Featured Hydrogen fuel a strong possibility?

Say what?!

 

Keep in mind I admit the following,

And I'm saying hydrogen fuel or otherwise...some other as of yet unknown technology or option.

I'm not disagreeing about the pitfalls and challenges facing Hydrogen Fuel.
But since manufacturers and "people" keep experimenting with the option, and the realities, I do think it's fair to say, we don't know what the future may hold.

Way back, if you would of told a person with a horse and buggy, that you weren't sure what the future held, either steam powered horseless carriages, battery/electric powered horseless carriages, or a horseless carriage powered by pistons and a highly combustible liquid called gasoline, I'm not sure what answer you would of got. It would of been easy to simply take the reigns say giddy up, with the totally logical and reasonable contention that nobody really knew, but it probably wasn't going to be that flammable, highly combustible liquid powered option.

But I only offer opinion. As I said, I'm not an expert on Hydrogen Fuel and/or the challenges it would face. I'm more just a philosopher, in regards to NOT knowing what the future holds.

 

Can you even imagine a future where people are complaining about the byproducts of their hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?
Like we don't have enough water already! What were those idiots thinking when they decided to use this stuff!
sci fi

 

Admittedly, I’m not clear where your tongue is — particularly relative to your cheek — when you say this...?

 

Most vehicle fires in ICE cars are not fuel based. They are electrical. All fires in BEVs are electrical.

 

Fair enough, I was hoping the sci-fi reference would be enough.
I've been following the hydrogen automobile fuel source and fuel cells in general for around 20 years.
My comments above are just one of the drawbacks that came to mind a few year back when rising ocean levels started being noticed in the wild.

Did you see my edit about the honda FCX and Plug Power Home fueling station? - to the first of my posts you quoted?

 

I would like to use the water to load up a vehiclular auto squirt gun and then I leave it to the imagination

 

If you’re actually serious about concerns regarding water vapor as a hydrogen combustion byproduct, I can assure you there’s nothing to be concerned about. Hydrogen gas is typically industrially produced through electrolysis, which breaks down water. So after it combusts, you’ve just got the same amount of water you had before. And even if the combustion actually added new water, it still wouldn’t be nearly enough to affect ocean levels.

 

I gather that the majority of hydrogen used for industrial purposes, in the US at least, is produced by steam-reforming, from methane, but other than that, I agree with everything you’re saying here.

In the case of combustion of hydrogen harvested from petroleum, arguably, that hydrogen would eventually be oxidized into water anyway when that oil is instead burned.

 

Link ?
Now - if this is meant to suggest an ignition coil, or spark plug that caused a gasoline explosion, or a12-volt lead-acid battery's bad connection are the SOURCE of a spark ... as opposed to bumper bolts piercing a gas tank, ah la Ford Pinto, okay.
So comparatively, if the suggestion is to do away with ignition coils? Spark plugs? 12-volt lead-acid? .... Ok
California fires that recently destroyed whole cities - were electrical ignition, in the same vein as spark plugs/12v batteries I suppose, so what do we do, take down all the high voltage lines?

Forgive the tongue-in-cheek, but I'm missing the connection to hydrogen, other than hydrogen will explode like most other stored energy sources.
.

 

How far back in time are you going, because in regards to telling a horse driver about steam cars, the first steam engine came out about 70 years before the first steam car. Electric power tools were arriving before the car. Horse rider likely would have had to buy the wife a washing machine before he could get an electric car.

More importantly, the fuels for these early cars were ones people were already using for lighting, heating, and cooking in the home.

Hydrogen's hurdle is in the fact that we aren't using it for anything else in the residential market, and switching to it means a huge material, money, and time cost.

Water vapor is already a major by product of ICE fuel combustion.

Home refueling systems for CNG cars ultimately failed. They were expensive, around $2000 at the time, requiring annual maintenance of a couple hundred dollars, and filled the car at about the same rate as charging an EV with Level 1. Near the end, Honda pulled recommendation for their use because the systems did not clean and dry the natural gas enough, and the cars' fuel systems were corroding. There was talk of cheap($500) ones a few years ago, but they never materialized

A hydrogen fueling station will cost more than a CNG one. It would need to go to higher pressures; CNG tanks are 3000 to 3500psi while hydrogen are 5000 to 10,000. The materials will need to be hardened to resist hydrogen. It will take more electricity to run. That is costs on top out making the hydrogen at home.

 

This sounds like entirely a problem of peoples' misinformation, misconceptions, and sci-fi fantasy fears.

If all the existing CO2 in the atmosphere was suddenly converted to H2O, it would amount to 4 mm of water equivalent. If that all rained out and flowed into the oceans today, it would raise sea level less than 6 mm. That is far less than the roughly 200 mm of sea level rise we have seen over the past century.

 

tanks all
any fears for the future of hydrogen bi products possibly contributing to sea level rise have all been put aside.
and i'm reeling in the sci-fi posts here from now on ....

 

You are right. Predicting is very difficult. Especially when it is about the future!

But it actually isn't so difficult to predict the near term future (1 to 5 years, for example).
And it is pretty easy to go out to 10 years in the car business.

First of all, look how long it takes a company to take a known technology and produce a convincing working model. Now how long to build a good sized factory to produce this. Now how long to ramp up the whole production and get people to buy?

If you just make a dumb guess that each of these steps takes ~3 years, which isn't so far off, you can see that anything that is going to be big in 9-10 years must be known today to people in the industry and/or VC investors who are looking at business plans.

Certainly, there is nothing in new automobile drive trains that is going to have more impact that Lithium-something batteries and electric motors in the next 5 years. Look how long it took Tesla to build their proof of concept cars, build the GF1 and ramp up that production. And the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place EV makers are doing similar, but so-far lesser of the same thing.

Predicting 25 or 50 years is much more difficult. But we know that it won't be burning fossil fuels. And it will be a better battery-electric type car or something better than that.

Mike

 

Maybe I'm going back in time like JJ. Abrams in a Star Trek splintered alternate universe. Where we eventually all end up on robotic horses, powered by magnetic oats.
Oddly enough our washing machines are solar powered.

It was meant to be a casual "philosophical" analogy, not tethered to anything as sometimes boring as reality.

 

OK but maybe I'm just bad at it?
I remember telling my brother that I thought Madonna was just going to be a 1 summer wonder. How did I know she would re-invent herself nearly endlessly and end up being one of the biggest stars of her generation? I still say "Like a Virgin" was a weak song.

I remember seeing "Survivor" and also telling my brother that these contestant based reality programs wouldn't last.
How did I know, cheap to produce and voyeuristic entertainment would be the magic formula? With as much as "reality" based entertainment has grown, I'm begging to be voted off the island.

When I was a kid? I anxiously waited for Star Trek the Motion Picture, secure in the idea that it was going to be at least as good as Star Wars. Until I was actually in the theater watching it and realized that somehow the movie itself was actually causing me physical pain.

I thought " The Island of Dr. Moreau" with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando...had to be a hit...right?

My Magic 8 Ball has only these responses:
Reply Hazy, Try Again
Ask Again, Later
Cannot Predict Now
Don't make medical care decisions based on my responses
It could be your Hybrid Battery failing

 

Interesting thought, though finding electricity in the boonies is a lot easier than finding hydrogen.

 

Like any new technology hydrogen has to fight it's way ahead against all the other technologies wanting their space in the markets. That seems to include battery-electric re-chargeables, not to mention the old technologies that fight against mass adoption of battery-electric re-chargeable tech.
Yes there are drawbacks to hydrogen currently, but can't that be said of every technology we use currently. And how much do we really KNOW about many of the technologies we use and/or are used on a daily basis?
Any milliwave 5G experts around?
ie: has the side bands overlap referencing the carrier wave of wireless tech really been solved?
or are we still dealing with inter-modulation-distortions to some degree even today?
6G - anyone?

 

Yes but in USA we can pick politically-correct winners and ban the losers to give the all the market to the winner so the winner can be most successful and subsidized. Example there is ethanol E10 and King Corn as our selected mono-farming crop.

Electric cars advocates feel strongly that BEV has won the battle to be proclaimed the " USA winner" and that BEV technoligy should be heavily subsiidized and progressed rapidly without competition for limited resources from the "losers".