for nearly three decades.
Reformer design
In designing the fuel reformer, Ahmed used a simple, inexpensive plan similar to catalytic converters in today's cars. Catalytic converters pass the car's exhaust over a catalyst that converts carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide to eliminate the poisonous gas.
In Ahmed's gasoline reformer, vaporized gasoline is mixed with steam and air and then sent through a catalyst-packed cylinder. The result is a mixture of gases with a high hydrogen concentration, which is fed to the fuel cell. Some carbon monoxide is also present in the gas mixture. Before it goes to the fuel cell, it passes through a secondary processor, which reacts water vapor and the carbon monoxide to form carbon dioxide and additional hydrogen.
Wanted: A few good catalysts
In addition to the reformer design, researchers needed new catalysts to spur the gasoline-to-hydrogen-gas chemical reaction. Hydrogen gas consists of twin hydrogen atoms bound tog
This is just pie-in-the-sky stuff right now. Sure they can put up expensive refueling stations for million dollar vehicles but who thought they couldn't.
The question should be asked, why are they doing it? It has no practical purpose other than to PROMOTE the dream of a hydrogen economy. It's still very much a R&D project but the Bush Administration keeps promoting it like it's going to happen this decade...
IMO, it so current fuel efficient technology( hybrids ) uptake is slowed down. We can't have slowed oil industry profits now can we.
Bout time? Sorry, but you're still waiting unless you've got the $$ and contacts to get one of these prototype vehicles. Hey, it's cheaper to get a ride up to the space station and visit the fuel cells up there.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
On the other hand, retrofit some regular trucks to pump gas and youve got yourslef a towtruck alernative when you run out. Of course you could always just call a cab to the cas station and back, and fill up a jug instead.
Quoth the poster:
Bout time? Sorry, but you're still waiting unless you've got the $$ and contacts to get one of these prototype vehicles. Hey, it's cheaper to get a ride up to the space station and visit the fuel cells up there.
Check out the cost of H2 conversion kits for gasoline engines. They're not free, but they are quite reasonably priced if you want to opt-out of contributing to global warming.
utter rubbish
They are developing cheaper alloys to act as catalists to fix this problem.
Ballard Power's PEM fuel cells DO use platinum but the amount of platinum required is decreasing with every new version of their cell.
Everything that has anything to do with hydrogen is just outrageously expensive and non-economical. Even if electricity were free hydrogen would not be affordable fuel. This whole thing is a scam that can only exist thanks to enormous taxpayer subsidies.
And since Water vapor is a much greater Greenhouse gas than CO2 is, we can really step up this global warming till finally I won't be freezing up here in the Northeast.
And we can look forward to getting those smug southern californians to shut up about their nice weather, when we turn that pollution haze over Los Angles into a perpetual rain storm.
- Hybids can do considerably better; for instance, the Accord hybrid is tuned for performance while still delivering fairly good economy (design tradeoff).
- At least one Future Truck hybrid managed to add all the hybrid features to an Explorer while subtracting weight from the smaller engine and superfluous drivetrain components. According to this CSM article:
If that isn't enough for you... read one of their technical reports (not sure if that's the same vehicle or not). You made three errors in that statement:- Maximum power requirements are typically in acceleration, not hill-climbing.
- Running out of battery isn't "stranding", it's just going slower. Like, you know, having to downshift when climbing a mountain with a load?
- These folks appear to be using engines in the ~2 liter department, but they're getting better-than-V8 performance out of the system. Better performance appears to be one of the common elements of hybrids, though the extent to which it is stressed vs. economy is a design tradeoff.
If you don't know what I mean by now...Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I am shocked by all the comments in this thread about poor range and obscene costs, like the 1 million US$ by the parent. Here are two links about the latest GM fuel cell car, the Sequel.
0 _n ews/sequel_011005.html
t ml
http://www.gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/10
Let's see, range 300 miles, 0-60 under 10 seconds. Doesn't sound all that bad, especially compared to some SUV's. And since that page doesn't talk about cost, this link
http://americajr.com/news/naias/2005/gmsequel.h
has a quote from GM saying it would cost about 60-70k to build the Sequel today. Too high for mass market production, but not too high to think it will be economically viable in the mid-term future. Both articles state by 2010, but considering this is PR timeframes, I would double that to 2015. Which still doesn't seem bad. If hydrogen cars in ten years are where hybrid cars are today, I will be very happy.
Hydrogen has too many barriers for use as an auto fuel right now. Perhaps in the future, when we're already using it in lieu of natural gas and there is an established infrastructure, but for now, there is too much infrastructure to replace. Complicate this with the relatively short range (that I've seen quoted) of about 150 miles between fillups and you have a vehicle that is only good in metropolitan areas that have an adequate infrastructure to keep your tank filled up. Biodiesel is really what we should be concentrating on right now. Biodiesel pours right into pretty much any existing diesel engine and has only slightly less BTUs per gallon that petroleum diesel. Certainly biodiesel isn't as clean as hydrogen, but it's a whole heck of a lot cleaner than petroleum diesel and even more so than gasoline. The best part of biodiesel is the fact that you can start using it immediately in your unmodified diesel powered vehicle and not have to worry that you're going to be able to find some (currently) exotic fuel if you go on a trip. Worse case, just pour regular diesel in. Biodiesel would make the transition phase painless. Hydrogen is much better as a long range plan. Biodiesel needs zero special handling considerations, while hydrogen needs significantly more. A new national distribution network is not something that you can whip up in a short time. There are probably other things that would be better run on hydrogen before cars. Maybe we could transition to it instead of natural gas for home heating. Once that network is established, then it can be used as a basis to begin to build a national hydrogen auto fuel network. I've got my money where my mouth is too. I run 20 to 40% blends of biodiesel in Dodge truck. The truck runs better on the biodiesel than it does on petroleum diesel, smells better, and the fuel is better for the engine since it has much higher lubricity than petroleum diesel. On top of that, I know that 100% of the cost of the biodiesel I buy pretty much stays in the USA. Tad
So what happens when you drive away with the hose still in your gas tank?
I predict that this will, in fact, involve lots of egg, but it will be on various politicians' faces.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I wish the nuclear trolls would think for a quarter of a second before posting stuff like this - how do you go about turning a nuclear warhead into a hydrogen generating plant? I know nuclear is supposed to be inherantly safe and radiation does not exist in one worldview, but I myself like the laws of physics.
The Associated Press is reporting the story, not TBO.com (see same exact story here on Yahoo news).
See Chevron's press release here.
See U.S. Federal Gov't press release on this here.
Sounds about right. Once we get nuclear-powered SUVs maybe we can start naming them after presidents. "And now the six-o'clock news. Interstate 90 was blocked today after a fiery accident involving the Eisenhower and the Monroe. Several smaller vehicles were also involved, including the Oklahoma, California, and . None of the drivers were injured, cushioned in their titanium-armored luxury staterooms, though several thousand local inhabitants are missing."
hydrogen fuel takes energy to make, so we'll still buy plenty of oil to make the hydrogen. Getting the US nuclear power industry going again in a big way is the only (short term, eg decades rather than centuries) way to dramatically reduce our dependency on oil. PS for those who modded parent troll, where do YOU think most of Al Qaeda's funding for 911 came from? Hint, it was neither Iraq nor Afghanistan...
If it can work for submarines, why not road based passenger vehicles?
I guess the problem would be if there was a traffic accident then there would be a greater catastrophe on our hands.
However, if nuclear fission could be made small enough and safe enough for a road vehicle, it would solve the oil shortage problem, because it would be thousands of miles between refuels.
Mark.
Well, how am I to create this H2 and store it in my "converted" vehicle so I can go further than the corner store? From what I've read, storage is very expensive and not yet able to store quantities sufficient for more than 200 miles trips( 160 miles rings a bell ).
Unfortunately, we're only 100% solar powered and don't have excess for generating H2....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Well, every American gas station is equiped with both options for gas and... umm.... uh... window washers?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
what your talking about is co-generation. where you burn CNG to make electricity, and use the waste heat from the generator to heat your home. see http://www.whispegen.com for details.
Sure, because all California drivers live within a few miles of Chino. California being such a small state and all.
Word.
I have an idea that would create hydrogen via electrolsys onsite but I need a geek to figure out the hard stuff. I made a pdf in class one day when I was board. Check it out and help me out! http://www.walshcollege.edu/egarelik/hydrogen.pdf
America America, Fuck Yeah! Tring to save the mother fucking day! America, Fuck yeah! Freedom is the only fucking way!
Vaporware.... nothing but.
And good for P.R. too.
But the short of it is, if this was for the general public (it doesn't look that way from the article), than only the few who live near enough to the fueling station to use it easily, would.
I was part of a group that installed several electric car charging stations on California's North coast, over a decade ago, and the "promised" electric car boom never happened.
As far as I know, none of the charging stations around here are used anymore.
In five years, the H2 fueling stations will all be gone because of disuse, and time will prove this to be another govt/corporate scam.
http://studentweb.walshcollege.edu/egarelik/hydrog en.pdf
America America, Fuck Yeah! Tring to save the mother fucking day! America, Fuck yeah! Freedom is the only fucking way!
You should read better articles.
Producing corn, or as the Brazilians use, sugar to make ethanol only requires fossil fuels if the farmer stupidly doesn't bother to use his own product, tax-free, to fuel his own machinery. An easy conversion for gasoline engines(they just need collector tractors), usually just a carborater adjustment.
There are no laws of physics being broken. The gain in energy is coming from the, err, what do plants use again? Oh yeah, THE SUN!
Read:m osphere.htm
http://www.princeton.edu/~chm333/2004/Hydrogen/at
It explains why Hydrogen released into the atmosphere is a bad thing.....unless we are a lot more careful with H2 than we are with every other fuel we use today, we will be making matters worse, and that isn't counting the fact that the technology still isn't up to speed to make the entire process efficient. A hydrogen economy requires that you produce it, currently from natural gas or water, store/transport it, then feed it to a fuel cell. Right now, the only way to produce Hydrogen without releasing CO2 is to crack water with clean electricity from solar/wind/hydro/nuke power...The fuel cells are delicate, expensive to manufacture, and require expensive materials that have to be mined (OMG he said the M word). Platnium is $800+ an ounce these days....people will be jacking your hydrogen car just to tear apart the fuel cell for the Pt in it......
This whole thing is a waste of our money, the technology is not there, and the advantages don't come close to breaking even with the disadvantages...we need to concentrate on making vehicles more efficient, and start looking seriously at changing power generation world wide over to nuclear or finding a way to sequester the CO2 produced by powerplants.....I think the money being pissed away on hydrogen cars would be a lot better spent on fusion research.....why not spend the cash to recover some helium3 off of the moon for fusion testing....
More than anything I think the goverment supporting Hydrogen research is a way for them to go through the motions, while they line their pockets with more money from Big Oil and Big Coal...and I am talking Everyone in DC, not just the current admin.....
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
Of course you could always just call a cab to the cas station and back, and fill up a jug instead.
Not with liquid hydrogen you won't
People who drive older cars should probably know what I'm talking about.
You can point to all the studies that you want, but until you give up your tax subsidy, I won't believe you.
just check this one here
BMW 7
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
The source you quote is nuttier than a fruitcake. How could we run out of platinum? For one thing, new fuel cell cars could just use the platinum that would otherwise be destined for the catalytic converter. Nobody's worried about running out of Pt for catalytic converters. And when a fuel cell wears out? The platinum is not somehow consumed -- the fuel cell along with its platinum will be recycled into a new one!
He's got the price of fuel cells wrong, too. If they cost $1,000,000 to make now, it would be too expensive to even do research on them. Right now a typical one might already cost $10,000.
Another example of the author's stupidity is how he compares the $80/bbl price of oil produced from turkey waste to the $5/bbl cost to *produce* oil from petroleum, and assumes that the TDP process used to make the oil must be 16-times more expensive. Even worse, he calls mistakes TDP's 85% efficiency for an EROEI of 0.85 when it's really 5.6 (compared to oil's 30).
And then he fails to take into account that turkey waste is expensive ($15-20/bbl) in the US because it is used a livestock feed. If they used municipal waste that would otherwise go into dumps, they might get twice as much oil from it and would get paid to process it.
Come to think of it, once they get the process perfected to the point of being able to process all incoming waste, they may even start digging up old landfills to make up for shortages in waste we produce.
Another advantage is that one of the products is carbon. What do you do with carbon? Well, we can bury it and then it won't be in our atmosphere causing the greenhouse effect. Another product is water, and lots of it. You could turn it into drinking water or use it to irrigate the plants (that pull the carbon out of the atmosphere) which will be turned into feedstock.
aqazaqa
If the only reason the car makers were even interested in hybrid cars was due to government handing out money, then hybrids are useless. If there is a way to make money off of a new technology, then someone will produce them. Believe it or not, most technological advances are actually made without the government telling them what to make.
every time i think of hydrogen as a fuel, i keep on thinking of the hindenburg. sure it wasn't used as fuel, but that hydrogen gas is highly flammable. the possibilty of a hydrogen powered car exploding scares me.
So this is being subisidised ! Bad - let market forces do it alone.
For all the poo-poo I am reading about cracking Natural Gas to create hydrogen and thus pollute may I mention the said process is done so the C02 can be treated as a point-source pollution vs. a non-point source pollutant (ie internal combustion engines). That allows for the sequestration of Carbon people!
Also, since the cracking of natural gas is done at a central site, the C02 can be sequestered instead of released into the atmophere. Electrolysis can be accomplished on a regional scale. All we need are some nifty pebble bed reactors, to provide us with safe energy for the electrolysis.
People wake up, the future is coming like a frieght train. America needs to learn to dream again.
Dusty (If you dont know what Carbon Sequestration is--- try google).
While he's wondefully wealthy and can afford to buy one just for the sake of having one, Arnold was at least showing some leadership recently when he bought a GMC Hummer "H2H" converted to run on hydrogen rather than fuel. Just look for "Hydrogen Hummer Governor Arnold" at news.google.com or your favorite news outlet. Here's one article.
The gas station to fill his ride is at LAX airport. How that would help the Governator working in Sacramento is beyond me. Who wants to go to LAX every time you need to fill up? and how many miles can a big beefy Hummer go before it needs a refill? The Chino multi-station pilot test at least seems more practical.
Speaking of practical, just how practical is hydrogen going to be, anyway? Unless there is a huge improvement in the abundance of energy needed to seperate hydrogen atoms from water (or methane or other sources), other methods like bio-diesel or just plain electric are going to be more pratical ways to reduce US dependence on oil. If we somehow are able to implement pebble-nuke plants like the Chinese are doing, hydrogen processing might become more cost-effective.
because fossil fuel is what they make fertilizer out of. not to mention the various herbicides pesticides and so forth.
Though one route is electrolysis of water, but the cheapest way is the steam reforming of natural gas, Gas and Water after the process turns into.. Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen.
Spot the greenhouse gas given off there, and the use of fossil fuels. Unless we can find a way to make electrolysis the economical way of producing hydrogen, a hydrogen powered car isn't as kind to the envioment as people are sometimes lead to believe.
"Could this be the 'egg' in the alternate fuels 'chicken or egg?' scenario?"
Since when chickens eat eggs? :-)
Dear Sir,
I have inherited the deeds to the only hydrogen mine in the world. But I am in financial distress, and need $1,000 immeidlately. I am sure you can see the benefit to humanity of using hyrdogen and will surely buy this valuable mine for such a low price.
Please contact me with great urgency
Mahtma Kote
Chief of Engineering
Nothwithmestan
Biodiesel is really what we should be concentrating on right now. Biodiesel pours right into pretty much any existing diesel engine and has only slightly less BTUs per gallon that petroleum diesel. Certainly biodiesel isn't as clean as hydrogen, but it's a whole heck of a lot cleaner than petroleum diesel and even more so than gasoline. The best part of biodiesel is the fact that you can start using it immediately in your unmodified diesel powered vehicle and not have to worry that you're going to be able to find some (currently) exotic fuel if you go on a trip. Worse case, just pour regular diesel in. Biodiesel would make the transition phase painless.
:-) All you need is a standard catalytic converter and a biodiesel-fuelled vehicle will likely meet the stringent Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle standard.
The nice thing about biodiesel is the fact any crop that has a high carbohydrate count can be processed in to biodiesel fuel. And the best thing is that biodiesel fuel burns very cleanly, not even needing a diesel particulate trap!
By the way, did you know that the very concept of biodiesel engines came from the original development work of Rudolf Diesel? The first Diesel engine ran off peanut oil, of all things! That explains why diesel fuel can be easily derived from plant sources. Also, there has been serious research into growing certain types of algae that could easily be refined into biodiesel fuel.
Anyway, today's diesel engines are high-technology wonders that have effectively banished the clattering and smoky exhaust of older engines. Thanks to careful design, common-rail pressurized direct fuel injection and catalytic converters that also "burn off" diesel particulates, they are quiet, clean-burning, and sound exactly like a normal gasoline engine. Here in the USA, if you live in any of the 45 states where it's legal go drive the Mercedes-Benz E320 CDI, a vehicle that demonstrates very impressive acceleration performance but when driven at reasonable speeds gets fuel efficiency around 32-35 miles per US gallon! =)
Anyway, I believe we'll see a large number of diesel-powered vehicles in the US market starting in Fall 2006. Thanks to the EPA mandate that all motor fuels can only have at most 15 parts per million of sulfur compounds in fuel starting September 2006, that makes it possible to develop modern turbodiesel engines that meet the ULEV standard, hence making them 50-state legal. And Americans will discover that modern diesel-powered cars are quiet, amazingly powerful (thanks to the very torquey nature of diesel engines in the low RPM range), and impressively clean-burning. I wouldn't be surprised that Honda brings over their well-regarded 2.2-liter I-4 i-CTDi engine for application in the Honda Accord, CR-V and Element models, and BMW brings over their 3.0-liter I-6 turbodiesel engine for the 3 and 5 Series automobiles.
Also, because diesel engines have their torque peaks at relatively low RPM range, that makes them a perfect match for SUV's, pickup trucks and minivans. Can you imagine by 2008-2009 most of these vehicles switched to clean turbodiesel power, which means they will have at least 30-40% better fuel effiency than now? The GM Duramax turbodiesel engine used on their Chevy and GMC pickup trucks sports a far high torque peak than the equivalent gasoline engine, and is far more fuel efficient, too.
Honda has been providing hydrogen fuel cell cars to a select few goverments since 2003 (I think there are 5 cities who have 3-5 cars).
Right now we are nowhere near having practical fuel sources or efficiency for mass production, and Honda is probably the industry leader in all engines other than diesel.
I doubt we'll see hydrogen powered cars become mainstream in our lives. When I say mainstream, I talk across the entire US. I bet both coasts will have fuel station networks up and running in the next 15 years, but the midwest will be late adopters.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I saw a history channel documentary on Fuel about a week ago (unfortunately I can not find a link to it) and a BP employee stated that an overwhelming majority of hydrogen fuels today come from natural gas. This means they have to break the hydrogen away from the carbon in the form of CO2 and other undesireable molecules! This is what enviromentalist are against right? Additional CO2 (greenhouse gas) formation. So the fuel they want to use can't be much worse for the enviroment than burning the gas itself?
rx contain everything humonoids desire!
Hydrogen has no future. You need more energy to create it than you get out of it. Its "energy return on investment" (EROI) is negative. Biodiesel has a positive EROI.
1 _RP.pdf
Moreover, as a carrier, hydrogen has all kinds of problems (safety, you need a major overhaul of the entire infrastructure, entirely new cars, etc...).
Hybrid diesel and hybrid biodiesel cars are the only real alternative.
In 2003, MIT's Lab for Energy and the Environment made a study comparing the entire lifecycle for idealized automotive drive systems (internal combustion, hybrids, fuel cells). The results were very clear:
-straight gasoline scores worst of all
-gasoline hybrids score far worse than diesel hybrids
-diesel hybrids are nearly just as good as the best fuel cell systems.
The study didn't include biodiesel in hybrid diesel cars, but any laymen can dedude that it is the technology of the future.
You have to look at the entire lifecycle, when comparing technologies. And hydrogen/fuel cells are not efficient.
MIT's study can be found here (pdf): http://lfee.mit.edu/publications/PDF/LFEE_2003-00
This is not informative, its wrong. First of all, natural gas is not tied to fossil fuels. Currently we find alot of it with fossil fuels, but we don't need to.
Second, natural gas is methane. It is worse to try and "crack" methane and convert it into carbon and hydrogen than it is to use other sources of hydrogen. In fact, you have it backwards. Methane is often produced by heating a mixture of hydrogen and coal. Why would anyone use hydrogen and coal to make methane, just so they could turn it back into hydrogen and coal? I know, they don't.
NOx formation is no more a problem with hydrogen engines than ordinary engines using hydrocarbons. And guess what, they aren't formed. Isn't that weird? No, wait, that's completely normal, otherwise lighting a match in the air would cause NOx to form, creating more fuel, and more NOx, and it would spiral out of control and consume the entire atmosphere in flames. Nitrogen in the atmosphere is N2 and is stable enough that it will not break apart to form NOx molecules just because there is heat and or oxygen around.
And finally, hydrogen is compressed to a liquid for transport and storage, allowing you to carry plenty of fuel just fine.
The only question I have, is how did something so completely and totally wrong in every way get modded up to 5 informative?
Ethanol is *also* energy positive. Pimental's old calculations have been thoroughly debunked.
Corn based ethanol doesn't return quite as much energy as BD, but it still has a positive energy balance on the order of 1.67 units out for every unit in. Compare this to 3.2 units out for every unit in for biodiesel.
Then compare both of those to .80 for gasoline and .85 for diesel and biofuels clearly win the energy balance arguement.
More reading:
http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ethanol/balance.html
http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-814.pdf
Besides, you're wrong about the charging time. A plug-in hybrid using 300 WH/mile and going 20 miles on electricity would need 6 KWH, which you could get from an ordinary 110 volt wall outlet in about 4 hours. Drive to work, plug in, recharged by lunchtime.
It eliminates oil (a politically troublesome fuel) immediately. And as you almost noted, the plug-in hybrid has a unique property: it can change the source of its motive energy years after it was built. Rather than locking yourself in to oil dependence for the life of the vehicle, you could offset the vehicle's fossil-fuel consumption by adding any combination of nuclear, solar, wind, hydropower or biomass. I haven't done the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the replacement of gasoline burned in a car engine at 17% efficiency by coal burned in a conventional powerplant at 33% is a pure win already.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Please explain how NOx gasses are produced...
It was my understanding that a PROTON membrane allows only H+ ions through to react with ONLY oxygen....
I believe "lobotomy" was thinking of only burning the H2 in a conventional internal combustion (piston) engine, not using it in a fuel cell to generate electricity for powering an electric motor.
Which humour-impaired cretin modded this Troll?
[Open to the sound of one set of hands clapping...]
But, if, as you say "Electricity is distributed and available everywhere. There are green sources of electricity which are cost-competitive, and improving," and "anyone can [build an electric] in his garage", it seems that will be able to happen anyway, regardless of what happens with hydrogen, eh?
But, seriously, bravo on your attempt to link the two together and evoke thoughts of conspiracies. Further, if the response is "well, if the big players and government were putting time into electrics rather than hydrogen, we'd be closer to that goal ever sooner!" Yes. And encumbered with all of the myriad patents you associate with hydrogen. If the big players went full-on into electrics, they'd be discovering - and patenting - new technologies for efficiency, delivery, etc., in that realm just the same.
The bottom line is regardless of how many people explore hydrogen - and even if it IS a "boondoggle" - this does NOT preclude ANYTHING you allege with regard to electrics.
This post somewhat reminds me of the West Wing episode where various green power advocates came to the White House as champions of their respective technologies - and viciously denigrated each others', some as scams, handouts, or boondoggles, even though they were all after the same goal.
...where the hell is Chino?
On the other hand, CNG (compressed natural gas) is, as the name implies, a gas. There is no liquid part to it. It is all gas.
My car (a Honda Civic GX), has a CNG tank that has a 100 liter volume, but the quantity of CNG you can get into it at 3600 psi pressure is only about 7 GGE (gasoline gallon equivalent).
7 gallons equals about 26.5 liters.
Since "GGE" tries to establish an equivalence based on energy content, this means that, at 3600 psi pressure, one GGE of CNG occupies roughly 4 times the volume than liquid gasoline.
Hence, you need a 100 liter pressure tank for something that, in liquid form, would only occupy about 26 liters of volume.
So why not jack up the pressure even more?
Two answers:
- Cost of and experience in building pressure tanks
- Cost of and experience in building compressors
About pressure tanks:
3600 psi is well understood, after all, this is roughly the same pressure that your avarage scuba diver uses.
In other words, hundreds of thousands of such tanks are in operation - not as CNG tanks, but as scuba tanks.
Upping the pressure to, say, 7200 psi would go into rather unexplored and unproven territory.
About compressors:
Compressing natural gas or air to 3600 psi already requires 3 or 4 compressor stages. That's right, not just one compressor, but a cascade of 3 or 4.
Compressing gas to, say, 7200 psi would probably require 6 compressor stages or so, more than doubling the cost of the compressor and reducing its reliability.
Also: As you compress gas, it gets hot. Compress it more, it gets even hotter. Thus, you would have to design in a few cooling stages into your 7200 psi compressor.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
Why not use LPG instead of CNG then?
Hydrogen is Da Bomb!
Oh, wait...
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Actually, corn-based ethanol is a scam to put subsideies in ADM's pockets.
To say that they *own* several midewstern Congressmen is an objective, testable, and true statement.
hawk
Well hell, how about winter weather? The reason why this starts in California is because of ambient conditions! What a nasty trick!
In the moment engine is started, it starts producing steam and this water steam begins to freeze inside the piping.
Then, the whole of produced steam creates nice big steam clouds and some of it freezes on the road surface.
I can imagine traffic jam, is completely covered in clouds of steam and cars cannot go on because of nicely iced road....
I want my gasoline!
The amount of nitrogen oxides produced ranges from none to miniscule amounts that don't matter. The grandparents statement that hydrogen produces NOx is wrong, the air produces it, and in a hydrogen engine its in such minute quantities that it doesn't matter. If nitogen were so happy to combine with oxygen just because of a little heat, then every time lightning stuck the entire atmosphere would burst into flames and kill all life on the planet. I have yet to see that happen.
You'd have to be a moron or have a vested interest in fossil fuel to produce hydrogen from natural gas. That better? I thought the US policy on hydrogen was still to pretend its bad based on the assumption that fossil fuels are used to make it, and then use fossil fuels instead.
> 200 w/m^2
;-)
>
> 6 sunlight hours per day
>
> 1200 kWh
Off by three orders of magnitude.
200W * 6 Hours = 1200Wh = 1.2KWh
> 4,272,000 kWh to produce a 1 m^2 solar panel?
> Gimme a break.
4,272 kWh to produce a 1 m^2 solar panel?
That is about 400$ worth of electricity, or maybe $200 worth in primary energy (e.g. oil, natural gas, coal) used to manufacture this electricity in a conventional power generation plant.
If we assume 1m^2 of solar panel costs. app. 2000$ (we are talking about solar panels with 20% efficiency here - that would be expensive bulk silicon ), then assuming that 10 percent of the retail cost is spent on energy used to manufacture the panel is not completely out of reasoning - at least if you would add the energy used by the workers at the panel plant commuting to work, etc.
If we add in the lousy efficiency of the conversion (solar electricity) -> hydrogen -> electricity for the cars (25% overall?) and the efficiency in getting the power generated by the cells to the hydrogen generating plant (75% ?), then very probably the net energy balance of burning oil to produce solar panels for hydrogen generation for cars is negative
In germany, the government forces utilities to buy solar generated electricity at app. 1.25$/KWh from any operator of a solar power plant for the next 15 years or so.
Yet, there is no rush from big corporations to reap this "easy money" - other than selling solar panels to individual homeowners, which the subsidiary of BP (one of the biggest oil multis) does
Given the current solar cell technology, I think that while any fossil fuel is used to generate electricity, it is not worthwhile to use hydrogen for car propulsion, rather than using gasoline or diesel.
What BMW is doing with hydrogen can be found here: http://www.bmwworld.com/hydrogen/hybrid.htm:
I like the sentence about Arnies promise to plaster the highways with hydrogen fuelling stations every 32 kilometers :-)
Doesn't anyone else think these are the most ridiculous vehicles? Never mind their incredible fuel efficiency.
One of my favourite Family Guy quotes:
Brian: Let's take that one.
Stewie: An SUV? We're trying to elude someone, not taking the kids to soccer practice.
Long time reader, but reading this... Where the hell are the E85 (Ethanol 85) stations? Many new fords have this feature, and mostly the E85 stations are in the mid-west. I live in Northern New Jersey. With the rising cost of gas, why aren't there more E85 stations around Jersey. Is the east coast just that far behind?
E85 Fuel
Im getting tired of feuling up my Explorer for 43.00 at the pumps, when this stuff is still around 90 cents a gallon.
-kris@kris.nu
Mr. Fact person, you can learn something if you want: Hydrogen heats upon expansion.
now what was actually said? hydrogen has the hydrogen burn rate: check unique to hydrogen
hydrogen heats on expansion: check unique to hydrogen
hydrogen leaks more easily than any other gas: check unique to hydrogen
Following the patter yet? none of what was said can be said about other gases and liquids. duh. your not fire prrof but you seem flame retarded.
Yeah, but that is accounted for in the studies. Farmers don't like to use that stuff because it costs them money to buy. They now use satellites and other technology to decide where to use fertilizer. Each area (10 square feet IIRC) gets a different amount depending on what it needs.
It does not take 50% of the energy content of a liter of LH2 to actually liquify a liter of H2. It takes 100% of the energy in a liter of LH2 to liquify a liter of H2. The other poster had a source that said 30% cost in the best case right now; that's optimistic. In the real world it's closer to 50% which means it takes a liter of LH2 to make a liter of LH2. Another way to put it: 2 kg of gaseous H2 will give you 1kg of LH2. The joys of the hydrogen economy! If the real economy worked that way I would make money by throwing money away!
the chicken or the egg?
I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.
Energy: time to change the picture.
http://www.hometownsource.com/2005/February/14farm ers.html
Getting old fast, Shit!
The city of Amsterdam has had a couple of busses driving around since Dec 2003. While searching I also discovered that Barcelona, Madrid, Porto, Londen, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Luxemburg, Hamburg and Stuttgart have had these same busses. But the city of Amsterdam has found the busses so succesful that the project has been prolongued for another 2 years. :)
Info (in Dutch): http://www.waterstof.info/ProjectGVB.htm
English info:
http://www.fuel-cell-bus-club.com/
Den Haag, the Netherlands
Hydrogen is not an energy source, its a very inefficient way of transporting energy produced by other sources. Why are we wasting money on hydrogen cars at the same time the government is about to shutdown amtrak? We'd be much better off using electricity to power bullet trains like europe has.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
And anyone who lets both their batteries and their gas tank get empty is dumb, and deserves to pay $5/gallon. Heck, I'd charge their batteries from MY car and let them pay for the privilege!
One of the biggest crimes of the "mega-SUV" deduction is that it locks us in to heavy petroleum dependence for a significant part of the fleet for at least a decade. Raise CAFE standards all you want; unless you send those vehicles to the crusher or raise fuel prices enough to make people drive them less, you will change their consumption little if at all.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I do burning hydrogen demos every year with my chem students, and I have to work carefully to get around a simple point: hydrogen floats. If you open up a 2L bottle filled with hydrogen with the nozzle pointed up, you will lose all of it in a couple of minutes. Leaking hydrogen at a gas station will float into the atmosphere and thence into space. As a result, the dangers from leaking hydrogen are negligible.
Leaking hydrogen is less dangerous than spilled gasoline.
To get an explosion from hydrogen, you need to have a contained H2/O2 mixture*, and no one is proposing that.
*Or, like the Hindenburg, a flammable magnesium-based skin.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.