Toyota Motor Corporation's Best Vehicle in 2015: The Hydrogen-Powered Mirai

oh wait what is that big double tanker truck I see everyday on the freeway?! Must be my imagination......

 

Explosive potential of a tanker truck of H2 is an order of magnitudes greater than one carrying liquid fuel.

 

Nope we do have those tanker trucks. Did you know we need 3.75 liquid hydrogen loads for each gasoline load to carry equivalent energy. That just means that the energy to liquify needs to be included in ghg and cost measurement. Those hydrogen trucks are more expensive and less efficient (they have to chill the hydrogen on the truck to stop it from leaking, so you want to make the hydrogen close to the stations. Not really a big deal as trucking gas doesn't add much to its ghg footprint or cost, trucking hydrogen is a little more costly and heavirer in ghg but nothing to get excieded about.

Trucking these mobile stations though has a huge impact, but its temporary. You wouldn't want toactually haul the station back and forth, just the liquid hydrogen.

The mobile stations just are a very visible sign that this hydrogen fueling network is going to be a lot slower and more expensive than those heady claims in 2004, or 2013, or even 2014.

NREL has said that the least expensive hydrogen is distributed SMR, but that isn't really what carb is building. Lots of money and delays for green hydrogen. Most SMR is trucked like in these 6 mobile stations. Adding SMR to a station would add about $1M in construction costs but worse add land requirements. The 100 stations in 2020 ($120M state + unknown federal) that would then be upgraded and more added isn't going to happen (2014) plan with 44 commercial and demo stations in 2015 (at least 35 commercial). Its now 86 in 2021 as of july 15 for $140M and it looks like we will have 18 stations only 6 commercial and 6 demo. Maybe its time to build some of those smr stations and lower the number of stations again. Most of these initial stations can provide 200kg/day or less (the ones at dealerships are 147kg until they need to be driven back to be refilled and provide half fills).

People are not going to like the ghg numbers in 2016 from hydrogen fueling. I'm sure we will be put off anouther year because of the delays in building the "real stations".

 

Ridiculous AND disappointing. It's disappointing when the fans of coal & natural gas conversion to expensive hydrogen fueled cars continually mangle truth, in hopes of making (Toyota's small - mediocre powered) hydrogen cars look not so horrible, while simultaneously flinging mud on plugins . . . . which actually work.

It is a lie, that Tesla chargers are proprietary - you and/or I can build as many as we want . . . . in fact if we wanted to set up an entire network of Tesla charging infrastructure - we could do that as well. In fact that might be an excellent business venture since there are over 30,000 people on the Tesla Model X wait list - each clunking down a minimum of $5,000 for the privilege of being in line . . . but of course you already know that nothing about Tesla is proprietary;

Tesla Goes Open Source: Elon Musk Releases Patents To 'Good Faith' Use

Then there's the OP / linked article . . . . the most important thing to take away got seriously missed;

so you see . . . . it's really NOT the best. Still, that's another amazing twist on truth. It shows some serious imagination to quote the Motly Fool, and take away a win. It's a shame to see such exuberance about a product that needs over ½ centurey of tax payer support (for a project that will only help japan, where all the cars are built) - even as plugin's begin the process of profitability after (in essence) just a decade of support. A decade of support ... not a ½ century. I actually hate having to call people out for dishonesty - but balanced against reality makes it necessary. Sorry. Don't get me wrong. Toyota's small hydrogen cars are great for Japans experiment ... but NOT for the same (un-incentivized) cost you can buy a 700hp -5 seater that comes with free nationwide infrastructure - 2 large trunks, and that you can re-fuel at home off solar to boot.
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