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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."
Mercedes-Benz also has a prototype. Their concept car will be available for production around 2015, using a fuelcell+lithium ion combo.
ya frick'n noob while natural gas is a fossil fuel there are other ways to produce it for example from http://www.naturalgas.org/
Natural gas can also be formed through the transformation of organic matter by tiny microorganisms. This type of methane is referred to as biogenic methane. Methanogens, tiny methane producing microorganisms, chemically break down organic matter to produce methane. These microorganisms are commonly found in areas near the surface of the earth that are void of oxygen. These microorganisms also live in the intestines of most animals, including humans. Formation of methane in this manner usually takes place close to the surface of the earth, and the methane produced is usually lost into the atmosphere. In certain circumstances, however, this methane can be trapped underground, recoverable as natural gas. An example of biogenic methane is landfill gas. Waste-containing landfills produce a relatively large amount of natural gas, from the decomposition of the waste materials that they contain. New technologies are allowing this gas to be harvested and used to add to the supply of natural gas.
So production of natural gas isn't fininte like with oil.
However the price of natural gas is the result of the frick'n energy companies since the 80's reducing the number of refineries and thus creating shortages(speculations) so they can reap the profits.
Which the gov should require energies companies to run at a min a number of refineries so this sh*t don't happen again.
greedy bastards.
Actually natural gas is worse then regular gasoline. Gasoline comes from oil and is easy to transport. Just load up a tanker with oil and send it over from the middle east if you don't have enough in north america. Even gasoline can be transported as is currently happening. It just can't be stored forever. natural gas needs to be pressurized and cooled in order to transport it on ships so very little is moved this way.
The way the wells work also differ. Oil comes out fast at first, then slows and you pump it and gradually less and less comes out each day.
Natural gas comes out as soon as the hole is opened. It comes out at basically the same rate each day until at the very end it just stops. You get very little warning and no gradual slow down.
As for the current supplies Natural gas has been in steady decline for years. A couple of winters ago the pipelines almost lost pressure we where so close to running out. $14 natural gas is going to seem damn cheap in the not too distant future
The tanks do not only hold 350 psi it is 350 atmospheres. 15 psi per atmosphere sea level so that would be 5250psi.
It's insightful because gas taxes are not based on environmental impact. They are based on road costs and other factors related to how much income the government wants to get from gas sales. Basing taxes on environmental impact would likely increase the taxes, because the current costs don't come close to covering cost of the environmental damage from burning the gas, and they don't come close to a goal of making gas guzzlers to expensive to run. The factors that are now making SUV's unfavorable are not gas taxes, but gas wholesale prices plus retail markup.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Heh, yeah, that may be true that there's tons of the stuff out in the midwest... But that assumes you, as a land owner have mineral rights to your land. It's pretty rare anymore for the government to not own the mineral rights, so that's something to be aware of. Even on large tracts of farm and grazing country, it's likely you have no right to anything below the surface of the earth. If the BLM comes knocking they will not be pleased--and since you have to get permits and what not to drill, they're almost certianly going to know.
And that's the really upsetting thing, the BLM auctions off mineral leases to oil companies, who then have the legal right to come in and drill pretty much anywhere they damn well please on your land, upsetting your animals and terrain, but you do get rent on the areas they use... Whoopty do. Let's have all the farmers say a big Thank You to the president, for looking after the oil interests above all else. I guess they expect the subsidies are to make up for it; and some have the balls to call others socialists.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
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.
Ideally, a battery with enough capacity and efficiency would be best. Ultimately, I think some kind of direct electrical storage is going to power everything we own.
But there's that capacity and efficiency issue... a lot of the power used to charge a battery is lost to heat, and not all the power "inside" the battery is usable. And batteries, per weight, can't store anywhere near the power gasoline can. (I use Power on purpose here, since it is not just an issue of energy storage, you have to be able to pull the energy out at a useful rate. I realize storage of power is not really a coherent concept.)
Someone will probably link to real data on efficiencies and densities - I could be wrong on the energy density for newer (very expensive) battery technologies, but I suspect nothing is coming close to gasoline yet (neither does hydrogen).
A big capacitor with no standing power drain would be perfect - high discharge rates, efficient charging, etc- but we don't have capacitors with the capacity or ability to hold charge forever while not in use. Some day, the entire hydrogen economy will be rendered obsolete by a better electrical storage device. Even then, there'll probably be a coal or deisel power plant somewhere, still generating the electricity we'll be storing in our portable supercapacitors.
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/
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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.
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.
200Hp diesels are semi-tractor class engines, it's a big ass engine. Diesel/hybrid doesn't make as much sense as gas/hybrid because a diesel's torque peak happens at a much lower rpm so peak effiecency is very close to peak torque; also diesel have the advantage of being able to run at much less than ideal stichiometric air/fuel mixtures so they breath a full charge of air and adjust power by controlling fuel flow which gives them much better off load effiecency. lean out a gasoline engine too much and you'll get great millage until you burn a hole through your pistons (about ten Miles).
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
Semi-tractor engines? LOL. Check this 225 hp (330 lb torque) turbo diesel engine out. They put that engine in a chassis as small as the Audi A4 and in that configuration it does 0-62 mph in 7.7 secs. Diesels make a lot of sense for hybrids but Japanese were never big on diesel engines. Personally, if I were buying a car today I'd get a Jetta TDi (1.9 liter) because it has is priced decently, has good fuel economy in town, absolutely awesome economy on the highway (unmatched by Prius/Insight) and is a proper car IMO.
It's called the Hyperion Energy Recovery System. Here is a nice diagram of the sewage treatment process at the plant.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!