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Toyota Unveils Plan For Hydrogen Powered Semi Truck (rdmag.com)
New submitter omaha393 quotes a report from R&D Magazine: Toyota announced a new initiative on Wednesday aimed at advancing its work in vehicles powered by alternative energy sources. The automaker unveiled Project Portal, which is a novel hydrogen fuel cell system designed for heavy duty truck use at the Port of Los Angeles. A proof-of-concept truck powered by this fuel cell will be part of a feasibility study held at the Port this summer, with the goal of examining the potential of this technology in heavy-duty applications. The test vehicle will produce more than 670 horsepower and 1,325 pound feet of torque from two of these novel fuel cell stacks along with a 12kWh battery. Overall, the combined weight capacity is 80,000 pounds that will be carried over 200 miles.
omaha393 adds: "While hydrogen fuel has been criticized due to high cost of production and safety concerns, recent advances in catalysis and solid storage systems have made the prospect of hydrogen fuel an attractive commercial prospect for the future."
omaha393 adds: "While hydrogen fuel has been criticized due to high cost of production and safety concerns, recent advances in catalysis and solid storage systems have made the prospect of hydrogen fuel an attractive commercial prospect for the future."
Please Mr. Summary writer. You are not getting torque from a fuel cell stack. That's the job of the motor.
Toyota Shows Off It's Semi for Hydrogen
They are certainly showwers. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Hydrogen powered vehicles are a scam. From the hydrogen production to the non-existent storage and transportation network, they just aren't going to happen.
A couple years ago I'd have agreed with you, but a lot has changed.
Toyota unveiled a (admittedly very expensive) hydrogen-powered car that goes >300 miles on a charge and takes 5 min to refuel. Toyota, the largest auto manufacturer in the world, is probably not doing this as an empty gesture. They've announced they'll almost eliminate ICE cars from their lineup by 2050 and have yet to release an all-electric car (just plugin hybrids). They're working with Shell to provide fueling stations, of which there are >80 in Japan and 25 in CA right now, promising 160 in Japan within a couple years.
source: https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/f...
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
Hydrogen can be produced via electrolysis of water or salt water from any source of electricity, including intermittent sources like renewables. The efficiency of electrolysis is very high today, approaching 90%.
source: http://www.h2fc-fair.com/hm14/...
It's not a perfect answer, but it's looking a lot less ridiculous than it did a few years ago.
As long as the lowest cost means of producing hydrogen starts with oil or natural gas, it is not a green fuel. They are working on producing it more easily from water but are a long way from breaking even with the cost of producing it from fossil fuels.
oh the humanity!
Electric cars are become more common. Not just Tesla, but most car manufacturers are jumping in. Electricity is relatively cheap, ubiquitous and easy to make.
Why Hydrogen?
And why is nobody else but the Japanese car manufacturers even slightly interested in it?
And this'll hit the trucking industry like a bomb!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Assuming water is catalyzed to produce the hydrogen, what do you do with all the oxygen generated? Release it to the atmosphere so it can later combine with the hydrogen for a net zero contribution of oxygen to the atmosphere? But the oxygen gets released locally, while it is consumed globally, which would likely create local imbalances. With large scale production that local imbalance could be significant and affect people and plant growth.
A friend of mine is driving a concept fuel cell tractor trailer for his company. They had to add a digitized noisemaker to sound like a diesel engine because the truck is so quiet. Since the truck is so quiet, it's almost a safety hazard because it kind of creeps up quietly. He loves the fuel cell truck as it outperforms the diesel, it's quiet, and the range he gets is equivalent to 14mpg. My buddy said that they'll have to pry this truck out of his cold dead hands.
Consistent units in summary please.
OK, let's do some algebra.
The mass of the atmosphere is 5.15E18 kg, 20% of which is oxygen, or ~1E18 kg. A day's worth of grid storage for the US is ~11TWh. Hydrogen has an energy density of 33.3 kWh/kg. So 11TWh is 3.3E8 kg of hydrogen. Hydrogen is 1/16 the mass of oxygen, so an equivalent mass of oxygen would be 5.29E9kg, however one molecule of hydrogen is produced per 1/2 molecule of oxygen in water splitting, so the mass of oxygen generated would be half that, 2.64E9kg. So to make enough hydrogen to store a day's worth of electricity for the US, we'd have to increase the O2 concentration of our atmosphere by 2.64E9/1E18 = 2.64E-9 (0.000000264%).
I think we'll be OK. Also, keep in mind that cars consume oxygen yet we generally don't die from lack of oxygen when standing by a busy intersection.
As the title says: hydrogen is not an energy source. There is nowhere on the planet where hydrogen occurs, naturally, in its elemental (okay, diatomic) form; it's always tied up with something else. That "something else" might be oxygen (to produce water). Or it might be sulphur (hydrogen sulphide: "rotten egg gas".) Or carbon (hydrocarbons - eg, methane, pentane, benzene.) Etc., etc., etc.
Which means that to use hydrogen to power a car, or some other system, you first need to extract it. Right now, that's generally done by cracking it off hydrocarbons, and letting the carbon escape as... carbon dioxide. Given the cost in energy for that extraction, my suspicion is that you'd be better off just burning the hydrocarbons directly.
If somebody manages to solve the problem of producing elemental hydrogen in a way that doesn't produce a lot of carbon dioxide (whether as part of the reaction, or simply by the energy source used to power the reaction), and they manage to store it safely in sufficient quantity, then this might be interesting. Right now, though, it doesn't really solve the problem that hydrogen proponents like to claim it solves (by glossing over the problem of its production).
I have no time for fairy tales about hydrogen vehicles, I have been reading about them since the 1980s and unlike EVs they have made little progress. It would be nice to filter out any story about hydrogen vehicles from my news feed.
So, when will there EVER be the requirement to store the entire days worth of electricity demand for the entire continental United States of America?
What are you hoping to achieve by using such an utterly ridiculous example?
I really hate it when people decide that their politics demands that they try to trick people.
Why can't we talk about the shiny space age technology instead of deciding to attack it because it could be used for something "green". The attack is not being "conservative" kids - it's being a fucking luddite that a 1970s Republican would brand as an idiot getting in the way of progress.
They want to replace other fuels with hydrogen so that we keep paying for something only they provide.
I sure hope solar/electric based technology prevails so we can move independently (eg: by using the sun) so we don't have to keep paying for fuel to corporations.
I need a monster truck that runs on crushed up Priuses.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually they do have a hydrogen car for consumers; see https://arstechnica.com/cars/2.... Not exactly for the mass market yet though.
Just a nitpick though; I agree with your point.
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Safety measures required in case of hydrogen are much more complex. (and consequences of big bada buhm with hydrogen is no joke either)
Mirai uses 70 MPa high-pressure hydrogen tanks.
That's 700 times atmosphere pressure. (dear god...)
That was brilliant: I misread "electricity" for "energy." Ah, well.
A Maglev Freight Conveyor System has previously been proposed for the Port of Los Angles. Seems like a better idea. http://www.askmar.com/Inductrack/2007%20Maglev%20Freight%20Conveyor%20Systems.pdf
That is of course what I was asking for instead of your deliberately insane fantasy.
Also, please stop trying to appeal to authority on a distraction - it's not about orders of magnitude - your impossible benchmark set up to deliberately fail is the issue. How about you stop roleplaying your username?
Your own link not only utterly fails to support your claim above (100% supply for an entire day!) but is also an incredibly naive one-dimensional view of electricity generation and distribution.
The world is three dimensional and we have these things called electricity distribution grids. We also have multiple types of ways to generate electricity. A strawman of limiting the number of sources and pretending that electricity is unavailable to be transmitted from another location is a unrealistic even for locations such as Hawaii let along the continental United States.
Just give up your silly little game - you are not even playing it up to high school project level so why bother?
Perhaps you should consider more carefully your appeals to authority.
A model limiting itself to nothing but wind and solar, not even more hydro let alone anything else, is not meant to be taken seriously alone. It's a thought experiment designed to illustrate the obvious situation that monocultures suck. It's not designed to prove what you have suggested at all.