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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.
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.
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.
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But ethanol is a crappy idea - it's got a lot of drawbacks, and it essentially needs to be "grown". A much better alternative is the old Vegetable oil way of doing things - BioDiesel. Almost every filling station in Europe stocks Diesel and BioDiesel works in most if not all Diesel engines. The enormous benefit is the turnaround time, as it is a continuous, rather than a batch process (for those Chemists out there).
Let's not go changing most of the mechanical parts if all we need to change is the fuel...
BioDiesel, grown from Rape Seed etc, would give not only American's reason to get the farms up and running again, but also third world countries - a lot of farmers will grow this stuff and sell it very cheaply, to be refined elsewhere. BioDiesel _will_ revolutionise the European lorry (sorry, truck) market, such a shame that the USA won't be able to partake - you're far too reliant on petrol (the stuff you normally fill up with). 10 years, and you may be ready, Europe is ready NOW. Let us be your Guinea pig. Do you hear that [insert current UK Home Secretary]???
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!
Actually, they've gone to some real trouble to make carbon-fiber-reinforced tanks that are *very* hard to bust. I've seen the test footage, and when they finally did manage to bust one (which was no mean feat), it slowly leaked the hydrogen out. What is more, when they ignited the leaking hydrogen, it just burned, Just Like Gasoline; it did not explode.
Incidentally, leaking H2 is somewhat safer than leaking gasoline, because it tends to float up and away instead of accumulate in a growing pool on the ground.
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Hate to Reply to Myself (tm Slashdot Inc.), but i forgot one other thing: another research group has been working on storing H2 as a Nickel-Metal Hydride. Sound familiar? It's the same method used for batteries of the same name. They fill a tank with fine, fine metal powder (mostly Ni), and pressurize H2 into it. The H2 bonds to the powder at the molecular level, which means you can squeeze ~1,000 times more hydrogen into the same size tank. To get the H2 out, you actually have to apply a small amount of heat to the tank. A fraction less efficient, but much safer than your post would suggest.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I've read some articles that say corn-based ethanol is pretty much a scam to raise the demand for (and price of) corn. Apparently producing corn ethanol requires a shit ton of energy and fossil fuels. People are tripping over themselves to create "clean" and "renewable" energy, but they're losing sight of the big picture and the laws of physics.
I'm not going to find a site because it's late.
-B
NEXT you assume only one square metre of solar cell space.... how big is your house? mine is around 8*20 metres = 160 m^2
SO if you take my house as an example, you are looking at 160m^2 * 200w (say)per m^2 * 8 decent sunlight hours per day = about 250 KWhours per day IF i cover my entire roof with panels, plenty to power multiple cars and the house and the neighbours house etc etc.
THE only problem with this scenario? due to a lack of widespread investment in solar technology, as opposed to oil or other fossil fuels, solar cells still cost about 5 bucks a watt, so your looking at an upfront investment of about 160 grand to cover my roof in panels. Now obviously i dont quite need that much power, but either way itll be a fair whack of money at current prices (otherwise i wouldve done it long ago). Hopefully some of the new thinner solar technologies coming out soon (within a year or two) will lower prices to a more reasonable level.
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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.