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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.
oh the humanity!
That's an argument against everything electric. Coal, petroleum, etc. Solar, geothermal and hydro are all compatible with hydrogen production. You just need more of it per mile. Then again, it's a hell of a lot lighter than batteries.
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.
As long as the lowest cost means of producing hydrogen starts with oil or natural gas, it is not a green fuel.
I'm not sure about that. It's somewhat akin to the argument about electric cars and where the electricity comes from. Is your electric car "green" if the electricity to power it comes from coal?
The advantage to something like this is your car is being powered by hydrogen. You can get that hydrogen from fossil fuels. You can get that hydrogen from water. You can get that hydrogen from the solar wind. However you can economically produce hydrogen--and that will change over time--won't matter to the car. As long as you're delivering hydrogen, it's all good.
And much like the argument about using "dirty" means of producing electricity, it's much simpler to regulate the pollution from a factory or 20 producing hydrogen than it is to regulate the pollution from 10,000,000 vehicles.
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.
But the oxygen gets released locally, while it is consumed globally, which would likely create local imbalances.
I think we'll still be able to breathe. But we may find ourselves moving water around the planet in a previously unforeseen way.
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.
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.
If the entire object of the exercise is to cut down on smog in a city, then yes it is. Those coal fired plants have scrubbers, precipitators and exhaust out of very high stacks, so if they are located far enough away from the city streets it does solve the problem at hand.
If it's about carbon emissions instead of air pollution it's still a gain even after conversion losses.
If it's about "zero carbon" - well that's a different story and one that's going to take decades to get to.
That's not what I meant. They don't make vast quantities of hydrogen by splitting water with electricity. They make it by splitting the hydrogen out of oil or natural gas which is essentially the same thing that we're doing when we burn it in the car.
I need a monster truck that runs on crushed up Priuses.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It may be possible to use hydrolysis as a step in wastewater treatment, so municipalities could produce fuel instead of oil companies.
And a solar-to-hydrogen site could be done on a scale suitable for city buses, garbage trucks, etc. with the excess production sold to the public
But people are paranoid about governments running anything that looks like a business, and while it would be fair for the excess to be sold using an auction system, we'll probably end up with a privatized system that owns the equipment, makes the city pay for it, then sells hydrogen at a fixed rate above market value. At least that's how everything else works in my city.
I expect all the cool stuff to be tied up with patents (or trade secrets) for decades before anyone can make a go at local hydrogen production. I'll be retired and no longer commuting by the time the hydrogen economy becomes mainstream, if at all.
“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...)
I'm not sure about that. It's somewhat akin to the argument about electric cars and where the electricity comes from. Is your electric car "green" if the electricity to power it comes from coal?
While it's a valid point, you can't blame that on the EV. Also, they do become about 15% greener than a gasoline vehicle, at least in this country. And they could be even better; we can find out-of-compliance power plants (WRT emissions) as fast as we can pay people to sample them. If we forced them to correctly use their equipment (it costs money to run scrubbers, for example) then the EVs would be even greener. And that's not even taking into account the value of moving the pollution out of cities.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It may be possible to use hydrolysis as a step in wastewater treatment, so municipalities could produce fuel instead of oil companies.
It's really not feasible, because you need clean water. That actually underscores the problem with electrolysis. You've got to spend enough energy to make drinking-quality water to feed into the process so you don't damage your electrodes. But you can grow algae with dirty water, practically any water in fact. And then you can centrifuge or settle or otherwise separate the lipids using ambient energy (solar, wind, etc) and get out a feedstock for making biodiesel. And then you put the biodiesel into the trucks. It slightly increases their NOx production, but they have DEF to handle that problem now and it works. Meanwhile, it decreases all their other emissions substantially, and increases the lifespan of engine components because biodiesel has far more lubricity not only than other diesel fuels, but actually more than other products used to add lubricity to diesel fuels! The waste from the process can be fed into the ABE process to make Butanol, which is a 1:1 replacement for gasoline which also reduces emissions. And any remaining waste is compost. This makes a lot more sense than hydrogen, in literally every way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That was brilliant: I misread "electricity" for "energy." Ah, well.
It's really not feasible, because you need clean water.
Wastewater treatment is about clean water. Having mostly clean water but not fit for human consumption (potable) is perfectly viable for hydrolysis. Most wastewater treatment plants do not create drinking water, they process wastewater into water that can be safely released into the environment. The water goes into the local river, and out to the oceans (or in my home town's case, Lake Michigan). My Chem 102 paper was on the subject of wastewater treatment, so I have some familiarity of the subject. The key misunderstanding is that there is more than one process involved and in common use in municipalities.
A quick search revealed multiple papers on the subject of processing waste water into hydrogen, from microbial action to hydrolysis.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Unfortunately, green brains tend to disengage before considering the big picture, and "hydrogen" will be pushed forward as an ideology, ignoring where it comes from.
Citation needed on the "green brains" bit. I don't think this push is coming from the environmentalists, it's coming from entrenched industry players who don't want to switch to electric vehicles. The smart environmentalists know that EVs are the real future, not hydrogen. Hydrogen is a stupid fuel; it's expensive to generate (and can't be mined), it's hard to handle, it's very hard to store, it embrittles metal, it has to be stored at incredibly high pressures to get useful energy density, and even then you still have a fraction of the range you get with gasoline/diesel. It's just a terrible idea all around. If you can't switch to all-electric, the next best thing is to switch to CNG or LNG, which are very clean-burning and can use existing engine technology (and even be retrofitted pretty easily on existing vehicles).
The path for "greening" vehicles is pretty simple IMO: hybrid-electric, alternative fuels (LNG/CNG), then all-electric as battery technology improves or quick-swap batteries are standardized on. LNG probably makes more sense for replacing diesel for large engines (esp. for shorter routes), and can then be coupled with hybrid-electric tech for even better efficiency, to get diesel pollution problems way down. Cars should probably just stick with gasoline, adopting hybrid tech. Eventually both can just move to all-EV as batteries improve and costs come down. Hydrogen is an awful distraction that makes no sense.
It's not just rich people being ripped off, it's taxpayers who are paying for the tax breaks and other incentives to push this crap technology.
Wow, I got moderated as a troll for expressing a negative view formed after 30+ years of reading about hydrogen vehicles. I guess there is at least one person out there who actually thinks there may be a future of hydrogen vehicles. The reset of us will continue living in the real world. Go on waste your mod points calling this a troll post too. I wonder if in 2050 I will still be reading news stories about another hydrogen vehicle that has just demonstrated to prove how practical they can be. Me, I'm ready to put my money where mouth is and buy an EV.
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.