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?"

Comments

Sure, unless you want to take yout SUV outta town.

[way2trivial]

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!

Bout Time

[SelectionShort]

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

I hope this takes off

[aendeuryu]

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.

Re:I hope this takes off

[amliebsch]

At best it is an inefficient way of storying energy generated by fossil fuels

I hear it can also store energy from wind and nuclear sources.

Re:I hope this takes off

[BenTels0]

Hydrogen is not a fuel source anymore than electricity is an energy source.

That depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the user of hydrogen it most certainly is an energy source, just as much as gasoline is. It is all relative. After all, in an absolute sense, nothing at all is an original energy source, as the law of preservation of energy tells us.

At best it is an inefficient way of storying energy generated by fossil fuels.

Or any other fuel; energy doesn't discriminate. Why exactly is it inefficient, in your mind?

Hydrogen isn't naturally found anywhere.

I assume you mean, not bonded to anything else. Try the sun.

It will never be commercially successful because it is inefficient and does not make economic sense. That is the sad fact. The future is in biological, organically created fuel oils. That's much more efficient if we can get a natural process (say algae) to turn carbon dioxide in the air into diesel fuel using the power of the sun. This is actually efficient and sustainable.

Ahem. Economy has a strange way of changing with things like scientific advancement and other factors. Right now, oil is vastly expensive and may in fact never come down in price ever again. Oil creation by algae of the heat/pressure simulation process developed at Shell recently is a possibility, but also expensive (in fact, viable only because natural oil is so expensive). Other technologies follow the same reasoning.

The "egg" is already there

[Tau Zero]

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.

Re:The "egg" is already there

[dbIII]

support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy

Hydrogen vehicle fuel has never been about saving energy - it's about shifting the pollution from the street corner to big power plants that have the space for anti-pollution gear and big high stacks to put it up where it will disperse. In a lot of cases its another way to get fuel out of coal, or fuel from hydro.

Someone is bound to put a nuclear troll in here - since a form of energy is mentioned.

To Be Viable, Need more Hydrogen Cars

[reporter]

In order for these hydrogen stations to be viable, we need more hydrogen-powered cars. They need to be a regular fixture on the Californian highways. Right now, I see a hydrogen-powered car only about once per year.

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?"

Hydrogen production..

[wilbrod]

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!

Re:At this stage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see. A typical car uses about 15KW at around 50MPH (See for example, http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JaeheeJoh.shtm l) , and the efficiency of solar generation of hydrogen via electrolysis is about 10% (See http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/hydrogen_workshop/Ma cQueen.pdf).
Now on a good day, you can't expect more than 1KW of sunlight square meter. So with a 1 square meter solar cell, if you wanted to drive for a measely one hour, you would need your solar cell to be exposed to full sun-light for 15KW/(0.1 x 1KW) = 150 hours. Oops!

Wait a minute...

[HunterZ]

From the article:

The Chino center will use natural gas as a feedstock, to use the extensive natural gas infrastructure that is already in place. "Natural gas is an established, very efficient way to make hydrogen," he said.

So, really, we'll just be trading one non-renewable natural resource (petroleum) for another (natural gas)?

fuel cells cost a lot/do we have enough platinum?

[marcmerlin]

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.

Re:And safer too

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you say it is any more dangerous than propane?

Propane powered vehicles with fuel tanks have been on the roads for decades. They can be fueled, and crashed, flipped, dropped, shot, without blowing up.

The safety issue is nothing more than hot air from Big Oil supporters.

Re:Great!

[g-doo]

People ask for alternative fuels. A large company like ChevronTexaco, who has the power to actually make these good changes happen> , listens. Then people bash them for doing so because they're involved with the petroleum industry. What is it that you want?

Re:It's not for public use

[flyingsquid]

This program is such bullshit.

Seriously. Five SUVs? we really want to do something serious about curbing emissions and conserving energy, today, we start by legislating higher fuel economy for existing vehicles; that will do something. Maybe in twenty years hydrogen technology will be advanced enough to be a large part of the solution to our energy and pollution woes, but currently, all spending a few bucks on hydrogen technology does is give the automotive and petroleum industries the ability to say, "look, we're really doing something! We're not evil!". Purely cosmetic, nothing more. It reminds me of how Phillip Morris changed its name -which had long been associated with selling death at a high profit margin- to "Altria". They still knowingly kill people to make a buck, but now they kill people with a name which sounds sort of like "altruism", the practice of doing good and getting nothing in return. Likewise I think this is just the auto and petroleum companies trying to say they've changed when they haven't. Like sticking a "save the rainforest" bumper sticker on a Hummer.

Why it won't work that way

[MichaelPenne]

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...

Re:Hydrogen: boondoggle or scam?

[Locutus]

Excellent posting. You might want to check on how Bush killed the hybrid project when he took office and created/funded the hydrogen project. Well, actually, he moved the hybrid project under an umbrella organization with the hydrogen project before killing it.

I think it's a scam alright, but its origin is the Bush administration and not the commerical sector.

Too bad I already burned up my mod points today...

LoB

Re:It's not for public use

[Vellmont]

But what you've missed is that it takes as much energy in fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol as is released when you burn it. The benefits of ethanol as a renewable energy source are very debateable. I'd bet bio-diesel is a lot more energy positive though.

It is going to be extremely difficult for any renewable source to take hold until all the non-renewable sources are gone.

Not true. We're probbably never going to run out of fossile fuels, it's just going to become increasingly expensive to get them. Not all fossile fuels have equal costs in getting them out of the ground and into a useable state. Canada for instance has a trillion barrels of oil in the form of tar sand. They're very costly to extract into a useable form though. The point is that as fossil fuels become increasingly expensive renewable sources will become econmically viable. The costs associated with renewables will also likely only go down as more money+research gets pumped into them from the profits of usage.

This is actually one of the reasons that OPEC doesn't want high oil prices. High oil prices only encourage investments in other energy sources, which eventually only undermines oil prices.

Re:Wrong wrong wrong

[theguyfromsaturn]

You are forgetting one thing: we need to compress the hydrogen gas from atmospheric pressure to tank pressure. This is a 50% energy cost. Half your solar cells are generating hydrogen, and the other half are compressing it.

Sometimes the hydrogen does not need to be compressed, but can be produced on the fly. There are still energy costs involved in the production of the raw products, of course, so I don't know how that would factor in. But definitely using compressed hydrogen directly sounds unsafe on top of expensive. You are also stuck with all the leakage problems which only get worse when you need high pressures. Maintenance costs of the feed system are sure to pile up also if past experience with potentially leaky systems serves me well.