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California's Hydrogen Highway Adds Another Station
plover writes Scientific American notes that a new hydrogen refueling station has been added in Sacramento, bringing the state's total to ten. This was timed to coincide with Toyota's Japan release of their first commercially available fuel cell vehicle, the Mirai. Toyota is scheduled to start selling cars in Northern California next year.
Well to wheels, hydrogen is probably the most polluting fuel cycle imagined. At present like 95% of the hydrogen supply comes from fossil fuels, and end to end cycle efficiency is even lower than an average gas guzzling SUV.
Rather than trying to push this into passenger cars, working on hydrogen based long haul trucks and airliners makes a lot more sense. But even then the theorethical "green" benefits are not clear cut.
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Mirai means (far) future in japanese, as opposed to shourai, which means near future.
I wasn't aware that hydrogen fuel cell cars were already approaching production. Here are the stats for the Toyota Mirai:
Cost: $57,000 (before taxes and rebates)
0-60: 9 seconds
Range: 300 miles
It's a hybird, so it also has a battery pack (like the Prius)
You have to dump the resulting water
At the moment, most hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels (much like electricity), so it is only one of a two-part process if we wish to stop releasing CO2.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Most hydrogen comes from natural gas (with lousy conversion efficiency. If you get your hydrogen from electricity, it has even worse efficiency. It uses about four times the electricity to make hydrogen and then convert it back to electricity in your "fool cell" vehicle as just putting the electricity in your vehicle and bypassing the whole hydrogen part.
Plus, electricity is everywhere, literally everywhere. Anyone can just plug in at home and work, etc. With hydrogen, you have only ten places to refuel in California... not going very far.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
There was actually very good infrastructure in place for liquid fuel engines since kerosene (for lanterns and such) was widely available and sold in metered amounts from pumps in the late 1800s. It was not nearly the stretch to extend that network for gasoline dispensing as it would be to build a completely new infrastructure for hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen, from generation to storage to use, is a bad, inconvenient, and very expensive idea.
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