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."

Comments

Re:Scarce

[Xyrus]

"Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up."

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 .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.

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~