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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."
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.
To add information to this discussion, here's the net system efficiency, well-to-wheel, of different energy sources:
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That graph is from this paper:
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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?
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.
Making power is easy. Storing it, not so much. Storing it in a cheap, safe, and efficient form? Worth trillions of dollars.