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America's First Pipeline-Fed Hydrogen Fueling Station
hasanabbas1987 writes "Shell has opened America's first pipe-lined hydrogen fueling station in the town of Torrence in Southern California. Shell wasn't alone in this project as Toyota also helped them in this green deed, all of which was funded by the government. At the moment other hydrogen stations around the US still depend upon trucks to supply them with fuel. This marks a new era of green fueling and hopefully this pipeline spreads to other stations. Many of the big car makers like Toyota, Honda and Mercedes have indicated a mass market for hydrogen powered cars by 2015."
While I do think that Hydrogen based cars is a great idea I know that a problem in their development was safety. Is having a direct connection to the pipeline at a publicly used service station a good idea? We see stupid things people do resulting in problems at regular gas stations all the time, will it use full time attendants or will just rely on people being smart while fueling up?
Is it any worse than a government-funded boondoggle of foreign oil? Perhaps the hydrogen is generated by burning oil, dogs, or babies... but that isn't the pipeline's fault. Someday the hydrogen could be made by cleaner schemes, and the infrastructure could already be in place.
This part made me laugh though:
Toyota also helped them
But
all of which was funded by the government
huh?
THL phish sticks
You would just pipe natural gas to "hydrogen" stations, and crack the natural gas at the station.
There are no vast fields of Hydrogen waiting to be mined (at least not on this planet). Hydrogen is an intermediate energy storage medium most commonly extracted from fossil fuels. It can come from water via electrolysis, but there's a lot of waste energy form that process so as far as I know it's not done on a large scale.
What is the overall efficiency of a Hydrogen powered car (including the energy cost to extract the hydrogen) as opposed to one that runs directly off of fossil fuels?
The sooner we can stop buying gas from the Middle East, the better.
It'd be cooler if Hydrogen didn't come from fossil fuels.
This article, from a 2008 edition of Skeptic magazine, spells out the good, bad and ugly of using hydrogen to power cars.
In short, not a good or easy thing to do.
The article.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
To add information to this discussion, here's the net system efficiency, well-to-wheel, of different energy sources:
Link
That graph is from this paper:
Link
All issues of fuel cost, fuel cell vehicle cost, safety, ozone damage, infrastructure cost, and so forth aside, one of the big complaints about hydrogen is that it's just not that efficient.
Could chocolate let me finish?
subject line says it all (as does TFA)
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
You should know that there were people who thought that the federal highway system was a waste of money too. Sewers, and subways also had their detractors (still do). People never change, tea party, John Birch, know nothings, the names change but some people will always fight the future.
One might also note that pipelines like it might just as easily be good for 'regular' gas stations. I'd guess that keeping the delivery trucks off the road could be a real cost/environment savings (once the pipeline has been in place for 10 or 15 years)
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Hydrogen is NOT green - not until they find a "green" way to produce it. It is NOT an energy SOURCE (like fossil fuels, and nuclear), it is an energy CONVEYOR. I wanna save the planet as much as anyone, but as long as fossile fuels are used to generate the hydrogen, it actually makes more sense to just burn the stuff in an internal cumbustion engine. /me waits to get modded down :-/
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Odor generating chemicals won't work with hydrogen. Hydrogen leaks far better than any other chemical, even helium. No odorous compound even comes close. Hence, only a major leak from a hydrogen container would let the odorous compounds escape. The same problem exists with flame visibility; you really need IR cameras to see it well. Other major hydrogen problems are pooling under overhangs and the very extreme sensitivity to even minor static shocks, as well as the wide range of combustible fuel-air mixtures and hydrogen's ability to readily detonate instead of simply conflagrate in STP conditions. Then there's obviously the embrittlement issues, the high pressure storage issues, etc, but also lesser known issues like its ability to enter other pipelines (since it can pass through materials so easily) and follow them to their destination, then pool there (NASA has lost several buildings this way; there's a reason why NASA requires hydrogen pipes to be the topmost, requires all buildings dealing with more than 1kg hydrogen to have roofs designed to be blown away, to have elaborate spark suppression and venting systems, etc).
Odorous chemicals would be fine in a H2 ICE, but PEMFCs have extreme purity requirements for the H2. So no, they would not play nice.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Hydrogen passes through solids hundreds of times easier than NG -- or any odorizer -- can. So it's questionable whether an odorizer would help.
The good news is that hydrogen disperses quickly when vented into open air. The bad news is that if there's anything over it, it can pool, and it's extremely sensitive to sparks, burns in almost any fuel-air mixture, and can not only burn, but detonate. And of course there's always the "invisible flame" issues when dealing with pinhole leaks, which are always a pain, but which can be dealt with (thanks to IR cameras, you no longer have to use the old "swing a broomstick in front of you and see if it gets cut in half" method that they used to use at refineries)
Could chocolate let me finish?
It'd be cool if we weren't burning stuff to make power.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
* there are a number of pathways to make h2, which allows you to make your desired tradeoff between cost, quantity, carbon footprint, etc. Some pathways: petro natural gas, landfill gas, power plant electricity to electrolysis, solar panel to electrolysis, coal gasification. what's cool about this is that h2 production technology can improve over time, and you can establish the FCEV market now that will fund future development. pathways ftw!
* FCEVs are a form of electric vehicle so they get EV efficiency ~85%, while natural gas cars are still internal combustion so they get ~30%. efficiency ftw!
*unlike BEVs, FCEVs avoid the range anxiety issue, and can be filled up like a regular car instead of needing 8 hour charge. convenience ftw!
There are more, but that's all I have on short notice. BTW I just learned what ftw means. loving it!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
From below, I posted about the efficiency. Here is a graph from this research paper. To sum it up, if you're burning the H2 in an ICE, you're only making the situation worse. PEMFCs can be a little better than ICE vehicles, but they pale in comparison to electric cars.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Toyota donated lobbyists.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Ethanol is a very good analogy. Even after hydrogen as a fuel vehicle has pretty much been panned by scientific review in contrast with electricity, it continues to receive funding because the companies working on it are so entrenched with the political establishment. When Chu tried to kill off the hydrogen funding a year or so ago, congress forced him to put it back in.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Making power is easy. Storing it, not so much. Storing it in a cheap, safe, and efficient form? Worth trillions of dollars.
It'd be cool if we weren't burning stuff to make power.
Hydrogen fuel cell powered cars technically aren't "burning stuff" (depending on your definition of "burning")
Umm, no.
Natural Gas = CH4.
Hydrogen = H2
CH4 =/= H2.
The point was that, currently, hydrogen gas is largely derived from petroleum products and/or natural gas. So until large-scale industrial water cracking or something becomes economical and takes over, this really doesn't reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Sure you can. That is how your fuel is transported right now over long distances. They use a pig.
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Hint: Think upside down.
Still haven't figured it out? :) Beneath an overhang (such as the rain shelters fueling stations typically provide so you don't get soaked filling up your vehicle), inside a garage (anything from a small home garage to a large industrial garage), in any building that a H2 pipeline passes beneath, in any building that a pipe that a H2 pipe has leaked into leads to, and so forth
Could chocolate let me finish?
That is a test system. Commercial hydrogen production is from reformulated hydrocarbons. I suggest you take a look at the cost and then work out the payback time on Honda's system. Probably about the time the Sun becomes a Red Giant.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
im sick of you communist libtards throwing my tax money away on sewers. what gives you the right to take my hard earned dollars and 'redistribute the wealth' to 'those according to their needs'. you need to shit? not my problem.
what we need is a privatized toilet system; wherein everyone has their own toilet, disconnected from the centralized, marxist sewer network that is controlled by an overweilding big brother government.
imagine it; each of us free with our own chamber pots, burning our own shit as free Americans, watching it float away into the night sky.
i kneel down and i cry, i weep, when i think about our children, who will be forced to shit into the government controlled, marxist lenninist sewer system, run by do gooder liberals who want to control our 'gaseous emissions' in the name of global warming (a hoax dreamed up by saul alinsky).
furthermore i... oh fuck it. Glenn Beck, are you out there? did you get my lettters? I LOVE YOU GLENN THEY NEVER SHOuLD HAVE FIRED UUUU
ok let me equivocate. If you use a coal power plant to produce electricity to electolyze water, then yes you're burning stuff. But that's tertiary burning at best.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
"Currently hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source."
Hydrogen has been the major source of energy for the universe for the last 13 billion years or so, and in this neck of the woods for nearly 5 billion, just look up in the sky sometime.
diesel is the future. Peanut oil works in diesel engines directly; we could refine and modify (chemically) peanut oil to work in current diesel engines easily. It can transmute into kerosene rather easily too (jet engines). So what we could do is get rid of that petroleum fertilizer shit farmers use and instead do crop rotation. Harvest the peanuts, crush and extract, refine the oil, modify, ship as diesel fuel; use the crushed peanuts as feed crop for pigs and goats; burn the peanut bushes and shells; till the land to move that burned plant fiber into it; and plant corn over it. Rotate like this forever. Burning the plants is fine because the CO2 you release is what came out of the air anyway; the same goes for the oil, so now your car has no CO2 footprint.
Seriously, do you need me to solve the world's problems for you? Here's an easy one: there's a capitalization error somewhere, solve that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Well, you're wrong. What we need to do is develop a large number of promising ideas in parallel and see which turn out best.
Personally I think H2 is too difficult to handle. I think after a few cars blowup, the consumers will flee. -or- If the manufacturers do manage to make safe, impervious hydrogen cars, the pricetag will be so high (~$100,000) that nobody will be able to afford it. The same flaw that plagues pure EVs.
Because conventional gas tanks never explode, gas engines never catch fire, and we're paying a fair price for perfectly safe gasoline storage and transport?
Never mind the studies showing that hydrogen is safer than gasoline in real-world situations. It's not the safety mechanisms that make the present technology cost $100,000 per car, it's the fuel cells themselves, and the cost will only come down over time because of mass-production and technology advances.
If hydrogen is to be compared to something, it should be compared to the (in-) efficiency of a car battery and generation of electricity. So far, everything is very experimental, but some optimistic predictions percieve the following:
* VHTR reactors produce hydrogen directly, which raises overall efficiency and safety.
Note: Experiments have been dissapointing, but overall the development is moving in a good direction.
* Hydrogen is not pressurized while stored in a vehicle, instead it's bound to solids, such as metal hydrides. Reduced efficiency, but dangers are eliminated.
* People may use wind, water or sun power to top up their car hydrogen tanks.
* Hydrogen may be produced more efficiently than electricity from some of the less usual energy sources.
* Other added benefits are vehicles with much higher performance and/or engine simplicity, reducing the overall mass of the vehicle. ;)
Every reduction to the mass of a the vehicle is guaranteed green
With that being said, I think we can all agree that the following situations would be stupid:
* Producing hydrogen from fossil fuels
* Driving around with a high pressure hydrogen tank