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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?
...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?
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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.
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.
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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 tanks do not only hold 350 psi it is 350 atmospheres. 15 psi per atmosphere sea level so that would be 5250psi.
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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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.
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.
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 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.