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Fuel-cell Vehicles for Americans
hey writes "An article titled Fuel-cell vehicles run clean, but is their future clear? in the Japan Times says Honda is leasing fuel-cell cars to individual Americans. The article mentions: 'Honda officials said it is easier for the automaker to start leasing in the U.S. because there are more hydrogen gas installations there than in Japan.'"
We have hydrogen gas installations? Do you have to go to an industrial chemical supplier to buy your fuel?
After all, I am strangely colored.
Erm... Provided noone has ever used such a car in the US before, how's that that there are fuel stations by now? Or am I missing something?
...a lot of countries are going to get nervous about potential invasion. If you thought things were bad with us taking your oil, wait till we come calling for your precious precious hydrogen.
If it takes more oil to obtain hydrogen in proper form than just refining it to diesel or gasoline and using it in an internal combustion engine, is it going to help? We will still be dependent on foreign oil. Maybe we could power the fuel cell producing plants by burning soybean oil in modified disel generators? There is a John Deere diesel generator I saw that was modified with a heat exchanger to heat up used soybean oil and run it through the engine after it warms up, requiring disel (fossil fuel) ot only be used to start up and shut down. We could get that oil from Texas, or maybe Alaska.
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I know that we have tons and tons of methane gas mactories, particularly in recliner chairs near most big-screen TVs over the weekend, but I've never seen any that produce hydrogen. Although once those methane facilities start processing, they do get you to move away from them pretty quickly.
;)
THAT'S the kind of engine we need! A Beer and Bratwurst Post-Production Methane engine! There's a virtually unlimited supply of that particular gaseous substance here in the States!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Until the legislation and tax rules are changed to make it un-economic to run a massive SUV. Sure these things are cleaner, but with Gas in the US being so much cheaper than pretty much all of the rest of the western world, and no additional taxes on large vehicles then what will be the incentive for the MAJORITY of Americans to do this?
Sure one or two tree-hugging people will go for this, but it won't actually matter until its cheaper to buy a Fuel Cell powered vehicle, and its ridiculously expensive to buy ridiculous cars like the Ford Excursion.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Lease the cars because buying them would imperil the American economy.
The U.S. has refused to sign on [the kyoto accord], however, citing concerns that adhering to its strict emissions limits would imperil their economy July 4, 2005. CTV News
tons and tons of methane gas mactories
Oh, it's going to be one of those days, I see. What a hell is a "mactory"? *sigh* Where's a FireFox spell checker when you need one?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
In japan... only americans drive fuel efficient cars?
Wait... the americans are the ones going to gas-alternatives?
I'm very, very scared... hold me.
You may imply what ever you wish, though you might suggest a hidden meaning if you where to infer instead. But if I where trying to read something into his user name, I'd be thinking more about methane.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
While the US government would want you to believe otherwise, oil is not the only source of energy. You can use a renewable power source, such as solar/hydroelectric/wind power, when producing hydrogen. While you still need the initial input to create the solar plant, dam or windmills, the amount of hydrogen produced with very little impact on the environment would be astronomical!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It might not work so well: the EV1 was leased too much to the dismay of owners (well, leasees) when GM killed it. Green-minded people might prefer to buy the Hondas outright, in the light of Californian EV1 owners' experiences.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yet at the same time Kami feels a sense of urgency about lowering the cost, saying that if automakers are unable to lower their pants and give cowboyneal the goatse, they will be a failure in terms of ass-marketability.
Never knew cowboyneal had anything to do with the ass market.
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
At the G8 summit, Bush seemed to be looking for technological silver bullets rather than do as the rest of the developed world and actively reduce petrolium consumption via e.g. higher taxes on fuel. He claims the US economy would be wrecked by similar measures however it doesn't seem to have harmed the UK's (mind you we travel shorter distances). In an earlier statement he said that the US economy was overdependent on middle east fuel and this was a problem for national security and economic stability (so why not try to reduce consumption? Oh never mind). I'll be fascinated to see whether he puts his money where his mouth is and starts pumping funds into this type of technology (i.e. subsidises it) to give Americans an appealing alternative to 10mpg SUVs.
THAT'S the kind of engine we need! A Beer and Bratwurst Post-Production Methane engine! There's a virtually unlimited supply of that particular gaseous substance here in the States!
There's an idea: install a gas-collection nozzle on the driver's seat, at the "strategic" location, so that the driver himself becomes the energy source when he sits down at the wheel. For refueling stations, the infrastructure is already there: just go to a Taco Bell drive-thru, "enjoy" your giant burrito with guacamole, wait 10 minutes and off you go!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
just noticed that myself. Methinks someones trying to sneak a troll in, and get modded informative.
I forget where (possibly wired, but I couldn't find the article, at least not without getting a debt collector after me), but I recall reading that the most cost effective methods (in other words, the ones that will most likely be used for a while) for refining the fuel needed for fuel cells created almost as much pollution as the vehicles themselves would be emitting using gas power. Wish I could find the article again, it was a rather interesting look on the situation.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
This is a well written PDF that was very educational dealing with Zero Emission Power Using Solid Oxide Fuel Cells and Oxygen Transport Membranes
s /01/vision21/v211-5.PDF
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceeding
Good explanation of alternative fuel vehicles here: http://www.midamericanenergy.com/eew/more/alt.html
Here's a good snippet regarding Fuel Cells:
FCVs are twice as efficient as gasoline or diesel engines, and they produce no pollutants or carbon dioxide. The only tailpipe emission is water vapor. The biggest challenge now facing the developers of FCVs is where to get the hydrogen.
Hydrogen is plentiful in fossil fuels such as methane and natural gas. At the present time, fossil fuels are the most convenient source of hydrogen. But using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen creates pollution and adds to the consumption of nonrenewable resources
Here we go again...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The article cites the current cost to produce this fuel cell car at about 100 million Yen each. Based on current exchange rates that is about:
512,000 UK,
740,000 Euro,
890,000 US,
1,090,000 Canadian,
1,200,000 Australian,
1,300,000,000 Iraqi (yes, that's B as in Billion).
The insane cost is to a large extent due to the use of Palladium in the fuel cells and other exotic metals.
The cars do not appear to be available for actual sale. They are being leased for aroud $500 US per month, at a substantial loss. This is a massively subsidized testing program, not a viable product.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
So when are hydrogen conversions for my rx7 going to be available :)
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
I was only being a smart ass with the methane crack (no pun intended) until I followed a link in a comment farther down in this whole thread that stated:
Hydrogen is plentiful in fossil fuels such as methane and natural gas.
So, I was right! I'd better get my Beer and Bratwurst Post-Production Methane Collector patented, copyrighted, and trademarked now!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Introducing the new Secretary of Energy...
WHO RULES BARTERTOWN?!
'Honda officials said it is easier for the automaker to start leasing in the U.S. because there are more hydrogen gas installations there than in Japan.'
What? A whole 3 of them (Albany, DC, somewhere in CA) - come on!
If anything, we should start cleaning up our fuel stores (aka Gasoline or Petrol). Our sulfur content within fuel is the highest on the planet. There are much more fuel efficent/powerful car vehicle engines available else where that the manufactures won't bring in to North America.
Why?
The sulfur lowers the efficency of the combustion system. More importantly, it kills the capability of the catalytic converters by acting as a inhibitor to the catalysts - and pulls down any possible chance that the vehicles can have a LEV/HLEV status stateside - as the vehicles will actually seem to pollute more here than over there.
Oh, and did I also mention that it would cost the fuel companies quite a bit to refine the fuel to that sulfur level as well?
MOD PARENT UP!
How do we get Hydrogen? By using energy. Energy that comes from fossil fuels.
Fuel cell cars do not reduce emissions, they just REDIRECT them. Instead of coming out your tail pipe, the fumes are now at an industrial facility in Wisconsin, etc. You can't see it directly, but the planet is still being screwed over.
There's a NYT writer who's been driving a Honda FCX in Fairfield CT - when he ran out of fuel, the car had to go in a trailer to Latham NY (Albany) to the nearest usable hydrogen filling station.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Bascally, the cost is $1-2 million, the engine is 86 kilowatt fuel cell with an ultracapacitor which is charged from regenerative brakes, the car can go about 190 miles before a fill up the fuel efficiency is about 57 miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent.
California has a bunch of Hydrogen fuel stations.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Storing Materials (For example, Gasoline), and using it to produce energy is primitive and inadecuate. What we need is better, smaller batterys. So, we have a form of energy (Electricity), that is clean, easy to store, cheap, and that is portable across different aplications (That is, you can power allmost anything with electricity, engines for different aplications, a radio, a computer, a cellphone ...), and the most important is: You can produce electricity in lots of different ways, from nuclear power, hidroelectric facilities, wind, solar power, using oil, etc.
So, we have a virtually unlimited resource (Since it's present in nature, is renovable, and can be produced in many ways, some of them are not renovable, but some are).
The only problem with this technology are batteries, because they are not sufficiently evolved, we just need to put more effort into producing better batteries, and in creating a standard so you can plug any batterie in any device.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
...alternative energy scheme that is a complete repolacement for petroeum. but taken in the aggregate -solar,wind, methane, biodiesel, ethanol, hydrogen from coal, etc..well, that's what we have now. Hydro is built where they will allow it,it's installed and operating,and it's a bear to get a permit for any new ones because of environmental regs for small scale low head hydro, there's always some endangered minnow whatever that puts the kabosh on it. In fact, the US has been ripping out small dams yearly now by the dozens, all over.
So that's the solution, it's "all of the above", just use what works where it's appropriate. Example, I own a small wind genny and a solar array. The solar is up because it works where I am, but average wind speeds here are dismal, so I never put up a tower for the wind genny. I keep it packed away for extreme dire emergencies if that's all I can get for electric, but now where I am it's a waste of time. But the solar PV works great! And some places like farms or foodstuff packing plants have tons of biowaste, so for them installing methane digesters works. It just depends, people keep looking for the one silver bullet-the backyard Mr. fusion- that will work for all people all the time every place, and frankly, I don't think it's happening any time soon. so we use what we have. The tech is here, it works now, even the larger petroleum companies are getting into selling solar, they just want to sell "energy", they could care less where it comes from. My solar is 100% Paid off, I own it, it works. I don't run all my stuff on it, but I can run *some* of my stuff and I have a guaranteed source when the grid goes down, and no one can charge me any more for it. for someone else, like I said, it would be better to put up a wind tower, currently extremely cost competetive with coal for instance at the larger end of things. In fact, there's more wind energy plants (by total MW) going up around the world right now than any other type of electrical generation facility.
Of course hydrogen is currently being derived from fossil fuels...it's the easiest and most efficiently way right now. HOWEVER, producing hydrogen without fossil fuels is amazing easy. In fact most people who took chemistry in 10th grade would know it. Electrolysis of water. Of course that moves hydrogen to an energy storage method, but combined with nuclear power it will produce a zero emission energy system that will power our homes and cars.
...that /. readers go apoplectic over the Supreme Court decision to let the government of the city of New London, CT take property from private individuals to give to developers, but are more than happy to suggest further intrusions on property and basic economic rights when it comes to alternative energy and environmental pet issues.
There are many many issues to be worked and a top-down socialistic approach of using coercion and forcing the people to make changes that people haven't thought through or properly justified to a degree commensurate with the methods being used is only a prescription for disaster.
The American economy is part and parcel of the world economy. If the American economy takes a total nose dive, then so too does the rest of the planet since we all trade with each other. Consider it an economic food chain or food web. You can't total any sizeable portion of it without totalling the rest.
Let's say they use punitive taxation to force people to use alternative and hybrid vehicles? What about the fleets of trailers and diesel locomotives that bring goods to the people? Will they be similarly targeted? Of course, why leave those polluting behemoths out? Up goes their costs, there's no near-term solutions, drastic moves cost money, and guess who that gets passed to? We're going to save the environment by making Americans pay $10 for a gallon of milk and $20 a pound of beef? Increase the costs of every damn thing on the shelf of every store because the cost of getting it there skyrocketed? At the same time their cost of getting to work in the morning and back home in the evening has gone up 5000%?
Give me a break.
The solution is to keep putting hybrids out, keep making them more efficient and cost-competitive, and allow them to be hooked up to power at home to kick-start them, without having to make owners mod them to do it. They need to make engines for the hybrids that run on gasoline, ethanol, diesel, etc. Pretty much rotary or gas turbines.
The solution is to keep working on increased efficiency and decreased cost of solar panels and solar water heating systems, making them something you'd find standard at the big home stores like Home Depot and Lowes and something that high end home builders would include in their homes encouraging them to be commonplace and low cost enough for lower end home buyers to install.
The solution is to come up with systems that turn sewage into methane and other useful things, perhaps even within the home itself, putting out less pollution into the sewage systems in the first place.
The solutions are indeed technological advancement and economic positioning to bring costs down to make adoption natural and not something that will crash a powerful part of the world's economy.
If anyone proved that top-down control of society by the state is not an answer, it was the Soviet Union and where is Russia now? Struggling to dig out from under. Where is China now? Struggling to find a way to join the modern world without undergoing a dangerous destabilizing total revolution that would set them back for decades never mind the rest of the world that is doing business with them. Statist solutions are not solutions, they're a guaranteed ticket to global disaster.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The best thing we can do to get off of our oil dependency is to all become vegetarians and stop driving. Growing meat requires 10 times the amount of hydrocarbons as it does to grow vegetables. The US uses 25% of the world's total daily oil production, 2/3rds of that oil is used to fuel the 200 million cars in the US so 16% of the world's oil is used to fill up cars just in the US. The only solution is stop driving the way we drive today. We have to make public transportation work otherwise we're not going to be able to afford to eat meat in about 30 years (when peak oil hits).
I refuse to give up driving my Ford Explorer and eating my Big Macs! Seriously, "become a vegetarian and stop driving" sounds like a troll. We should be able to come up with better energy fuel sources for beef production and propelling my vehicle. Why should we compromise?
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It IS all about the hydrogen - always has been. Whether we've used wood, coal or oil to get at it, the primary source of energy has always been hydrogen.
Oil has the highest concentration of hydrogen, second only to hydrogen itself! It's rapid and predictable release of energy is why we use it for so many things. Hydrogen itself is the next logical step, but storage is a problem and until that gets completely solved to everyone's satisfaction, we're not going to see a total conversion to it.
I think what we will see is a diversification of our energy needs - more individualized solar, more wind (here in PA there's a LOT of those projects going on), more nuke (Thorium), more coal (clean coal tech), etc.
What would certainly accelerate this is a better battery. Better battery tech, or some type of electrical energy storage is the holy grail as far as personal transportation is concerned.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The article states that the vehicle has an operational range of 330 kilometers with a full fuel tank. That translates into, roughly, 206 miles or so. Not so great. My Dodge Stratus with a 2.4L engine gets about 300 miles on a full fuel tank. The article isn't clear on exactly how much fuel the Honda FCX holds, or how much a full tank would cost, but at 26 dollars to fill my tank currently (from absolutely bone-dry empty), with an effective range of 150 miles, compared to the 100 miles in the Honda FCX, well, that just doesn't cut it.
:-p
Sadly, the other drawback IS the lack of fuel filling stations in California. I understand that some exist, sure, about fifteen or so, but being teathered to living within 5 miles (par exampla, if you want to use your vehicle for something other than driving to the fuel depot), depending on your commute, you're going to spend most of your time, and money, going to get gas! Great planning, that.
Informatus Technologicus
I'll bite anyway
1. The amount of oil required to mine palladium is so many orders of magnitude smaller than the amount of oil the car would burn over its lifetime
2. There's nothing misleading about calling them fuel cells. They oxidise fuel (methanol/hydrogen etc..) to produce electricity. A fuel cell is a very accurate descrtiption of what it does.
Peak oil is actually acknowledged by the US Geological survey and the International Energy Agency officially, they think it will happen in 30 years, some people think it'll be well before then (like before 2010). Also, we can't replace it with nucelar reactors, because we've almost used up all of the uranium (Thorium is a possibility and maybe some experimental nuclear reactor will be more efficient). The only thing we can do (that is, if we want our grandchildren to have any type of life similar to ours) is stop consuming like we're consuming today. Exponential growth is impossible unless we populate another planet.
FC have extremally low power density, compared to internal combustion engines. So they weight more.
Moreover, the cheaper FC use PEM, and have an efficency less than 40%
So you don't gain efficency using a fuel cell instead of an internal combustion engine for moving your car.
Look for example at the Honda FCX : with 3.8 kg of hydrogen, it has a range of 190 miles.
Because 1 kg of hydrogen has the same content of energy as 1 gallon of gasoline, this car can do 50 mpg(about 21 km/l), the same as hybrid cars or diesel cars.
Moreover hydrogen can be made by many thing, but none cheaper then methane !!! So you pay a lot more, for having the same level of CO2 emitted
Last thing: nuclear cannot be used NOW for the production of hydrogen, because it requires nuclear plants operating at 850 C (at least), instead of 4-500 C of the current generation.
I'm not sure that the U.S. oil problem is caused so much by the huge 10 mpg SUVs as it is the people who choose to drive those vehicles. What is going to make someone who drives a Ford Excusion choose a hydrogen-powered car over a civic that's been available for decades? By the time gas prices in the US hit a point where people start reconsidering their SUVs, the economy and the whole country will be in a very bad place.
A "mactory" is a plant for transforming inputs, with mastication as its first operation upon them.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It doesn't take prohibitive temperatures to crack water. Just yesterday, I was burning magnesium in the campfire in order to help kill bugs (they "rain" into the fire... really something to see). The magnesium burns hot enough to split water into hydrogen and oxygen so I often throw some ice onto the magnesium once it starts burning. This increases the brightness of the fire by an order of magnatude.
I imagine that it would be entirely possible to get a nuclear reactor to create hydrogen directly by heating water. At that point, you could have a hydrogen "grid" instead of power lines. All energy will be distributed in the form of hydrogen and fuel cells or direct burn will convert it into electricity or heat, respectively.
More
As a typical slashdotter, I don't think I will ever have childen, let alone grandchildren. I don't even have any friends. I get modded -1, Unfunny in real life. So I don't really give a bloody hell what happens when I am gone. You can blame people like the fucktards that oppose us putting oil wells in Alaska for the shortage of oil. I like how my Mac Mini is composed with hydrocarbons from oil as an ingredient. The intelligent will find new ways of getting around problems. Germany produced oil from coal. There is always around a problem. There are too many stupid people alive anyway. 95% of the world population can't even grasp the basics of pointers in C. It is these people who use our oil by paying for CDs with useless garbage on them, associated with the RIAA MPAA. Televisions be manufactured so people can watch inaccurate news. Maybe the future will become more like early America was? Instead of "I've got to have that!", they will ask themselves "Do I really want to support wasting oil on making plastic cases for the latest DVD of mindless garbage?" I know I only buy things I can use. I may be running twelve computers, but I actually gain knowledge from coding, applying OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD to different objectives, etc.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Even after the withdrawal of the EV-1, the number of electric vehicles in California is what?
The cost of Li-ion batteries for 500 km of range is what fraction of the cost of a fuel-cell system with 330 km range?
The media dog is barking up the hydrogen tree while the oil companies have gagged and trussed the real alternative and are sneaking away with it.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
China is on the edge of a knife. They can't continue their economic growth with current technology or they will wreck their environment (probably they've already done so). They can't stop growth because then they'll have a billion people, all expecting the "good life", suddenly told they can't have it. (hellooo revolution!). Tough times for China in the next 30 years.
Oh, and China has no domestic oil to speak of either. Lots of dirty coal though. Yet, they look to surpass the US as the largest energy user in the next couple of decades.
Not that I agree with the GP, but decentralization can help - if it's implemented correctly.
Decentralization does not mean that one necessarily needs to get away from large cities, and definitely does not need they need to be more detached from everyone else.
A primary goal of decentralization is that the price of living near where you work (i.e., within walking or at least biking distance) should not be more expensive than living far from where you work. When all of the companies are centralized in one location, only so many of their employees can live near to those companies. This means that (a) the price of living near those companies is prohibitive, and (b) most people cannot do so. Of course, this can be (and is) somewhat mitigated by building large apartment complexes (or condominiums) near these companies. However, with a few people controlling these housing markets, prices are still going to be prohibitive.
True decentralization is probably as realistic as eliminating war or hunger. However, being unattainable does not it make a bad goal. One step we can take is trying to find jobs near where we live - or telecommute. Naturally, there are reasons for centralization or it would not exist. However, I think that some of the reasons are due to laziness, habit, or history.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
- It's not compact, like gasoline.
- It's not easy to handle, like alcohol or electricity.
- It's not efficient to transform energy from e.g. electricity to hydrogen and back again; losses are something like 60%.
Nope, there's one and only one reason to settle on hydrogen as THE medium to replace gasoline, and that is because it's most easily and efficiently made from oil, coal and natural gas. It keeps the fossil-fuel companies on top by making sure that the infrastructure is built around the goods they supply best. You, sir, have a future ahead of you as an advertising executive.Stay the hell out of science, engineering and economics, because you have obviously convinced yourself that an energy system with 15% end-to-end losses is inferior to an energy system with 60% end-to-end losses. You won't get published, nobody will offer you a job, and people will point at you and laugh.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I could no longer enjoy cable and buying computer hardware, or my six litres of Mountain Dew a day (two litres of it store brand thanks to high gasoline tax)
If you drink six liters of Mountain Dew in a day, you have bigger problems than expensive gasoline. I would say you are in the top 1% at risk for diabetes.
Try drinking water instead, it's a lot healthier. Also, caffeine depletes the water in your body, which has a lot of nasty side effects (cellular metabolism comes to mind, also harder to digest foods).
Would you object to owning this as your next automobile? The future is bright, the future's electric. Remember you heard it here first.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Nooooooooo! Patents are baaaaaaaaaaaaad!
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Recent studies indicate that you are a moron.
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Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
The rush to hydrogen is an attempt to pre-judge the issue. For instance, solar panels have an energy payback time of 4 years (single-crystal cells) or less; if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment. But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency and you need about 2.5 times as many solar panels. You get a similar answer for wind.
If you insist on hydrogen, it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy (artificial photosynthesis excepted, but that's not even being done on a serious laboratory scale yet). That's why hydrogen isn't the answer. You can put enough lithium-ion batteries into a fairly small car to get 300 miles range, and the Toshiba electrodes have cut the charging time from hours to minutes. Why are we allowing our governments to waste money on this expensive, bulky, volatile and lossy gas?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
So, the Earth has been like a gigantic 'battery' for the past several hundred million years or so, being trickle-charged by solar energy. All of a sudden (in a microscopic blink of an eye, in terms of geologic time) it's being discharged by human willy-nilly technology. Uh-oh... where's that Fast Recharge switch? There isn't one. The Bush/Kerry Demo-Publi-Cratican establishment tried for awhile to get us to think they could just drill a bunch of hydrogen wells or something to solve this little prob, but apparently reality recently intervened on that one. Personally, I think the only answer is figuring out how to safely tap nuclear energy to keep the whole show going, which would be the elegant solution, but oh what a head-scratcher that one seems to be so far. I guess all we can really hope is that the demand for the ancient power source doesn't get too great in the near future, giving us all time to get used to it (whatever that may mean), and find some way of dealing with what looks more and more like a "Tragedy of The Commons writ very large" taking its course. Looking back to the 1950's, say, we probably should have said to ourselves, "Gee, if we don't stop using all this stuff now, our grandchildren are going to hate us someday". Right. Oh well... (btw, if someone over there wants to label this a 'troll' post, well, that's ok with me I guess)
The energy bill is a captive of special interests. It's all about pork; I understand that there will be NO subsidies for biodiesel produced from non-crop sources (soybean, rapeseed and waste cooking grease only), and ethanol from corn is preferred over ethanol from biomass. Why? Doesn't benefit the lobbies who are paying for the next campaign, that's why.
Hybrids and clean diesels only reduce oil demand; they can't substitute anything else for it. The plug-in hybrid (CalCar) can, but I understand that there were no programs or preferences for them until some people like James Woolsey pulled some strings. If you look at the numbers, electric has more potential to eliminate oil consumption than anything else out there.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Is it me, or do the Japanese automakers take an "AND" approach to engineering, as in "high-performance AND low emissions." In contrast, the U.S. automakers seem to always take the "OR" approach.
Plastics can be drived from using soybeans. We don't need to be drilling in the ground to make plastics. There is also Soy-diesel. There are alternate sources of these items. The industry just needs to be converted from the fosil-fuel based sources. That, and there needs to be more access to the recycling of the current resources that are availible to us that which we simply throw away. As for the Fruits and Vegtables... It wouldn't hurt us if we ate more of them; Although coverting all they way to them is just plain silly. You do need protien, although not anywere near the ammount most Americans consume. I say if you like soy, eat soy. If you like a certain type of meat, eat that. But it needs to be in moderation; That is the key.
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Sincerely,
Locke
The "clean-burning" version of which is now impounded by the national park system. Thank you previous presidential administration...
I've been wondering something for a couple years now, ever since the first electric cars came out, and more so now that I've seen the Prius and its peers..
What's going to happen - when we've all got these newfangled cars that run on highly automated electrically powered systems - what's going to happen to the treasured art of driving a car with a manual transmission? When I head up a curvy mountain road, I get to do a lot more than just gas - brake - gas - brake. It's a challenge to do well, and feels like a kind of artistic expression at times. I love the sound of the engine as I come off the downshift and come whizzing into a turn, the feel of the accelleration when you know you've hit the sweet spot of second or third gear at just the right moment.. all of that. If they take away the stick, they may as well give me a voice-activated autopilot so I can get some sleep. Driving down Big Sur (for example) on cruise control will never hold a candle to catching up to a lumbering SUV, dropping two gears, and roaring by, with the cliffs on one side, the ocean on the other, and the "I know *exactly* what my car is doing" authority.
So, will motorcycles be the last bastion of the art of the clutch? Or, could car manufacturers give us a "driver's edition" complete with stick shift and an audio system that gives us all that glorious noise? Something tells me.. it just won't feel the same.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You can turn oil and natural gas to electricity in IGCC powerplants with efficiency greater than 50%; with coal, 40%. Charge batteries with this (95% or so for Li-ion) and you're talking close to 50% overall efficiency. On top of this, you get a whole bunch of advantages over hydrogen:
- You get 90% or so end-to-end efficiency from wind or solar power, because you have no conversion to hydrogen and back.
- You can use the existing electric infrastructure; much less new investment.
- Lithium-ion batteries are already about 1/10 the cost of fuel cells, and can come down in price a lot sooner.
There is no point to using hydrogen unless you want to tie the future to oil.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This dovetails neatly into the second problem - energy storage. Oil/gasoline is not a popular fuel just because it's a (relatively) cheap source. It's also a popular fuel because it's very compact (has high energy density) and easy to store and carry. The storage problem is the reason battery-powered cars are flopping while hybrids are taking off - modern battery technology simply cannot match gasoline in terms of energy per kg, even taking into account the horrendous efficiencies of gasoline engines. A major obstacle to hydrogen fuel cells has been figuring out ways to store hydrogen densely and safely (i.e. not under ridiculously high pressures or ridiculously cold temperatures).
Any alternate energy source is going to have to match or surpass oil at solving both these problems if it wants to supplant oil as the world's primary portable fuel source.
Give me Meat or give me death!
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Criticism of alternative fuel vehicles (mainly hybrids), which info I insterted at wikipedia, but it keeps being deleted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle
Especially in Europe, hybrid vehicles are seen with some suspicion. Many assume hybrids solely address the pollution issue, while refusing to conserve energy, which is a half-hearted approach against global warming.
Use of hybrid propulsion technology is often considered an exclusive solution for emission problems of SUV and full-sized car culture because of its higher price tag and it still wastes energy due to excessively large vehicle sizes (e.g. even the Prius is considered a big car by european standards). California Governor [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]]'s solicitation of hidrogen and hybrid powered [[Hummers]] has received negative publicity in the old continent because driving monster SUVs was considered meaningless, regardless of the propulsion used.
Instead, European car vendors follow a path of refining the traditional car to reduce [[fossil fuel]] consumption to 65MPG and beyond, using smaller internal combustion engines with a trend towards overall smaller vehicle sizes. Europe's choices are the modern small [[diesel]]s, which have enough power, good torque, high RPM and boast the highest efficiency of any internal combustion engine design. The inclusion of a particle filter drum and Euro-4 compliance reduces solid emissions dramatically. Such developments remove the need for auxillary electric propulsion in diesel-powered cars.
Economic pure diesel vehicles continue to conquer the european market, having reached an 50% share of all new sales as of mid-2005 and hybrids are practically unheard of. The International Engine of the Year 2005 award given to the Fiat MultiJet 1.3D underscores the continued viability of traditional and significantly cheaper internal combustion solutions against hybrid technologies.
The use of batteries for automotive power is controversial, because rechargeable batteries are an extremely inefficient form of power storage. A partially or fully electric-powered vehicle needs to haul heavy batteries, usually about weight of an extra adult passenger. This significant weight increase requires extra power from the engine due to increased friction, yet the batteries store juice for relatively short trips on full-electric cruise. The average internal combustion engine powered vehicle spends 2-4% of its onboard fuel reserve per 1000 kilometers to haul its own fuel stored in the tanks. This ratio is markedly worse in case of electric vehicles.
The onboard use of a large mass of batteries is also an environmental and safety issue. The cost to produce rechargeable batteries is very high when measured in terms of the raw materials used up, the energy used for the manufacturing process and the pollution caused by battery factories. Many battery ingredients, including lead, acids, cadmium and metal-hydrides are poisonous or harmful to humans and the environment, which causes problems in case of an accident. Responsible disposal at the vehicle' end-of-life is complicated and spent battery reprocessing plants are difficult to establish due to local green protests.
A hybrid vehicle's propulsion is more complicated than a traditional car's drive-train and costs significantly more to manufacture because of the need for two high performance motors in a single vehicle. The large investment is not warranted unless hybrid cars have a life expectancy much longer than internal combustion vehicles. Most cars reach end-of-life after 10 to 12 years due to design and technology obsolescence, regardless of continued road-going ability. Considering the amount of advanced technology implemented in hybrid vehicles, their lifecycles may be shorter than traditional cars'.
Regards: Tamas Feher from Hungary (etomcat at freemail dot hu)
[...] ethanol will run in any gasoline engine with modifications.
Not entirely correct. A blend of ethanol and gasoline (which I refer to as gasohol) can run in most gasoline engines at up to a 10% ethanol mix. Some older cars (80s and prior) can't even handle that much ethanol - my first car couldn't, and the one thing I did *not* need at the time was the $700 repair bill.
The same goes for methanol, but generally in a 5% methanol blend.
Honestly, if honda started offering fuel cell Civics and Accords in the states, I would consider actually purchasing one.
Even if it cost more, the benefit of not having to pay exorbitant prices on gasoline makes up for it.
>what's going to happen to the treasured art
>of driving a car with a manual transmission?
In Europe some 80% of new cars is still sold with the stick on the floor.
If you drive an automatic here, people will think you are too stupid to remember how to use three pedals. Having the stick allows you to make fun of females who are perceives as 99% unable to use the clutch correctly. The stick is obviously a fallic symbol.
Dirty joke:
- What are four policemen arguing about their car?
- Who will sit by the window...
- What are two five policewomen arguing about their car?
- Who gets to sit on the stick...
Sorrowfully the picture is changing, FIAT Selespeed, Ferrari F1A, Mercedes, Audi, ProDrive and other automatic or sequential gearboxes are slowly eating away stick's continental market share.
E.g. nowadays only 1 in 10 or 12 new Ferraris have the stick, the rest are sequential paddleshift. Which is a shame considering horses have the largest sticks naturally. Whoever has seen the 250 GTO's famous metal grate would never drive an automatic.
Two pedals bad, three pedals good! Two pedals bad, three pedals good! Two pedals bad, three pedals good! Two pedals bad, three pedals good! Two pedals bad, three pedals good!
I've never heard anybody complain about hydrogen's ability to store energy efficiently.
Electric cars are certainly pretty cool, though.
-FL
One problem: try storing electricity for any significant period of time. I, too, like the idea of a single energy conversion (fossil fuel|nuclear -> electricity -> locomotion), but there's just no way we can currently handle the load of everyone "filling up" their electric cars at 3-5pm in their applicable time zones every day.
Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, which is actually very flexible.
Saying or doing? Because, last time I checked...they were saying alot of things. Doesn't make them even remotely true.
There's a huge amount of methane hydrates at the bottom of the oceans. If global warming causes them to be unstable and release the trapped methane into the atmosphere, it will have a greenhouse gas effect 20 times greater than if we could mine the stuff and burn it as a fuel. I just read an article that said that just one large deposit located 100km off the coast of Vancouver could theoretically supply all of Canada's energy needs for 200 years in place of oil. Mankind needs to develop some way of mining these methyl hydrates. Methane can also be used in fuel cells, or burned directly in car engines, where it has a motor octane rating of about 130, nearly the perfect fuel for a piston engine. The problems of transport and storage of LNG or CNG are not that big at all. If he suddenly had a huge source of cheap methane made available, the rest of industries would adapt to it in a heartbeat.
First, yes there is Hydrogen Stations already, Chicago should have a few they were Beta Testing the Ballard Fuel Cells, for years, in busses. British Columbia has actually started to build out hydrogen filling stations as well. Hydrogen does not directly require fossil fuels like some think, it is obtained from water, though it does require electricity, which could be obtained through fossil fuels. Hydrogen Fuel Cells, are not as enviornmentally friendly as people would think, the pollution is only redirected to other locations, and other sources, such as Nuclear waste, or pollution at the power plant in another state or province. There is an exception to this pollution issue, is hydrogen fuel cells based around other sources of stored hydrogen, such as methane(natural gas) based fuel cells, or even sugar water. And for those who will flame me, with "Methane is a fossil fuel" this is not 100% true, the majority of methane in the world is not held in the crude oil of the world, its being produced from agriculture.
I completely agree with your point regarding total cost, most people don't factor everything. However, I would say that if you are willing to live without the status symbol of a new car, you can do a bit better with used cars.
Most people can't bear to drive around a two generation old model and give up the status of owning the latest and greatest. But it is less than half the cost. If you are willing to drive slightly older vehicles, not only do you spend far less, but you save more of the environment. The total environmental cost of producing a new car is (by some sources) two times the cost of the car itself.
Example: Here in the states, you can buy an eight year-old Honda Accord with about 80K miles on it for around $7,000. This is a car that is going to go to 180k miles, meaning you can drive it at least 100,000 miles for an upfront cost of $0.07 / mile. Do your research, this is a car that will require very little maintenance with not much more than a timing belt, brakes and a CV joint or two. Here's the math for my typical annualized costs:
This is a 4-door, mid-sized car, with full safety features, airbags, windows and mirrors, nice paint, air conditioning, moon roof, quality wheels, etc. Drop back to a smaller car (like a Honda Civic) and you can do even better ($2,000 less upfront cost or about $0.03/mile). The trick is to find a well made automobile that doesn't need a lot of on-going maintenance, you have to read good consumer information (Consumer Reports:Used Cars) to properly evaluate.
The metro area in which I live has terrible mass transit, it would take me almost four hours to commute the 15 miles I do to work. Biking is deadly, there are no bikelanes and only narrow roads and highways. Same goes for just about everything else we do, mass transit is not an option. But this proves that one can still own a safe car, save money and the environment. Just don't buy everything shiney and new the car makers are hawking.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
The question ought to be, what are we going to power stuff with?
For cars, we're going to power them with whatever has the highest power density. At the moment, that's gasoline. When gasoline becomes a non-option, it will be hydrogen.
if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment.
Have you ever actually seen a fully electric car? The Simpsons joke isn't far off. Affordable batteries are like hauling around a ton of rocks for every tank of gas. Advanced ones are little more than reversible fuel cells.
But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency
Electrolysis is more like 90%, and usually even higher. I didn't think fuel cells were up to 60% efficiency yet, but the important thing is that there's nothing stopping them from also being 90% efficient. Either way, though, if hydrogen is at 40% efficiency for the entire process, then it's already on par with internal combustion engines. That's impressive considering the technology is just beginning commercial use.
it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy
Easier for whom? Easier for the people whose homes are demolished to make way for the coal strip mines? Easier for the people dying in oil wars? Or easier for the criminal industrialists who profit from said ventures?
What if the global warming nuts turn out to be right? Do you still think that burning hydrocarbons and trying to capture the CO2 will be the most efficient path? Besides, what will we use in 100 years? Surely even the most wide-eyed optimistic American oil-man doesn't think fossil fuels will last that long? Do you want to be the one to tell future generations that we used up all the fossil fuels and didn't even attempt to find a replacement?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I love when people talk out of their ass...
Yo people, all we need to do is start changing the way engines run. Ethanol is THE best alternative. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/automotive/article/0, 20967,1069364,00.html
There is one in DC about a mile from my office, the installation was subsidized by (IIRC) GM.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I wonder how big energy will get away with charging premiums for the most plentiful stuff in the universe.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Electricity has the advantage of being a near-universal medium of exchange, and one more feature: we've already got a huge distribution network for it, so we can get started immediately.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny.
Yeah, there is. If you generate entropy in your process you have to get rid of it as waste heat, and that's energy you can't convert to work. Second Law, no way around it. The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%. I haven't worked the numbers, but you're in no position to dispute that unless you have. Easier for the people who own the big energy-supply companies, that's who; do you think that people's homes stand in their way now? Go hydrogen, and they'll mine coal, gasify it to CO and H2, steam-reform to H2 + CO2, and sell the H2.Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze (someone else's panels or someone else's airfoils will work just fine too). They won't have to buy another expensive piece of hardware to take water apart so that the car can put it back together again, and they won't have to pay for the losses of the double conversion. As for batteries, the iron lithium phosphate chemistry has gotten rid of the cobalt and thermal runaway issues in Li-ion, and the price has been coming down steadily year over year. They'll be ready before hydrogen fuel cells will, and then we won't need hydrogen fuel cells (unless we want them to be one more source of juice for the grid, rather than the sole source for the car).
Batteries with enough performance to go 300 miles cost too much today, but that's not a problem. Outfit hybrid cars with enough batteries to go 20 miles before they have to start burning gasoline, and you can replace something like 2/3 of all gasoline with electricity. Batteries enough to go 20 miles are fairly cheap.
I'm already betting on it. What's more alternative-friendly: hydrogen with no infrastructure to speak of and economics that favor production from coal and natural gas, or electric that people are already making themselves and charging their own vehicles?Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Is this something thats peculiar to america, the idea that you would lease a car for long term use?
I havent heard of that in australia, only hire cars for short term use (e.g. holiday etc)
The U.S. is the largest consumer of petroleum and derived products for energy consumption by percentage, by population and by total quantity. To be in tune with your sarcastic tone, I ask you why the world must suffer for our over indulgence? Do you hate the entire world, exclusive that is, of the U.S.?
You don't actually think we are consuming all the goods we produce do you? China and the U.S. both produce most of the world's goods, and as a result are bound to use most of the world's resources.
Globalization is slowing changing this, but even then you will always see the largest inflow of raw materials to the nations which produce the largest outflow of finished goods.
The reasons other countries aren't producing much in the way of goods bound for the global market are rarely related to how much oil they are able to purchase on the open market. It usually has to do with poor governmental institutions that limit or make infeasible international investment into their country.
Like most politics, this shit is mostly local. Economically-challenged countries begin with economically-inept political leaders. If the leaders of these countries would stop padding their bank accounts through the misery of their people, and start producing economically feasible government, not even Satan himself could stop Big Business from moving in to that country to take advantage of the low labor rates and untapped raw material wealth.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
100% correct. All fossil fuels are just solar energy collected over thousands of years. Pretty soon fossil fuels will not be able to meet our energy needs anymore. In north america oil peaked in the 70s and gas will peak pretty soon. Worldwide oil will peak within our lifetimes - pessimists say before 2010.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. To get H2 to run these lovely new vehicles we STILL need to work out where the energy is coming from.
Our options are:
- Fossil fuels: currently the cheapest, but will not last much longer
- Solar: Nice and clean, but to replace fossil fuels we'll need to cover a large percentage of the earth with solar panels. Not likely.
- Other renewables (hydro, wind, etc.): also cannot make a significant dent in our energy needs
- Nuclear: The only viable option at the moment. We'll still need to build many thousands of nuclear plants though, and nuclear fuel is also in limited supply.
The only possible light at the end of the tunnel is fusion, although it's at least 50 years away and nobody knows for sure if it will even work.
There's just too many problems with fuel cell vehicles (e.g. high production costs and where the hell will we get the hydrogen from) I prefer the RUF dual mode transport system. I hope it goes somewhere: http://www.ruf.dk/
The Search For More Money!
Look at our bestest buds in California.
Since their fuel revenues have begun dropping off, now these jackasses want to tax people not only for the fuel they buy, but ALSO for the amount of time they spend on the road!
Roads that were build long ago with public money and taxes.
Roads which SHOULD have their ongoing maintenence MORE than compensated for with the yearly revenues from fuel taxes and in some cases tolls, as well as other sources.
Roads which have had these funding coffers ROBBED, again and again by the fucking politicians to fund other projects, rather than balancing the budget and doing without pork.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oops, I mean PLATINUM, not Palladium.
Must be a side effect of sending so much time researching and posting on Trusted Computing.... aka Longhorn... aka Palladium. Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
They can be, but not per unit of energy. If you still think otherwise, I'd like to see proof. For instance:
and cheaper than fuel-cell systems and their high-pressure hydrogen tankage. Zinc-air is even better.
They may be cheaper up front, but they need to be replaced regularly, and are not cheaper over their entire lifetime. The car you linked to uses lead-acid batteries, which are cheaper, and easily recycled, yet heavier because they have even lower energy densities than li-ion. Notice how the majority of the car is sealed away, hiding the large battery array, and the conspicuous lack of mileage or curb weight?
Why do we want to fix on hydrogen
Again, because it has the highest energy density of easily transportible non-fossil-fuels. But of course "fixing" on hydrogen doesn't prevent you from driving and promoting battery-powered cars instead. Like you've said, the infrastructure for electric cars has existed for decades. Why aren't we driving them already?
when we have (a) technologies which are better today
Once again, we don't. Batteries have been in commercial development for decades, and have yet to reach more than a fraction of the energy density of hydrogen.
and (b) the energy supply already has very wide distribution?
You're exaggerating the difficulty of converting electricity to hydrogen. It can be done by small units installed on any street corner.
This source agrees, and has some pretty dismal figures for the cost of hydrogen vs. its gasoline equivalent.
Those sites are a dime a dozen, and they all miss the point. We shouldn't care if hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, even inefficiently, in the short term. Inefficient conversion will still be on par with internal combustion. In the long term, converting to hydrogen will be necessary because 1) it has the highest energy density of viable transport fuels and 2) there are few other methods of long term energy storage in a distributed renewable energy economy. The site you linked in particular, however, is riddled with erroneous assumptions. I stopped reading when it assumed that commercial/industrial users pay $0.12/kwh for electricity.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny
Absolutely. Yet dragging around a ton of batteries means you have to either 1) limit the range, 2) limit the size/capacity, 3) or be happy with mileage on par with internal combustion.
The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%.
Fine, 90% was just a guess.
Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze
And how are people supposed to store this energy they create? Should they have two cars and leave one plugged in, or just hope that the sun is shining or wind is blowing when they need to recharge? Storing electricity "in the grid" has been dismissed as laughable even with fossil-fuel back-up, let alone in a truly renewable energy economy. Flywheels are also expensive and years from commercial feasibility. You're not advocating we keep expensive battery packs wherever we need to store energy?
What's more alternative-friendly?
Whatever can provide for all of our fuel needs while assuming transportable hydrocarbons are out of the picture.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You go to a chemical supplier to buy your fuel.
Don't think you're going to be able to generate your own hydrogen, the govenment gets plenty of tax revenue from fuel companies and the fuel companies are going to want you to continue to spend money with them, so home production of hydrogen is almost certainly going to be illegal, justified on safety grounds of course.
Deleted
This should be a reply to my earlier message. Several of my messages did not appear as replies.
Let's consider whole (real) vehicles here:
2004 Focus: ~2650 lbs
Ford Focus FCV: 3808 lb (1727 kg)
Real-world fuel cell cars are much worse than I thought - the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Great. How much does it cost, and how long does it last? (I understand that PEM fuel cells degrade fairly rapidly over time.)
Lead-acid is already cheaper if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. Both Altair Nanomaterials and Toshiba's advanced Li-ion cathodes have pushed cycle lifetimes into the thousands; even if you only got 100 miles per cycle, 3000 cycles is longer than the rest of the car can be expected to last. Batteries out of scrapped vehicles would have considerable value for stationary storage; can you imagine how long your UPS would run with a 15 kWh battery?
Electrons have a far greater energy density than hydrogen molecules if you are measuring flows into the vehicle, and the overall energy density of the systems currently favors Li-ion batteries.
I'm sure that vehicular hydrogen FC's will one day pass the energy density of the best batteries. Some time later, they may become cheaper. But your example of the regenerative fuel cell argues against building a hydrogen fuel infrastructure, because those vehicles could "regenerate" using electricity and use the existing electric infrastructure. Instead of spending a trillion dollars to re-vamp the nation wholesale, you replace vehicles individually.
But mass-market cars with drivetrains which can run on electricity alone did not. That had to wait for Toyota to ship the Prius. The hackers got their hands on it, the cat is out of the bag, and I'm enjoying the fireworks.
Yes, we should; anything which puts an unnecessary roadblock in the way of eliminating fossil fuels is to be avoided.
Let's take the coal-to-hydrogen angle. If you gasify coal with a chemical efficiency of 76% and then reform to hydrogen at 90% efficiency, you get about 69% out. Feed that to a fuel cell of 60% efficiency and your overall efficiency is about 41%. If you bought wind power to electrolyze water at 70% efficiency, you'd get 42% overall; about the same.
Now consider batteries. You convert the coal to electricity, either with a combined-cycle gas turbine or through stationary fuel cells; let's say you go with fuel cells and get up to 50% efficiency, or 45% after 10% battery losses in the vehicle. But wind or solar power gets 100% to the vehicle and yields 90% out, or twice as much. Why pick the systems design that gives renewables a 50% penalty, unless you are biased against them?
You were ragging on lead-acid batteries for being heavy.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
For the rest, see my reply to benjamindees.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
http://www.bloomberg.com/ reports: ....
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow Visits U.S.'s Biggest Oil Supplier: It's Not Saudi Arabia
`It's not well known in the U.S. the degree to which the U.S. is dependent on Canada for energy,' John Manley, a foreign affairs and finance minister under former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said in an interview.
Canada's oil exports to the U.S. averaged 2.12 million barrels a day in 2004, or 10.3 percent of daily U.S. consumption, compared with 1.64 million barrels from Mexico and 1.56 million barrels from Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration
I think when he says " to the economy" he means " to my money". Doesnt he own some oil-wells in texas? He would lose a lot of money if people didnt need to buy oil... Harken, O thou plaything of Beelzebub, for you will be trampled by a herd of stampeding pigs! ---- http://www.myspace.com/freekymayne
Harken, O thou plaything of Beelzebub, for you will be trampled by a herd of stampeding pigs! ().I}.][.$.$.
They already have. There's something wrong with your estimates. Perhaps the mark 900 fuel cell weighed a lot or something, because Ballard says that their 902 fuel cell weighs 212 lbs. The only other components are a rather lightweight (carbon fiber and aluminum) tank and some lines. There's no way the entire system weighs 1000 lbs, let alone more than that.
Let's compare apples to apples. From your Ford Focus example, the hybrid fuel-cell/li-ion car weighs 1,600 kg = 3,527 lb. We know that a 60 kWh li-ion battery (at 200 Wh/kg) is 660 lbs of that. Through the magic of subtraction, that means a mark 902 fuel-cell-only vehicle should weigh 2,867 lbs. This is only a 217 lb penalty over a regular Focus, not 1000 lb.
Now, there are other components that differ between the two cars, but most of the rest of the weight difference is in the lack of engine and transmission, and the addition of electric motors. I don't know how much the electric motor(s) weigh. The (missing) engine weighs somewhere between 300-450 lbs, and the transmission 200 lbs or less. So that places the entire weight of the fuel-cell "system" at roughly somewhere between 717-867 lbs, conservatively including the electric motors. Without the electric motors, I'll bet this weight is close to the 660 lbs of the li-ion battery pack.
Using the (conservative) mileage for the mark 900 fuel-cell-only vehicle (which weighed way too much for some reason), means that our mark 902 fuel-cell-only system should have a range of at least 100 miles. Extrapolating based on weight differences (which may actually be accurate, since the cars have the same body) gives a (1727 kg - 1600 kg - 300 kg battery pack =) 427 kg difference, or almost 25% improvement attributable to weight alone. This makes our 100 mile range more like 125 miles.
The article also insinuates that the hydrogen storage capacity has been increased in the hybrid, by up to 40%, by increasing the pressure. This may also account for a good portion of the radical range differences between the two vehicles. Adding another 40% (40 miles) brings us to a 165 mile range which can be attributable to a mark 902 fuel-cell only vehicle.
Now for li-ion-only. The upside of the li-ion system is that it can use regenerative braking. Since Slashdot has almost unanimously questioned the validity of regenerative mileage estimates in real-world situations before, I'm inclined to take a rather pessimistic view of it's benefits. This anlysis says:
Nevertheless, I'll attribute the remaining 35% mileage improvement to regenerative braking. That brings us to the 200 mile (maximum) range estimate in the article. Neglecting friction, 60 kWh at maximum speed (65 kW, 80 mph) gets you about an hour of driving, or an 80 mile range. My understanding is that electric motors have no preferable rpm range, so (neglecting friction) this is a valid estimate.
This means that, assuming the weights of the li-ion and fuel-cell-only systems are about equal, adding 25 miles for weight improvements, and with regenerative braking adding an additional 35%, a li-ion-only system would have a range of about 140 miles. Remember, though, that a significant portion of this is attributable to the dubious benefits of regenerative braking, which gives rise to the wide range of mileage estimates in the article.
I'll admit this range is suprising
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The rest of your analysis is worthless, derived from a faulty assumption.
And for all that, it still isn't close to what you get with Li-ion batteries. 330 km is barely 200 miles. Maybe an Escalade needs 65 kW to cruise at 80 MPH, but your average car would need 20 kW. 3 hours, 240 miles. In an actual trip from LA to Las Vegas, the Li-ion tzero cruised 245 miles on its pack and had range to spare. You're bloviating again. You can get close to 140 miles range on NiMH cells; the Li-ion tzero has been tested at ~285 miles range in left-lane traffic and estimated at over 300 miles on standard driving cycles. It ought to be, because it's low by better than a factor of 2 compared to real-world drives of real vehicles. I'll say. It appears to induce delusions, denial and innumeracy. It should be administered only under supervision of a psychiatrist.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Here's a link to a prototype in France that will go 200Km on a fill up.
i r-car.htm&url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/22 81011.stm
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=a
It doesn't actually use liquid nitrogen, because the maker is including an electric compressor that you can plug in overnight (or at work) and fill up the car overnight.
But I think liguid nitrogen is the eventual way to go. Nitrogen is inert, relatively easy to transport, and predictable in its expansion and compression. Who want's flake of frozen CO2 gumming up the works, for example.
The other big attractor for liguid nitrogen is it's ability to be used for bulk transport of energy from producer regions to user areas. North Dakota is often called the Saudi Arabia of Wind Energy, but no has figured out how to get the power from North Dakota to somewhere that people actually live. Liquid nitrogen could solve that. A pressurized pipeline could carry liquid nitrogen from collection areas in North Dakota to the the highly urbanized areas around Minneapolis. Liquid nitrogen could be stored for use in peak periods, provide direct airconditioning for large buildings, and even be used to generate electricity using an compressed air motor. Imagine a huge power plant whose only emission is cool nitrogen gas (which already makes up 70% of the atmosphere).
The only technological hurdles are transporting massive amounts of a supercooled/pressurized gas, which isn't anything too difficult to imagine. After all, we already move around a lot of oil and natural gas using pipelines, and liguid nitrogen has the advantage of being non-corrosive and non-flammable.
Rather than trying to make hydrogen out of natural gas, or from Nuke power, why not use the direct mechanical energy of wind power to mechanically compress air from the atmosphere and transfer that power without conversion losses? Plus, this would have the additional benefit of importing fresh, clean air from rural wind production areas to crowded urban areas that could really use it!
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
You said:
the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Which was clearly just completely made-up. I've already linked to the heaviest component in a production fuel-cell system, the cell, and it only weighed 212 pounds. Furthermore, you keep insisting on comparing "real cars" yet you can't even find one that has any of the mystical properties you attribute to lithium-ion electric cars, especially economic properties like price and lifetime.
How about this. Instead of continuing to throw worthless links at me about $50,000 sports cars that need $3000 worth of batteries every year and a half, with no weight or mileage numbers, how about you pick a battery pack with a price, weight, lifetime, power output, and energy density.
I'll then be happy to crush every one of those specs with a hydrogen fuel-cell-based system.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Now, since you're claiming I haven't answered questions that I have, you ignored the same question posed directly to you:
- How much does [a PEM FC] cost, and how long does it last?
You also refused to acknowledge direct challenges and refutations:- Lead-acid is already cheaper than gasoline if you don't push your depth-of-discharge. (source)
- diverting energy through hydrogen gives fossil supplies no advantage, but costs renewable energy sources a 50% penalty (here).
If these things are wrong you should be able to refute them. All I hear from you is psychobabble that could come from a creationist; "No, that can't be right, it conflicts with the Revealed Truth of the One Element Number One!" You obviously didn't look at any of the numbers or links I posted, because none of those figures relate at all to what's there (not that figures from hand-built vehicles have anything to do with what things cost in volume). Who's making things up now? You've had plenty of opportunity to do that pre-emptively, and failed.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Palladium would definitely make it expensive...
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent