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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."
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?
Yeah but fuel cells are much more efficient than combustion, so you'll get more bang for your buck.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
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 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.
Yeah. I thought natural gas was actually scarcer than petroleum... or at least, there were less currently exploited reserves of the stuff.
-EvilMagnus
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"?
Problem is, if a significant number of people start using this system, demand for natural gas is still going to go up, and so will the prices.
I love the concept, though. If it's efficient enough to offset the electrical load from the grid, it might be cost effective.
Hey, as long as the car itself uses another fuel source, people and government agencies will love and applaud it! Disregard the prices of natural gas -- they're not relevant!
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)!
Isn't 1 or 2 home blowing up everyday enough to stop this madness? Did you see all the fires and explosions caused by Natural Gas in New Orleans after the hurricanes? I can cook with electric ranges and heat with oil burners, why do you need to bring this dangerous substance to our homes?
Don't even get me started on Propane Gas GRILLS!!!
It's kinda sad to see the Japanese wiping the floor with GM, whose sales have tanked completely because they weren't forward-looking. Sales of big trucks have plummeted about 40% while the Prius and other hybrids are selling like hot cakes.
Well, right now in the US we have 300 million cars that only run on gasoline.
Let's say we take your idea and everyone replaces their car or retrofits it to use natural gas.
Great. Now, in ten years we'll have 300 million cars that only run on natural gas, and we'll be running out of natural gas. And have to retrofit our cars for something new.
The point is to power cars with something that can be generated from ANY initial power source: wind, solar, nuclear, coal, natural gas, etc. Hydrogen and electricity are the two things that fit the bill.
The benefit being you have a neutral source for powering your car, and as different methods of creating that source become cheaper, you don't care and don't have to rip apart your car to use it. You don't care whether the hydrogen or electricity came from oil, gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, whatever - it goes in your car and you drive.
If oil spikes in price, producers will be switching their hydrogen or electricity production to other forms. You the consumer won't be hit with a huge price jump.
Energy is never lost, it becomes heat. If you live someplace where it's cold, that can be handy.
It's called the ocean.
for gasoline, but not for biodiesel.
You're dividing the total world supply by the demand in America. Have you considered that non-Americans might also want to use a few cubic feet now and then?
-Graham
Sweet! Now if only we could actually use all that natural gas without dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere...
include $sig;
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"Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up."
.24 kg/m^3. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kg/m^3, thus yielding an atmospheric content of about 20% CO2, or about the same as when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Except it is more expensive to extract useable oil from these forms. And these might not be conveniently located in a friendly nation, so you have to add in the costs of aggressive negotiations, bribes, regime changes, etc..
Now, if we are talking proven oil reserves, the top 10 producing countries have a total of 1.092 trillion barrels left according to some quick googling. World oil consumption in 2000, again according to some quick googling, was roughly 75 million barrels a day.
That gives us about 39.89 years left, if oil consumption rates stay the same. But they aren't. They are increasing quite a bit with countries like China and India rapidly industrializing. So as far as the world's proven oil reserves are concerned, the future is pretty bleak. And this isn't even saying anything about the trillions of tons of CO2 we'd be dumping into the atmosphere.
Okay, so lets say we have all this oil locked up in other forms. Lets use a nice number like 200 years worth of oil. Well, that would mean that 5.46 trillion barrels of oil are locked up.
According to the Wiki, there's about 1.6 trillion barrels of oil locked up in the world's oil shale. That'd buy about another 59 years. However, to get the oil out requires a process called pyrolisis, which as the name implies requires heat (450-500 C). That takes a bit of energy to do, but that's only the beginning of the problems. The byproducts are extremely toxic with various carcinogens thrown into the mix for good measure. It also requires a 3 to 1 ratio in water. On the plus side, shale becomes economical at barrel prices above $40.
Alright, were at 100 years worth of oil. Now lets see what else there is. Tar sands. Again according to the great Wiki, we've got an estimated 5.25 trillion barrels locked up. That gives 193 years more, burning at 2000 levels. And again we've got more bad environmental impacts. But with rising oil prices, it's becoming to economically feasible.
That's a grand total of 252 years of oil at 2000 levels. Hundreds is a little much, but technically you are correct.
Now to throw some cold water on this party. According to the DOE, even if we extract all this lovely oil, at the current growth rates the high estimate is that production will peak around mid century, and fall off rather quickly, dropping to almost nothing by early next century. So there goes the "hundreds of years". If we're lucky, we'll make it to the next century.
What about the environment? Trillions upon trillions of tons of toxic wastes will be generated from extraction of hard oil reserves. Even in-situ methods aren't clean. And then there's the tremendous amount of water needed to process this stuff.
And last but not least, our old friend CO2. At 83.2% carbon and an average weight of 1 metric ton per 7.3 barrels, burning all that oil would add about 1 trillion metric tons of CO2, not including the CO2 that comes from everywhere else and our diminishing flora that reclaims it. That's enough to raise the CO2 content of our atmosphere (assuming a 100km cieling) by
Back then, the average planet wide temps were around the century mark (deg F), enough to comfortably bake most modern day species, including ourselves.
At this point, I guess I don't even need to mention the other noxious gases that would constitue significant fractions of our atmosphere at that point. Eventually, the planet would recover after we die off, as it always recovers from such disasters.
Even if we had trillions of barrels just ready for the taking, I'd push for renewable energy. Burning oil for the next 100 years or so is not only completely stupid, but also incredibly dangerous (from a human perspective, the planet could really care less).
But you were right about the oil.
~X~
~X~
caveat: it might be a net gain overall in the winter with the ability to use waste heat for heating. I don't think so in the summer, even if used for hot water.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Natural gas is free! You make crap loads of it ;) You just need to retro fit basement with a sewage management system.
Rotting food, animal waste, human waste can all be used to generate CH3 and the byproducts are clean water and fertilizer.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Well, you already caught my response to that by noting that the wasted heat would be used, so it's probably a total gain overall. Recovering heating costs in the winter is fairly large, so that could make up the whole deal.
Remember, they're only talking about a factor of 2 total savings in cost for heating+fuel+electricity. That's not a big gain, and for people who have hybrid cars, it's probably just breakeven.
That being said, I doubt they took into consideration the fact that your refueling point is now your destination, so you don't need to waste fuel refueling. Minor, minor advantage, but still an advantage.
The main advantage I see here is that it's an excellent stopgap until large scale hydrogen distribution is around. Natural gas distribution is already well established, so you're essentially leveraging an existing infrastructure to "take over" for petroleum until a hydrogen distribution infrastructure can be built.
Build these, sell them to people, start selling hydrogen vehicles as well, then start building solar electrolysis plants near water sources, and start ramping up a hydrogen distribution system. It could work.
And yes, solar electrolysis of hydrogen is incredibly inefficient, but you can probably help it become cost effective with tax breaks due to the fact that it's an entirely local production.