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Honda Fuel Cell Concept with Home H2 Refueling
It doesn't come easy writes "Honda unveiled their next generation FCX fuel cell concept car, along with a home hydrogen generation filling station, at the Tokyo Motor Show this week. The car has a range of 350 miles (560 kms) using two separate 350 psi hydrogen storage tanks. The tanks use a newly-developed hydrogen absorption material that doubles their capacity without raising the required storage pressure and thus allows the concept vehicle to exceed the DOE's targeted driving range for hydrogen powered vehicles. The home refueling station uses natural gas to produce electricity, heat and hydrogen. Honda estimates that the HES system [will] lower by 50% the total running cost of household electricity, gas and vehicle fuel. As the FCX is a concept car, no mention of when the technology might be introduced in a real automobile or what it will eventually cost, but the advances demonstrated by the car are quite amazing."
And just when natural gas is getting so cheap, too....
So, it relies on natural gas to produce the hydrogen, but they say it'll cut costs? Have they seen the prices of natural gas lately, not to mention their volatility? And isn't natural gas just as scarce as regular gasoline?
Could one replace the natural gas with a solar generator or something?
Seems like this is just buying a longer reliance on dead dinosaurs.
I'll walk for now.
...so if I put some "powered by Honda" stickers around it, lower it, and add a cool exhaust tip, will it be fast just like a Civic?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
This is a great advance but its unlikely to be massively successful until the point at which Gas Guzzlers are taxed at a rate based on their environmental impact. In otherwords until Gas is $6+ a gallon (about the UK price) there won't be the driver in the US to adopt green technologies, thus meaning there won't be the huge volumes of purchases to make the technology really affordable.
For anyone who wants to understand what I mean, go to Honolulu airport and look at the pollution "clocks".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
this is way to dangerous to be widely deployed. Next we'll propose nitroglycerin powered vehicles with homemade nitro producing distilleries.
So when someone rear ends you do the tanks explode and launch a ballistic missle defense?
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This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
This is probably the only way to solve the chicken-n-egg problem of hydrogen cars. Sure you won't be able to drive it cross-country for a while, but for burning around town, it should work, and then once enough of them are out there, THEN the commercial stations will follow.
Still, as others mentioned above, with high natural gas prices, I can't see this helping, though if it doubles as your home heating, hopefully the amount of natural gas per household increased useage isn't much.
Mercedes-Benz also has a prototype. Their concept car will be available for production around 2015, using a fuelcell+lithium ion combo.
I'd be really interested to know how well these 'chargers' could be adapted to work with other sources of power for charging the cells. I mean if we had to buy like 3 or 4 cells in order to have them charge for like 3 or 4 days to get that 300+ miles, then okay fine... but to burn yet another fossil fuel is kinda like picking your evils... though I suspect other gases could be used but again, the method of extraction or manufacture almost always leads back to fossil fuels. How soon can we get into a source that is significantly more "free"?
but it still doesn't fly.
I can imagine, that when it freezes, your pimped & overtuned H2 car leaves behind a trail of snow when you burnout to impress bystanders!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
What I want is a electric/diesel car. Something more along the lines of 200hp and 50+mpg! While the newer Prius, Civic, etc hybrids are nice and all they are just way too underpowered. By swapping out the gas engine with a diesel one you can get better gas mileage AND better performance.
Here are some pics of the Mazda RX-8 that has two tanks: the hydrogen can be filled on one side, and regular gas on the other side.
a /gallery4.html
_ 75008.html
http://autos.goo.ne.jp/motorshow/gallery/car/mazd
there is an article here in japanese: http://autos.goo.ne.jp/motorshow/news/tms/article
The hydrogen economy is an exciting prospect, but where will the hydrogen come from? Not natural to be sure. The process creates CO2 emissions! I've always thought the federal government might fund a huge nuclear plant to for trial H2O => H2 + O2 conversion. How much nuclear power would it take to establish the hydrogen economy?
an ill wind that blows no good
http://www.switch2hydrogen.com/h2.htm
And power your home:
http://www.fuellesspower.com/
And why drive when you can fly?
http://www.fuellessflight.com/
The tanks do not only hold 350 psi it is 350 atmospheres. 15 psi per atmosphere sea level so that would be 5250psi.
I think the summary's pressure numbers are a little whacked. The article says the tank pressure is about 350 atmospheres. One atmosphere = 14.695949 psi according to Wikipedia, thus the pressure in the hydrogen storage tanks is > 5100 psi.
Why not just power the car with natural gas to begin with? This has to be way more efficient since you skip an entire energy conversion.
I was in Europe recently where people were retrofitting natural gas tanks on their cars for about $300. No real modification was needed for the motor only the tank had to be connected to the fuel injection. Economically it made sense since the price of gas was about $6 a gallon and this allowed a savings of approximately 50% over the cost of gas.
In the US, however, natural gas is not really economical so I don't think it would save you any money.
Aren't the power stations supposed to be much cleaner and more efficient at producing electricity? If Honda has some new uber-efficient method for turning natural gas into current, why not use it at the power stations?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seems like everyone is trying for that brass ring. While others have mentioned that companies other than Honda have produced prototypes for vehicles and fuel cell tech, it doesn't seem like we're getting any closer.
e ch/fuel_cell/stationary/
So I'll add GM to the mix and a link to some of their stuff, including a working stationary fuel cell that is powering a large portion of a DOW plant in Texas.
http://media.gm.com/us/gm/en/technology/vehicle_t
The SYMPTOM here is high energy prices.
The way people are trying to fix all our woes is by treating the SYMPTOM, i.e. making energy costs lower and searching for alternative energy resources.
The SOLUTION however is to simply use less. If we thought more and were less lazy, oil etc. wouldn't be a problem.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
I am amazed that Honda is cutting the gas stations out of the industry with this prototype. I guess decades of better gas mileage has left Honda and the gas stations less than natural allies anyway. With American automakers edging so close to bankruptcy after cannibalizing their mid-decade sales with 2002 "dumping" prices, and relying on gas guzzling SUVs for most of their profit, maybe Honda is just ahead of its time. More of that car buck is now in demand for fueling up, and the cozy old relationships might just be coming apart.
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make install -not war
Home hydrogen refueling? Yeah right, like that's ever going to become mainstream.
Nothing new to see here people, just another concept car/idea that we've been seeing for ages.
I've found the real news from the Tokyo Motor show.
If you are interested the hydrogen is probably produced by steam reforming natural gas. This is pretty cheap and easy way to make pretty pure hydrogen for fuel cells. The problem is that it produces carbon monoxide as well which is a poison to most fuel cells. IIRC commercially the hydrogen is purified by filtration through a sheet of red hot palladium. Presumably in this set up they are using some sort of catalyst to oxidize up the CO to CO2.
While the car is impressive the really impressive technology here (IMHO) is producing a steam reforming plant that can fit in an average house.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
There will be adopters.
(Only being able to use it above -20F might be a problem in my area.)
Bob
For some interesting reading on Hydrogen storage using a similar method to the Honda version (but w/o propane...) check out the Hydrogen fuel pages at United Nuclear (http://www.unitednuclear.com./ These folks seem to have been doing it for the last 10 years.....
Of course, they have also found some problems with long-term engine life for CONVERTED engines...
http://www.switch2hydrogen.com/h2.htm
-arg
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
What I want is a electric/diesel car. Something more along the lines of 200hp and 50+mpg! While the newer Prius, Civic, etc hybrids are nice and all they are just way too underpowered. By swapping out the gas engine with a diesel one you can get better gas mileage AND better performance.
So tell me again why you want 200hp? 200hp has no intrisic value, it can only be used to accelerate you faster or to give you higher top speed. Most of these cars can do 80 or 100mph (unless they are computer limited), so lets talk acceleration.
Cars with internal combustion engines need all that power since these engines have very low toque at low RPMs, so need to rev up, then shift, and shift again, to keep the torque on. The beauty of electric motors is that they have max torque at 0 rpm. When you are accelerating from 0 with your 200hp pocket rocket, you are actually only using a fraction of that horsepower. Of course if you have a 300hp engine, that fraction is higher, but you are not really using all 300 horses.
Back when GM was promoting the EV1, I drove one at a demo event at Caltech. Those things were rockets off the line. The computer kicked in at 30 mph and limited acceleration to reduce energy consumption. They found that people were racing around town and getting very low distance between charges. But from 0-30, the EV1 would easily beat a 300Z.
So what you really want is to either hack the computer to not limit your acceleration, or perhaps a larger electric motor or higher current draw capability. But a 200hp diesel would be a complete waste, expensive, heavy, and slow.
Theres ALOT of petroleum left on Earth in the normal form "Oil", Tar Sands and Shales. Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up. Theres lots of it left, the idea that it's "scarce" is a fiction, right now the price is high because of speculation, storm damage and a lack of refinery capacity.
Combustion of one cubic metre of commercial quality natural gas yields 38 MJ (10.6 kWh). Natural Gas import and movement is difficult from a safety and logistics standpoint due to the nature of a tanker full of it and the ports needed. Moving NG through pipes is hard, so the best way is to liquify it and move it then in chilled pipes and on tankers.
In the US there are between 1,300 and 1,779 Tcf remaining in proven and unproven deposits, theres estimated to be about 5,210.8 Tcf in the world in proven deposits.
In 2003, world natural gas consumption was 95.5 Tcf. Russia, which consumed 15.3 Tcf, and the United States, which consumed 22.4 Tcf, accounted for 47 percent of the total. Consumption of natural gas is projected to increase by nearly 70 percent between 2001and 2025, with the most robust growth in demand expected among the developing nations. By the year 2025, total world consumption of natural gas is expected to bet 151 trillion cubic feet.
If there are 5,210 Tcf of NG, at 2003 levels theres about 54.6 years of proven Natural Gas.
but only once you have the hydrogen. Hydrogen is not a fuel -- it's a storage medium, and energy is lost when you convert natural gas to hydrogen.
Why would I want to use electricity to produce hydrogen which will net less electricity upon recombination than it required to split in the first place? Why wouldn't I direct the electricity straight into a battery? Even if there was a more effecient way to get pure hydrogen (I guess this heating system would produce it as a by product?) - why wouldn't I recombine it for electricity right away and use that to power my house and my electric car? Can anyone explain why a tank full of hydrogen is better than a battery?
As usual, our favorite Japanese English-language newspaper has complete coverage of the important parts of the story:
/ 051019motorgals/
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/photospecials/graph
I have been wondering about the comparative costs of different energy sources. Does anyone know the dollar cost per BTU (or per some unit of energy) for the various types of sources of energy? That is at today's prices, how much money per BTU of Natural Gas, gasoline, electricity from the power company, etc?
If you like, give websites with this kind of information.
- the Dunedan
Isn't it the case that the domestic natural gas supply could be "cut" with H2 in the same way that gasoline is sometimes cut to make "gasahol"? In general, what would happen to a house full of gas appliances if you send H2 down the natural gas pipes? If there was no or minimal impact on appliance operation, then isn't the best way forward to work on centralized reforming of methane and sending the resulting hydrogen down the existing pipeline infrastructure?
I can replace my 200 MPG Carburetor!
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
Why can't the system just generate hydrogen from my electricity and tap water?
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
I'll just let him do the talking. This is an excerpt from October 10.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
I see many people really don't understand Hydrogen fueled cars. Natural Gas is one of many sources used to produce Hydrogen but currently is the cheapest method to do so. It can also be made from petroleum, coal, various chemical reactions, and from biomass (landfill waste, wastewater sludge, and livestock waste). Solar and Wind can also be used to produce hydrogen.
.357 magnum at it, detonating a stick of dynamite next to it, and subjecting it to fire at 1500 degrees F.
Now to address hydrogen safety for those who might worry about it.
1. Hydrogen combusts at 550 degrees celsius. Gasoline will combust long before Hydrogen does.
2. Hydrogen disperses rapidly because it is lighter. Ignition is unlikely.
3. When Ignition takes place, It burns upward and quickly.
4. And tanks that are used to store hydrogen have been subjected to firing
You can find useful information at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen/
http://www.hyodrogennow.org/
\
I can see this being quite reasonable for the average person..
Here in BC, Canada, we use natural gas to heat our houses. If I can charge my car up while heating my car up, why not?
What we have to bare in mind is that this is still a prototype. Natural gas may not be something feasible for everyone, but the fact that u can recharge yor fuel tank in your house seems really cool. Maybe further on there might be other ways to charge your fuel tank, but at least someone has a start in the right direction.
For starters, theres a lot more too it then that but the Wikipedia article gives the jist.
Natural gas is also a lot more abundant so isn't as likely to undergo quite the same massive cost increases over the next decade and beyond like petroleum will.
If you burn natural gas at the home then you can use the excess heat generated to heat the house. When the power plant burns natural gas(or coal) the waste heat usually ends up getting dumped in a lake which is great for the ducks but not so efficient.
My local university and power company recently teamed up to build a cogen plant that burns natural gas and uses the excess heat to heat campus buildings. They figure that this new plant is 70% efficient vs 30-35% for most existing natural gas power.
We have the best government that money can buy.
And you could have one for about $75,000, according to the developer when I talked to him at a trade show a few months ago.
o ns.htm
http://l3research.com/vehicles/enigma/specificati
For those too lazy to follow the link:
Peak Power: 250 HP (combined)
Acceleration: 0-60 MPH 7 Seconds
Fuel Economy: 80 MPG est
Maximum Range: 650 Miles est. (8 gal)
All-electric Range: 20 Miles
It uses a 200 HP electric motor (!) to provide the major "thrust", with a 60 HP, 80 MPG diesel engine (running at peak efficiency RPMs) to recharge the battery or provide extra oomph to accelerate or to cruise at highway speed.
And it is a convertible.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Another dumb moderator on the loose! Damn I had points yesterday.
> And isn't natural gas just as scarce as regular gasoline?
Well, let's put it this way: people I know cannot produce gasoline.
Besides, that would bring "human-powered" to a whole new level, if you know what I mean...
8-P
for gasoline, but not for biodiesel.
H2 + fire = bang
As a side-effect, this could really help reduce people's complete and utter reliance on the powergrid. It's much easier to store natural gas than electricity, so this could make everyone more resilient in the face of disasters or blackouts.
California already has a bunch of Hydrogen fueling stations. It is probably the best place in the world to be driving a Hydrogen car. See this map of station locations. There are 16 in operation now and another 15 in construction. There would be no need for home fueling if you lived in the Los Angeles or San Francisco area.
Another dumb moderator on the loose! Damn I had points yesterday.
Yes - we do need to focus on using less energy. The issue is that the North American natural gas supply peaked in 2001. We have already lost at least 1/3 of the Nitrogen fertilizer industry as a result.
We can get hydrogen mind you from the coal gas method that was used around the turn of the century. Essentually we put some coal in a bucket - slap the lid on it - heat it up and inject steam at high pressure and temperature.
We have decent amounts of coal for the present. We have a huge north american shortage of hydrogen with Suncor for instance presently spending billions to design and build hydrogen plants.
This is for the production of liquid fuels from bitumin. Liquid fuels typically have 2 parts hydrogen for each atom of carbon - ie - they follow the parafin series C(n)H(2n+2). N=8 => octane.
Bitumin comes in about 1:1 H:C and coal is about 0.6:1 depending on what grade.
So the issue is that the hydrogen shortage is sort of going to make this uneconomical. That being said I think there is reason to believe that thermal cracking of water (steam electrolysis) has promise from solar or nuclear sources. Many people don't realise that the temperature of the photons from the sun is quite a lot higher than even the hottest nuclear power plants are run at.
Nevertheless one would have to cover their house and out buildings with solar collectors and these would need to be a combination of thermal and electrical. There is some thought towards attaching a thermocouple to a solar cell which might bring the efficiencies up. Any way we look at it however its going to be prohibitably expensive to try to make your own source of hydrogen. It also might actually be dangerous because this is an industrial process and high temperatures and pressures are involved.
Even a large parabolic mirror is dangerous because improperly set up it can light your place on fire.
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If anyone is interested check the BP statistical energy review. This will break down the various energy sources. Since most of the oil is used for transporation it follows that the hydrogen source will have to grow large enough to replace the oil. Currently the USA uses about 10 million barrels of oil per day.
The energy bonds associated with carbon are greater than hydrogen so you need an INCREASE in the hydrogen if we manage to go with this system. However that is offset by greater efficiencies so perhaps it actually will take less hydrogen.
This leaves Suncor for instance in a dilemma. They can produce the hydrogen and use it to upgrade the bitumin. Or they can produce the hydrogen and forget about their tar sands mines and put the hydrogen in a pipleline. Which is better? There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen and you don't need tanks capable if holding 350 atmospheres. The infrastructure from distribution is in place.
The rain on the parade however is that more than a billion dollars per year are currently flowing into Alberta, Canada in an effort to ramp up tar sands to about 3.3 million barrels per day by 2015. Even with this massive investment the total synthetic crude that is going to be available is going to represent less than 1/5th of what North America burns today.
If we couple this with the fact that world oil production is likely to be well past peak by even 2010 with a conservative (very conservative!) decline rate of say 3%, given that the world oil production is currently about 82 million barrels per day (with the USA burning 1/4 of the world's production) then just two years of decline will wipe out what the Tar Sands ops can make available.
This means we are going to be facing a very severe energy problem in very short order.
As Dave Hughes from the Geological survey of Canada says, the good news is the oil and gas industry is going to make a lot of money. The bad news is that they might have to b
I missed that typo. The USA uses over 20 million barrels of oil per day. THis is about 1/4 of the world's production.
It is widely reported as well that China and India are causing the high demand for oil. The BP reveiw refutes this! While the PERCENTAGE increase in consumption in China and India is high - the absolute increase is not. Check the changes in the importations in the BP review.
IMHO reporting it this way is quite irresponsible because it points the finger in teh wrong direction.
It would certainly be within the realm of possibility to mount a 1KW solar panel on the roof to run a small water electrolysis cell and a very low volume high pressure pump to allow the vehicle to partially refuel itself during the day as it sets in the parking lot.
There are many ways of making hydrogen, but usually getting it compressed to 3000 or so psi is a major hurdle not to mention using a lot of needless extra energy. A 350 psi compressor is much more consumer-friendly.
Electrolysis is a costly process in terms of energy required; however, it is well suited to electricity produced by solar cells. Low voltage DC power with high amperage is precisely what you need to crack water, and thats what you get from solar cells. Basically, re-wire your panel so that every cell is in parallel and connect the output to your electrolysis cell.
I've been meaning to make a cell myself just for experimental purposes. The concentric iron pipe design is probably best suited for amateur fabrication. Years ago I purchased several 1A solar cells, I think they are 0.5v each, and was toying around with cracking water. It did work, but I never actually had anything other than some wires stuck in water. I'll have to blow the dust off of that project and make myself a honest to goodness electrolysis cell, especially now that I have learned a decent design for one.
Meandering back on-topic. This car would obviously well suited to convert into a plug-in also, since a fuel-cell car is just running on electricity anyways. Presumably it would use a bank of batteries to act as a ballast for the fuel cells. Just add more batteries, and make a charger unit. A plug-in self-refueling hydrogen car. Nifty.
Clickety Click
Why is it that news articles like this explain that a technically feasible and potentially beneficial technology is avilable today, but then we must wait decades before its availble to the masses?
I mean, hydrogen fuel cells, burns cleanly and long known as a good alternative to petroleum powered cars. Natural gas burns cleaner then other fuel sources, this system will heat your home, produce electricity (thus aleviating strain on North America's energy crisis) and produces hydrogen for your car so you don't need a retail hydrogen supply infrastructure. Great!
So why isn't it on the market now? Because car makers are dragging their feet implementing alternative fuels from pressure by the petroleum industry. I.E. the trillionaire tycoons don't want to see you burning anything but gas for the next century. Governments are too scared of the oil industry to do anything about it (plus, governments get taxes from the infrastructure of selling gas). Move to a system where people suddenly provide their own fuel and bypass petroleum, well, it won't happen in our lifetime.
Oh sure, Honda will claim it a prototype and there are still issues to work out. Governments will claim they need to study safety concerns. It will be a decade before we hear about this again, and it will pretty much be the same story. Company X will release a great, environmentally alternative to gas, but it still isn't ready for primetime.
What I don't get is why Honda feels compelled to demonstrate this technology when they don't have any real plans of rolling out. Sure, there are specialty markets that will buy into it, Californians that have no choice but to reduce smog emmisions so they can breath without getting emphasima, so they are forced to implement alternative fuels. But any real full scale rollout won't happen. I guess Honda just wants people to think they are looking out for their best interests by creating something that could save the environment and keep your wallets full. They just hope that if you buy into that BS, your next few car purchases will be gas burning, oil guzzling Hondas!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
You've just mentioned the whole point to hybrid cars. They're not dual powered cars. They are low-power gasoline cars with an electric performance assist. So they get mileage equivalent of the engines they have, but can perform like a 6-cyl. with only 4 or even 3 cylinders. (I believe the honda uses a 3-cyl. engine)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You better redo your calulations. Also electrolysis is quite efficient. Compressing the hydrogen however is going to take energy which will be converted to heat and can be used to heat a swimming pool in the summer and your home in the winter.
But you are going to need more than just the roof I think.
But show us your calcs and if they stand up then you get tthe kudos!!!
Great, so I now have to replace my car battery as often as I replace my computer battery. Dead in 10 months or less. Guarenteed to allow the car to operate for 2 hours, which means I may get out of the driveway before it shuts down.
THAAAAAAT'S PROGRESS!
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Just hope that FORD does not start to make something like this for a car. Or if they do, hope that they are not like a Crown Victoria or a Pinto. Can any one say BOOM?
Of course, this will only be useful for four months of the year. And I suspect that you'll need to burn more natural gas than you would purely for heating purposes, since you end up with an intermediate product (H2) that you can still derive energy from, rather than only final products (C02 and H20) that you cannot.
The big benefit of this prototype is that it allows the system to bootstrap. Then the "I'll only do what profits me in the next quarter" business myopes can start building the hydrogen distribution system based on wind generation, etc.
oh, thats the sound of the gas companies about to crush this technology as well. how many alternative fuel technologies never see the light of day.. this is gettting rediculous, a government with golden pockets payed for by the gas companies, will really let this slide into place.
Just a side-question: wouldn't H2 powered cars have problems when it gets significantly below freezing outside? I've seen prototypes of them where puddles form under the car as it sits stationary, idling. I mean, as long as the waste-water vapor is warm enough, it won't ice up the exhaust system, but all of it is going to condense, and freeze up all over the road. So during a hard winter, roads traveled heavily by H2 powered cars could become impassible even without any precipitation. Sure, L.A. could see a significant thinning of the smog, and cut way back on gas usage, but anywhere it routinely gets below freezing, not so much.
Am I wrong here?
This sig rocks the casbah.
It is, but we can make methane gas fairly easy with our landfills. I think the city of LA in California collects methane from their sewer system... Either way, it is easier to manufacture than oil or bio-disel.
You call that easier? I can brew up a batch of biodiesel in my backyard -- it's about the same difficulty as making my own beer.
I guess making methane would be just as easy if I had either (a) a landfill or (b) the LA sewer system in my backyard, but as it happens, I don't.
I think we're still a long way from having cars run on water and vinegar.
Rear in-wheel motors. Each of the rear wheels contains a thin, eccentric 25-kW motor.
I applaud Honda's work on this technology and everything, but I don't know if I want to be driving around in a nearly-insane vehicle...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I was told by someone I know who was in the Navy (late sixties/early seventies) that he got to see a demonstration of the pressure in a scuba tank. They all got into a concrete bunker with the tank facing away from them, some ways off, and a remote-controlled hammer knocked the valve off. He said it went through a six-inch thick concrete wall. (I think that was how thick it was. I may be off somewhat.)
Many years later, he's working at a health clinic and some twit with an oxygen bottle throws it at someone else. Good thing the guy had it turned up to full blast (his clothes were probably saturated enough so that if you'd dropped a match on him, he'd have gone up like a roman candle, but that's a separate issue), because it was empty by the time he did that. If it had been full, I guess the best he could have hoped for would be it flying out a window or through a wall (not through any bystanders, hopefully), coming down in the next town over.
But anyway, think of them as rockets instead of hand grenades.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
" From Wikipedia [:]' Fuel cells are electrochemical devices, so they are not constrained by the maximum Carnot cycle efficiency as combustion engines are. Consequently, they can have very high efficiencies in converting chemical energy to electrical energy.'
."
For starters, theres [sic] a lot more too [sic] it then [sic] that [,] but the Wikipedia article gives the jist [sic--should be gist]
That's only 1 mile per PSI (and it takes 2 tanks to do it). That was achieved YEARS ago. Not impressed...
In real life, lots of the stuff is also quite easy to reach - consider oil shale for example, there are new techniques to ecenomically extract oil from shale (without much environmental harm either, no mining) and there are HUGE oil shale deposits in the US. I think the figures were that it's ecenomical to go after these deposits using the new techniques at around $60 a barrel of oil - which is quite reasonable considering we're around that now. There aren't many political or military costs associated with doing much in the middle of Wyoming.
That's what "hundreds of years of supply" means - that you have a lot of oil all over, not just in hard to reach places.
Of course how much oil is really required before we develop technologically to really make heavy use of things like solar or other power sources feasible and ecenomically competitive. It could be we really only need 50 years worth of oil to get over the oil depedant hump, as it were.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Alright, were at 100 years worth of oil.
More optimistic than myself. However to worry with that kind of figure is to be looking at oil in a vaccum; What makes you think that even in fifty years we'll not have a huge reduction in dependancy on oil? You had me at 100 years of oil, more than enough to get to where we need to be.
Technology marches on, and so do efficencies in new forms of energy. Not to mention that as oil becomes more expensive, other forms of energy become viable and are therefore used instead. To cry that the wolf of complete breakdown in the worlds energy supply looms over us all ignores the entire history of energy and technology.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the info about the Carnot Cycle. Just so everyone understands, the Wikipedia isn't the last word on everything: http://tinyurl.com/8af4s . In fact they're probably working round the clock trying to keep up. http://tinyurl.com/9sond
The nice thing is that when you run out of hydrogen, the same engine can burn gasoline.
Does this mean I won't be able to ride my ducati motorcycle anymore in 50 years?
*ducks*
what are these "anamels" of which you speak ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
At first I thought the article would be about some rich guy installing a private gas station at his home for his Hummer.
The form of hydrogen storage is lower energy density than current battery technologies and there are already high performance fully electric sportscars which can do 300 miles per charge at motorway speeds, 0->60 sub 4 seconds. Sure, you need to have a quarter of a million to buy one but guess how much Ferraris or Paganis cost.
More realistically Mitsubishi are planning production of a fully electric vehicle by 2008.
Deleted
the article says that its 350 atmospheres, which is about 14.7X different then 350 psi.
Some ecological groups in California have successfully obtained injunctions against windmills because of bird deaths. The numbers of deaths are controversial, but one study I saw said about one every two years per windmill.
No alternative power is perfect. Hydroelectric has issues with recreation, fish, sediments, floods and water quality. Geothermal pushes brine waters around and in some places cause small earthquakes. Solar uses lots of land and the solar cell manufacturing uses lots of toxic chemicals.
The zinc fuel cell cycle has already solved all the problems h2 is struggling with. Zinc is roughly 4200 times denser than h2 and has greater energy density than gasoline. The "exhaust" is solid zinc oxide. An automated fuel cell swapping system has been developed that only takes 8 minutes. The swapping system gets around the problem of battery replacement as the vehicle ages because you only rent a power pack for a short time. Zinc's biggest problem is political. It cannot be made from fossil fuels so our bought off politicians ignore its many advantages.
This stuff is so under reported that even Wikipedia has no article on it!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
... sources, either fission or fusion.
Even the various organic compounds from which we derive gasoline, heating oil, etc. are just stored solar energy. In this respect, they are the same as H, just a transmission medium.
So...to convert sea water to H2 + O you still have to capture the solar, or go nuclear for the energy source. You could just capture the solar and charge the batteries of your electric car. Save excesses to H2 for night time or cloudy days.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Depends on the hybrid- but yes, the majority of the currently available ones are just as you describe.
The other form of hybrid car is primarily an electric vehicle- with a small, finely tuned for maximum efficiency, gasoline generator you can switch to when the battery power gets low. This form of hybrid you can actually plug in at night- so that potentially for short trips, you use no gasoline at all.
Personally, I prefer the second- and was sad to find out that such famous cases as the Ford Escape, Honda Insight, and Toyota Prius were the first. Anybody know of the 2nd? Anywhere?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Anyone know how many Kw the gas engine on a hybrid is created? I'd like to make my own conversion using diesel but I don't know what to buy. It would be nice to run bio
I found this site. http://www.hardydiesel.com/
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
My neighbor is a petroleum engineer. She worked for Texaco for 20 years on the problem of getting usable oil from the sand oil. They got nowhere. Nothing. Nada. No progress whatsoever. And that was just trying to get the oil/sand out of whatever they shipped it in effificently--much less actually getting it to a refineable state.
She laughed out loud when I suggested that it was just a matter of finding a technological solution to help us use sand oil. She is willing to bet that personal cold fusion devices will be ubiquitous long before they figure out how to refine sand oil into useable fuel at anything close to a reasonable cost.
Sure your calculations take into effect the biomass of the planet and reductions in emissions from new technology?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nearly every major city already has a source for getting hydrogen. Liquid or gas. And they deliver.
http://airgas.com/
Also, you can currently buy 3,000, 5,000, and 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks. Now all we need is a low cost or at least reasonably priced hydrogen fuel cell and then we could convert our own cars over to hydrogen electric. All I need is either a low cost platinum based hydrogen fuel cell or a non platinum based fuel cell. How many years have they been working on these for now? Maybe if all that Iraq war money would have been spent on fuel cell development instead...
Hydrogen tanks:
http://www.lincolncomposites.com/
Hydrogen fuel cells:
http://www.ballard.com/
Interesting info:
http://www.knowledgepublications.com/page2.htm
As did I, until i thought about where my electricity comes from and how much air it heats up on its way to me. Then i realized performance boosting low-power, high efficiency vehicles was a good idea, especially in the US where performace is so important. I was just disapointed with the cost. unless gas goes up even more than it already has, it's still cheaper to just buy the similarly performing car from the same manufacturer and pay for the extra gas. and the similar performing cars are also allegedly more comfortable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm in an area of the country where we're moving away from coal and gas fired power plants, towards the significantly cleaner hydro, wind, and nuclear options (there's even talk about redesigning and reopening Trojan as a pebble bed reactor- and bringing *back* the old waste shipped up the river to Hanford, back down the river to Trojan as fuel). But I have a tendency to like true hybrid options not for environmental reasons, but for cost and national security reasons. Right now, 90% of my driving is less than two miles a day- a tank of gas in a true plug-in hybrid would last me a couple of months. Due to fewer working parts (a three or four cylinder generator engine is a hell of a lot simpler than a big V8, and an electric motor is WAY simpler than any gas) TCO money might be saved enough even for me to sign up for my electric company's "Clean Wind" option- paying 2 cents a KWH and $5/month more, but guaranteeing that all the electricity I use goes to pay for more windfarms to cover the generation of that electricity.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.