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.'"

Comments

If America goes hydrogen...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Will fuel cell cars really help?

[Krankheit]

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.

Won't take off in the US...

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:Won't take off in the US...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

You know, it's funny how people become completely blind about the cost of owning a vehicle: buying and using a Ford Excursion *is* ridiculously expensive. So is buying and using most other cars. It's strange, but most people only consider the price of gas when they think about how much a car costs them.

I go around by bike and public transportation myself, and I occasionally call a cab, or rent a car whenever I need to. I'm not particularly ecology-minded, but I calculated that driving about 20000 miles per year (which isn't much really) in the mid-sized sedan I had costed about 5 grand a year. That included gasoline, insurance, amortization, repairs, parking tickets, etc etc etc... With my current scheme, I stay healthier and it costs a grand total of $1000 on bad years.

$5000 is a big hole in many people's budget, yet they don't seem to realize. And I dare not imagine what it is when people buy cars on credit...

Re:Won't take off in the US...

[aengblom]

Why should the government interfere? It's the free market that's finding a replacement for gasoline.

Because the free market does not at this time account for the real cost of environmental pollution.

The free market is so good because it provides very accurate price signals to account for time humans spend to make something. But (car manufacturers) are able to build cars and people are able to run their cars that cost pollution that they are not charged for.

Somebody, eventually, will pay that cost though. Either through increased health care or by eventually being forced to use and even cleaner vehicle because the environment has absorbed all it can.

Remember, purchasing a low-emission or no-emission does nothing to clean my air, so there's a huge free rider problem.

Oil isn't the only source of energy.

[CyricZ]

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!

Re:Oil isn't the only source of energy.

[Spectra72]

I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but the "Bush is against anything but oil" rhetoric is getting stale. Try to stay current on what the White House is saying ok? Right now, the plan is Four-Fold: 1) tax incentives for hybrid and clean diesel vehicles 2) Increase domestic production capabilities 3) explore alternative fuels (hydrogen cells, ethanol, bio-diesel 4) help other countries become more fuel efficient & help them improve their energy outputs.

Now, one can certainly debate those points and any priority you would give to each. One can debate the amount of money set aside for each of them (1.2 billion for hydrogen as an example). What is not debatable is the nonsense of "the US government would want you to believe otherwise", that's tinfoil hattery of the first order.

Re:Oil isn't the only source of energy.

[fireweaver]

If you base your nuclear power on burning thorium (3 times more common than uranium), you gain certain advantages such as no plutonium production, less radioactive garbage to contend with, and greater safety.

http://www.cavendishscience.org/bks/nuc/thrupdat.h tm

The thorium fuel cycle has been known since the 1950s but was discarded due to cold-war politics in favour of uranium burning reactors that bred plutonium. Additionally, thorium reactors can be used to get rid of existing plutonium in a safe manner.

So if the Indian and Russian experiments pan out (and it looks like they will), expect nuclear power to become a more attractive option. Perhaps the Iranians could jump on the thorium bandwagon as well; it would go some way towards keeping that madman in Washingtom at bay.

Re:Oil isn't the only source of energy.

[patreek]

and also if you're building dams, has HUGE (and potentially adverse) impact on the environment.

Some of the adverse environmental impact is already in place in the form of water rentention dams, and with modifications these dams could be producing electricity.

I few months ago I attended a lecture at the University of Kentucky by Jack Spadaro (http://www.jackspadaro.com/), an accomplished mining engineer who helped draft much of the (poorly enforced) regulations for surface mining in the United States. At one point in the lecture he claimed that if all of the currently installed water retention dams in the West Virgina were converted to hydroelectric dams West Virginia could meet all of its power needs without using a single lump of coal.

As for wind power, I agree that it only works in certain areas, requires large tracts of land, and can be unreliable. But modern wind turbines have significantly reduced noise by improvements in production techniques and aerodynamics, and are no more noisy than traditional power plants (Buffalo Mountain in Tenneesee is a prime example). Also, the bird deaths at sites like Altamont should be seen in context - proportionally automobiles, radio towers, and skyscrapers each kill more birds than wind farms do, and newer wind turbines are designed to prevent birds from perching/nesting on them and rotate at slower speeds. I would suggest going here (http://www.cogreenpower.org/Wind.htm) for more information on the subject.

Re:Hydrogen installations in the US?

[vansloot]

They designed specifically for advancing the future of fuel cell vehicles:

http://www.cafcp.org/aboutus.html

They have 15 installations now, and have 9 more planned.

http://www.cafcp.org/fuel-vehl_map.html

There are 65 fuel cell vehicles in California.

Re:Not necessarily less pollution.....

[prionic6]

But it's easier to build better power plants every few years than to get everyone to buy better cars every few years. Centralized energy production may not be more effective right now but it has a better perspective. At least so I think.

FCV's

[rerunn]

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

Some points about hydrogen

[orzetto]

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?

Here we go again...

• Gas engines have low efficiencies, between 30 and 10%. FCs have higher, about 50+%. So what you lose in the refinery you more than make up in the engine.
• FCs are quiet. Acoustic pollution is not a secondary issue in many cities.
• Hydrogen can be made out of many things. Oil is one. Natural gas another one. Nuclear, hydro, tidal, wind--you can make hydrogen out of pretty much anything, while you cannot make gasoline out of electricity. The keyword is flexibility: your country could gradually go over from oil to renewable, always delivering hydrogen as a fuel.

Price note

[Alsee]

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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Storing Energy Vs. Storing Materials ....

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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.

It's fairly interesting to me...

[suitepotato]

...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.

Re:Will Bush subsidise this?

[truckaxle]

Well in my opinion we should be looking for the "technological silver bullets" becauase that is were the future resides. Bush is worried that the US economy would be wrecked by taxing energy consumption, then what does he think a disastrous war that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars is going to do.

I use to think that people were naive if you thought the war in Iraq was about oil and now I think you are naive if you think it wasn't about the control of oil and contracts in oil field development. Lets just put it this way, the war in Iraq was not about WMD and it wasn't about terrorism.

It is good tho to see Bush acknowledging that our dependance on oil is a national security. Amory Lovins has been saying this for years. In fact, our dependence is not unlike a chemically dependent junkie who will do things to get his next fix that he would not normally do.

Regardless imagine if the money that was spent in Iraq was spent on the development of new demand and supply side technology such as hybrid vehicles, cheap diode lighting, solar sail lighting, better building techniques and terrestrial and extraterrestrial solar energy production, safer and cleaner nuclear, wave energy and of couse the holy grail of fusion energy.

Further the taxing of energy consumption would not create economic disaster as Bush states and as you note in the UK. It would harm certain segments such as traditional energy suppliers but creates and fosters others industries that are self sustaining and pay long term dividends. It would create a whole new economy dedicated to supplying new forms of energy and using what we have more efficiently.