In response to Honda's upcoming limited release of the FCX Clarity fuel cell car, Toyota has announced plans to start leasing the seductively named "FCHV-adv" in Japan later this year. If this is a beauty contest, FCX kicks FCHV's butt. FCHV-adv's main claim to fame: a range of 760 – 830 km (472 – 516 miles). Long term durability of the fuel cell unit itself is "subject to ongoing R&D," which means it isn't there yet. Meanwhile, "Honda Motor Co.'s revamped fuel cell vehicle for leasing in California is rolling off a Japanese factory floor later this month." Forget Ford vs. Chevy; the real battle today is Honda vs. Toyota. Which begs the question: what happened to the GM Hy-Wire concept vehicle Wagoner showed off way back in 2002 as the The Answer? And lest we forget, where's the hydrogen for these vehicles going to come from? Oil?
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“And lest we forget, where’s the hydrogen for these vehicles going to come from? Oil?”
Your’re closer than you think.
It comes from natural gas.
The same natural gas that is in high demand to “make coal out of diamonds” * by wasting it / using it (along with boat loads of water) to make usable oil out of tar sands in Alberta, Canada.
So much for getting off the hydrocarbon “habit.”
* sorry I can’t recall where I read this “gem” but it was a quote by a well esteemed oil and gas expert.
Sorry for 2nd post – apparently I can’t edit my own posts again.
But I just remembered that those nice harmless exhausts from fuel cell vehicles? You know, that water vapor?
Well, water vapor IS a real greenhouse gas, whereas CO2 is only a very minor one.
So you folks who think fuel cell vehicles are the answer might be in for a surprise if ever we do manage to go down this route.
I think we should skip the “hydrogen economy” and go straight to the “electron economy” (i.e. electric cars), personally.
The Hydrogen (of course) will come from the Sun.
There sre several ways to get it from Old Sol; PV cells, wind turbines, decaying plant matter.
Or you can build a giant fleet of rockets with asbestos-lined scoops to bring it back directly.
I understand that GM and Shell Oil are working closely with NASA on a “secret project”.
This is a technological dead end, just like using corn as fuel. Google The Hydrogen Hoax by Robert Zubrin. The biggest problem is that the energy spent to create the hydrogen negates the energy derived from it. You have to spend almost as much energy creating it as you get from using it.
Unless you get it from nuke plants. Then it’s cheap, clean and abundant.
Go nukes!
Jonny Lieberman :
Go nukes!
Tell that to Iran. Oh wait..
menno: “Well, water vapor IS a real greenhouse gas, whereas CO2 is only a very minor one.”
True enough. However, CO2 doesn’t fall out of the atmosphere on a routine basis whenever it gets cold, rises, pressure changes, etc. No. Thanks to our input, CO2 is on a slow, inexorable rise from about 280ppm 150 or so years ago to ~390ppm today and, remarkably, the increase in global temperature appears to closely shadow that linear increase plus something sine-wavish that looks remarkably like the Sun’s output, so you have this graph of temperature going up, up, up as a squiggly line.
I mean, how dumb do you think atmospheric scientists are that they haven’t noticed the air has a bunch of water in it?
At least have the decency to go with one of the Denier’s conspiracy theories, rather than tell us that a very large group of people with doctorates and other proven credentials actually don’t know the stuff they’ve been studying for a decade or more, and that you’re way more in tune with their subject of expertise than they are.
—
I can’t necessarily endorse Zubrin but windswords is certainly on to something… H2 is not terribly energy dense and there’s no infrastructure at all. I’ve heard (but do not necessarily believe) there’s only 5 H2 “filling stations” in the US. I don’t know about that but there’s certainly none near me!
It’s much cheaper to just use electricity to meet local energy needs. In my part of town, nowadays, electricity is delivered right to my door!
We can continue to use oil as a convenient portable fuel, we just need to ramp down its use and supplant it where possible. Smaller cars, some battery cars, rail instead of trucks, solar heat instead of oil burners… All of that can get started and can start making a dent in oil (and coal and CH4) consumption long before an H2 infrastructure would reach the critical mass necessary to become a force in the marketplace.
Google The Hydrogen Hoax by Robert Zubrin.
Nevermind…
The Hydrogen (of course) will come from the Sun.
LOL! Yeah right! Energy too cheap to meter and all that, right?
There sre several ways to get it from Old Sol; PV cells, wind turbines,…
As Zurbin points out (in rather nice detail), it makes no sense to waste your precious clean electricity by converting it into hydrogen (Simpson’s jingle in the background, please). Why convert a safe and easily transportable form of energy into one that is dangerous and difficult to transport and almost impossible to store? Got money to burn?
…decaying plant matter.
Well, that is already converted to methane, which is far superior to hydrogen as a fuel.
Robert Farago:
Tell that to Iran. Oh wait..
Not to worry – the B52s on Diego Garcia have been modified to carry Cadillac Provoqs.
Engineer:
The post was a setup to the bad joke at the end.
The only thing hydrogen should be used for is rocket boosters and to feed fusion reactors (if it ever becomes possible to fuse hydrogen directly in such a device).
I’m all aboard with better battery technology; feed ’em with the best source feasible.
Why convert a safe and easily transportable form of energy into one that is dangerous and difficult to transport and almost impossible to store?
You’d do that so you can stick it in your car.
As it stands, batteries are not very energy dense and take a long time to charge, especially given the current generally available in an ordinary home (240v, 100 amp). One must have faith that batteries will still improve a great deal in cost and capacity before a practical EV can be marketed. Regarding charge times, a dedicated “charging station” with better service could be faster, but then the car’s electrical architecture would have to be beefier (to an impractical extent?) to cope.
Hydrogen’s attraction is that it can be pumped from a storage tank into a car’s fuel tank in a few minutes, like regular gasoline, and that it is not too conceptually difficult to imagine large-enough high pressure tanks to give the car a reasonable range between fills.
Regarding hydrogen infrastructure, Honda has been working on a home energy station, whose basic function is to turn natural gas into heat, hot water, electricity and hydrogen for your fuel cell car. It would replace one’s existing furnace and hot water heater, and displace some of the current one otherwise buys from the electric utility. The efficiency of such co-generation is supposed to make the whole solution attractive — and if your heat, hot water and electricity currently all come from natural gas already anyway, what’s the loss?
Now your car will essentially run on natural gas, and probably a bit more cheaply, because the fuel cell and electric drive will convert the energy stored in the hydrogen more efficiently, plus the natural gas piped to one’s house is not taxed the way gasoline is. Of course, no roadtrips unless you have a friend down the line somewhere with his own hydrogen station in his basement.
All this is not to say that hydrogen is the most attractive solution. It’s just to point out two major attractions over batteries — on-board storage and refill. Honda’s concept of combining automotive energy needs with home energy needs might also yield savings, but only for people whose profiles fit the company’s expectations. Broadly speaking, hydrogen’s drawbacks may negate those attractive points and make it pointless to mass-market.
True enough. However, CO2 doesn’t fall out of the atmosphere on a routine basis whenever it gets cold, rises, pressure changes, etc. No. Thanks to our input, CO2 is on a slow, inexorable rise from about 280ppm 150 or so years ago to ~390ppm today and, remarkably, the increase in global temperature appears to closely shadow that linear increase plus something sine-wavish that looks remarkably like the Sun’s output, so you have this graph of temperature going up, up, up as a squiggly line.
Except that in fine resolution analysis, the increase in CO2 tends to lag temperature increase by 800-1000 years (hint: outgassing from increased ocean temperatures)…
NBK: Your soulution makes perfect sense; but only as a stopgap measure — the price of natural gas is regulated by the states as a “utility”; once demand increases becuase people are fueling their cars with H2 cracked from the stuff, the ‘gloves will come off’, and the price of home heating will become even more painful (especially for the poor).
That methane has to come from renewable, biological sources, so as to not destabilize the nat. gas market.
As of now hydrogen is made from natural gas.
So, why don’t we just use natural gas in vehicles?
No need to bother with the fuel cell part.
You can make CNG vehicles dual-fuel: gasoline or natural gas, whichever pump is nearer.
You can make natural gas (methane) from biomass to be carbon neutral.
I looked at the Honda Civic CNG, but it’s not dual-fuel, so not practical.
Does anybody know why there is a deadly silence about CNG vehicles?
@EJ_SAN_FRAN:
“As of now hydrogen is made from natural gas.
So, why don’t we just use natural gas in vehicles?
No need to bother with the fuel cell part.”
Because using natural gas directly requires the use of a heat engine which is less efficient than aan electric motor driven by a hydrogen fuel cell.
@mannstein:
I don’t think so: the conversion of natural gas to hydrogen is pretty inefficient, negating the efficiency of the fuel cell.
Keep this in mind:
Think about those solar cars the universities build and “race”. You think those are powered solely by and only by solar cells? They have batteries on board charged up by the panels. Kinda like an EV?
These fuel cell cars are typically weak. They have batteries on board to give them umph. If they only had a powerful fuel cell, that would be one thing. Instead, they have a battery pack.
I’ve never seen a powerful fuel cell.
Question any fuel cell vehicles power output and if it has any batteries on board and how many.
An electric vehicle will smoke a fuel cell vehicle any day of the week.
Also question the price of the fuel cell and or the price of the vehicle. Does the fuel cell have any platinum in it? That is the big question. What’s the current price of some hydrogen?
The other thing is, what is the price of your electricity? Mine is like .08 cents a kWh. What has the price been for the last 50 years?
With hydrogen, we will be subject to potentially high fuel prices just like we are with gasoline and even shortages and constant prices fluctuations.
It’s no free ride and I don’t see it being any cheaper then a gas car.
With a battery car; you can build one, own one, and drive one TODAY.
Don’t like high gasoline prices? Switch over and don’t buy the stuff anymore. That’s the ultimate statement. Hybrids are only half. Go all the way.
It costs some people ~$60 to fill up their trucks fuel tank. What will be the breaking point where they sell that vehicle off and get something different? Will it be an $80 fill up? Or a $100 fill up? Or will it just be common to dump $120 in the tank? No big deal.
Imagine filling up your fuel tank and it runs you $185.
Will they export all our fuel burning cars to places like Iran and Saudi Arbia where fuel is like eleven and twelve cents a gallon after we switch over to electric? Or maybe ship them all to China for scrap steel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_usage_and_pricing
Think about all those people who paid top dollar for those museum cars from Barret Jackson. They always said cars were not a good investment. If someone bought a muscle car for $90,000; that does not mean someone else will pay that.
http://www.evdl.org/
http://www.eaaev.org/
Also, here is a decent battery primer:
http://zeva.com.au/tech/LiFePO4.php
The batteries are still in low volume production. Hence the price. When it ramps up though!
Just think if you made batteries and yours were at the lowest price. I need about 10,000 cells. If I wasn’t the only one. Who’s moving some volume now?
“The new TS-LFP800AHA can deliver up to 2400A continuous current”
http://www.everspring.net/
That’s a little bit of power huh? ;)
Anyone want to take bets on when we’ll see the movie “Who Killed the Fuel Cell Car?”
Toyonda are doing many of the same things GM did with EV1 but with FC cars. Small scale production and leases. They’re producing their own fuel cells, whereas GM had Delphi and GM Ovonic doing battery development/production. I wonder what the reaction will be when Toyonda don’t put these things into full scale mass production?
Granted Toyonda have been at this for quite a while in developing not only the fuel cells but also the supporting electrical systems to have a good electricity based vehicle. So… If the fuel cell doesn’t quite pan out, they should have lots of good well developed and proven technology if there’s a decent source of power.
NBK-Boston: As it stands, batteries are not very energy dense and take a long time to charge, especially given the current generally available in an ordinary home (240v, 100 amp). One must have faith that batteries will still improve a great deal in cost and capacity before a practical EV can be marketed. Regarding charge times, a dedicated “charging station” with better service could be faster, but then the car’s electrical architecture would have to be beefier (to an impractical extent?) to cope.
You talk like they are still trying to beat some technological hurdles. A GOOD EV is current tech! You could do everything with a good EV you could do with a commuter car now. Today. Right now. Except the patents for the current best battery (large format NiMH) are held by Chevron who won’t let the world license the design. You can thank GM for that one. They sold the patents to Chevron. The patent expires in 2015. Expect no changes on this topic unless somebody develops another battery that is equal or better than NiMH.
You wake up in the morning, go out and unplug you car and drive to work with a/c or heat, with a stereo or wipers on. You’ve got 100 miles available to you. How long is your commute? Mine is about 15 miles with all the kid deliveries built-in. My wife’s trip is 25 miles each way. When you get home, plug it back up. No, you may not drive it to the next state to see Grandma but that is what ICE powered cars are for.
Electricity prices going up? Put solar on your roof anf charge for free. How about never going to a gas station and buying gasoline again? Sounds great huh? Scares big oil to death so they don’t want us consumers to drive EVs. Neither do the car makers who suddenly don’t have ICE systems to maintain for you or parts for ICE systems to sell parts for. Neither do the auto parts stores who no longer have alot of parts they can sell you. In fact little things common to all cars like brakes no longer are an issue with regen-braking. FWIW both of my FWD cars are on their original rear brakes at 152K and 161K miles respectively. What if they didn’t need front brakes for 200K either?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV
Patent encumberance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_metal_hydride_battery
http://www.cameronsoftware.com/ev/Welcome.html
Still pretty damn expensive but remember that you can take the driveline with you to the next car. And there are all sorts of ICE fuels and maintenance you won’t have to buy anymore – including repairs.