Featured Hydrogen fuel a strong possibility?

I do. But I prefer my tuna with extra dolphin and a splash of mercury. I ALWAYS order my water with twice as much hydrogen as oxygen..

 

• Map: Stations Map | California Fuel Cell Partnership
• Subsidized hydrogen stations: ~$2m each
• Retail hydrogen vs battery charging: ~$16 vs $5

Reducing the hydrogen wholesale price has little effect on the retail price because of distribution and labor costs. In contrast, an electric charging station has a one-time installation cost and relatively free of subsequent labor costs.

I appreciate California running the experiment but there comes a judgement time as the initial adopters face end-of-lease and unsubsidized fuel costs. They face exceptionally steep depreciation and without a viable used, fuel cell car market, quite impractical.

Now for a fleet where their parking and service lots are fixed, a viable hydrogen fuel support might work IF they can contract for wholesale hydrogen. But operational costs are still higher than charging batteries . . . which commercial electrical rates and schedules can make quite affordable.

Bob Wilson

 

Valid point: FCEV *may* have some possibilities in the case of small vehicles specifically in the case of fleet operations — vehicles for City-government operations, or possibly taxi fleets. Still, the business case for such limited deployments is pretty weak, especially when it’s so cost-ineffective at this point...

 

Perhaps it would be better to say that hydrogen is not an energy source? Chemically, virtually all the hydrogen on Earth is 'already burned', so another energy source is needed to chemically 'un-burn' it for energy storage.

But that is only for chemical energy. Hydrogen is an energy source for nuclear fusion -- if we can ever make that viable for non-explosive use. Fifty years ago, that was just two decades away. But it isn't even that close anymore.

 

The SAE fill time specification is actually for 5kg of hydrogen. Once the nozzle is connected to the car, it can take as little as 3 minutes if all the conditions are right, or up to 15 minutes if they are not. Around five is probably the average, but over 15 can happen. For the Mirai and Clarity, 5kg will provide about 330 miles of range. The Mirai's tank holds a little under 5kg, and Clarity FCV's holds almost 5.5kg.

The picture gets blurry if we consider gasoline. The gasoline fraction of petroleum is not suitable for modern cars; the octane might be 60 at the high end. There also isn't enough 'gas' in petroleum to meet demand. We have to put energy into the petroleum to break and reform chemical bonds in order to make enough gasoline of the proper composition for modern engines. The concept of reformation, and even electrolysis, isn't far from oil refining. Gasoline just has a much better energy balance than hydrogen.

 

But nearly all of that energy comes from the same crude oil feedstock that the gasoline is refined from. Or from some related fossil fuel, natural gas, also piped into the refinery.

The energy needed to run the refining process for gasoline doesn't need to come from an unrelated source, The energy is nearly entirely embodied in the crude feedstock.

 

Which is why I sad it had a much better energy balance. The energy coming from within is energy and material not being used without though.

The balance gets worse with tar sands, oil shale, and coal. China has a coal to diesel plant running.

 

I think the FCV is DOA.

For those consumers who care about reducing greenhouse emissions, there are many Partial and Zero-Emissions Vehicles to choose from, and they range in price from $20K for a Prius to the high-$30’s for a fully electric Tesla (of course, you can spend even more, but in the range of $20-$40K, there are a wide range of options).

You can already buy an all-electric vehicle, install solar panels on your roof, and have truly zero-emissions transportation.

Lastly, Tesla figures out how to turn green transportation into a status symbol, AND they’ve surely convinced the market that electric vehicles are not a range-anxiety problem for consumers.

So how can FCV meaningfully enter and win in such a market? I think it’s utterly impossible.

 

My degree is in animal science. I'm a tech in a research lab that has been shuffled around. Worked on cellulosic ethanol, bioplastics, food products, food safety, and genotyping of food pathogens.

Mainly, I just pick up bits of info.

FCEV may have a shot if they added a plug. Or if they stopped insisting on using pure hydrogen. There are fuel cells that can run on liquid fuels. Nissan's runs on ethanol, and their FCEV design strategy is a small fuel cell constantly charging a BEV sized battery.

In the future, fuel cells might replace ICEs as range extenders.

 

As the OP has perhaps discovered, there is intense opposition to H2 FCV among American electric vehicle advocates. H2 is highly toxic, causes nuclear explosions, and will cause a rip in the fabric of space-time, thereby destroying Planet Earth. As if complete destruction of Earth is not bad enough, H2 would also rob tax dollars that could go to progressing electric vehicle roll-out. Not a politically acceptable USA situation.

However, some countries such as Japan may certainly go that way (assuming we can willingly allow them to rip the fabric of space-time).

Having said that, it is already cost-effective to make H2 from natural gas lesser extent coal. Not clear making H2 in situ in oil field has any practical merit. Probably better idea would be to make liquid fuels of the H2 via Fischer Tropse, which I always have trouble spelling.

 

I'm against hydrogen for cars because its physical and chemical properties means expensive infrastructure and design compromised cars when we already have nearly all the benefits in a PHEV. The Clarity PHEV is a more useful car than the FCV model simply be having a bigger trunk with fold down rear seats.

If tax dollars didn't go to commercializing FCEV, I wouldn't care if it went to plug ins or not. it just irks that the companies pushing hydrogen wanted someone else to build the infrastructure to support their product, even after Tesla started building the Supercharger network.

It may work in Japan. They have else are than California to cover for refueling stations. It's the US's sheer size that makes building refueling infrastructure for a whole new fuel a non starter. Then it may not work, as the cars may remain expensive without large export markets to support production.

I think there's an H in there. And the process needs C. Converting one fossil fuel to a more usable form doesn't help global warming. Starting with water and CO2, F-T could be used to make diesel.

If the hydrogen is made from natural gas, like the majority is in the US, the carbon emissions are around the same as burning the natural gas directly in a CNG hybrid. With hydrogen, you could capture and sequester the CO2*, which the CNG car simply can't, but that increases the cost. The merit of this system is that carbon sequestering is part of production.

We can make hydrogen renewably, but again it increases the cost. If higher fuel prices are acceptable, we can make the fossil fuels renewably.

 

Saying that it’s not an energy source strikes me as reasonable.

In terms of hydrogen as a fuel for nuclear fusion, that is certainly true, However, it has to be two particular types of hydrogen: Deuterium and tritium.

 

I'd say its up to the japanese. I think it would only locally rip appart reality, and other governments have wasted more money and time.

I believe it costs more than $10 usd to dispense 10,000 psi hydrogen from regional networks not including the cost of the hydrogen. Perhaps metal hydrides will drastically reduce the cost. I am sure it is much more expensive to do the convert coal in australia to hydrogen, then ship it to japan and dispense it there, as the japanese are doing.

I'd say discussion has gone a little off the rails here. What the article claims is a method to convert oil sands and probably depleted oil well fuel to hydrogen by injecting oxygen and water and some process of partial oxydation. The carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur, etc gets left in the ground and only the hydrogen is allowed to come up. Really cool if they can do it safely and for the $0.10-$0.50 / kg hydrogen cost. Absolutely agree that this is not good for transportation directly given the costs of transporting and dispensing it as hydrogen.

It could be upgraded to methane or methanol using the power of oxidizing some of the hydrogen for heat and electricity and combining it with CO2 and perhaps some O2. These are much less expensive and easier to transport. The methanol could be used directly as a transportation fuel or converted using FT. All of this would be carbon neutral since it started out removing carbon dioxide from the air.

 

If a fuel cell car met the past expectations of high reliability, efficiency and cost while being fully multi-fuel, and giving free heat and ac.

I might support it, but being dedicated to solely hydrogen is a non starter


The fact that a 2016 Mirai can be bought off the auction block for under $5000 makes it tempting to buy one for the sheet metal and do a conversion in my non-emissions state.

Too much work though and retail is only $12-14k on that same 2016, if your that one guy in that one city might be worth it for a second car. (Though you have to accept it might have a goose egg value at the end of your ownership

 

In the US there are under 6500 hydrogen cars across all brands d, not a small number considering these are only science experiments.

Understand that Toyota gets big government kickbacks for a Mirai, at the end of the day the taxpayers loose

 

At this point the only hope is for the Lockheed skunk works project to actually work.
None of the others could be commercial by 2050.


Skunk Works' Exotic Fusion Reactor Program Moves Forward With Larger, More Powerful Design - The Drive

Mike

 

the reason Japan wants to make hydrogen work for cars is because they have no natural resources. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan began feeling their source fuel for electricity was unreliable, & therefore electric cars might be as well. Japan is working out deals with Australia to use their Brown coal to reform hydrogen in Australia, leaving all the toxic byproducts of coal ash within Australia.

Victoria's plans for hydrogen exports to Japan are 'way of making brown coal look green' | Environment | The Guardian

So under the NIMBY principle, Japan thus has a clean fuel car.

Lockheed has produced no evidence over the past ½ decade that they're close to success, & they (as well as other countries) have been trying to get a Fusion system workable for decades to no avail. It's kind of like hydrogen car Tech - where the proponents say "in 10 years", but they've been saying "in 10 years" every 10 years, since the 1970s. That said, if it did work in 10 years? Yeah then we could have cheap hydrogen. Don't hold your breath.
.

 

My understanding is that the original plan was to run electrolysis off their nuclear plants. BEVs were always seen as short range city cars there.