The head of the Air Resources Board on her beloved Mirai

Nonsensical answer - I've already traveled to Fresno and back (over 300 miles each way) and will be driving up to San Francisco and maybe even Sacramento soon. Time Patience and Perseverance. The infrastructure will come - 2 new stations in So Cal in the past month. And I have 3,800 miles on it in 5 weeks. Have only had to use my PIPrius once for a trip to Henderson Nevada.

 

fair enough. I'll wait for the FCV to make it to Moab. Or really, ANY other destination other than CA.

 

I'm sure there will be a 300 mile model 3, but it it will cost more ;-) I'm expecting the loaded ones to hit texas around march 2018, and then it will take longer to get the lower trim models. Real US volume probably won't be until 2019 when the get the kinks out and get first shipments out of the country.

On the other hand carb expects 86 hydrogen stations by the end of 2021. My guess is they will get 60. hey I'm being generous. They were supposed to have 100 by end of 2010, then 44 by end of 2015. If the plug-ins are selling well, it will be hard for them to get more than the $220M to build past 2025. That's plenty of money to get to the 68 carb and doc brown say will prime the pump, but many of us are skeptical that without government money the stations will just close down.

 

Well they have 40+ slated in CA by the end of the year with 15 now open. And I believe they're starting to work on New England area too.

https://ssl.toyota.com/fcv-consumer/?et_rid=135616113&et_cid=2749286&mid=9001053408550&cid=2000000426306&siteid=DMG_RLA_EM:VSMIRL15EC1555:201512&tdesc=stations#survey/loadMap/92083

 

Yes Yes - They had 44 slated for end of 2015 and they got to 12 from 9 in 2013 depending on how you count. In July last year they changed because of slow progress. Now there are 20 stations in california, 14 that are retail fast fill retail stations (the kind toyota recomends for the mirai). Perhaps your 15th is santa barbara which the cfcp says is in comisioning and open next month. Anyway it appears that carb's estimates of 15 stations in september took an extra 3 months, or 75% longer than they expected. Hopefully they will do better in the future.

With $60M of state spending and about $30M of federal spending 40 stations should be no problem, that is $2.25/million per station subsidy, but .... I will believe it when I see it, as I will on the 100 stations. One reason they dropped from 100 stations in 2010 (2004 estimate) to 100 stations in 2020 (2014 estimate) to 86 in 2021 (2015 estimate) is the stations were not being built fast enough, and it was thought that existing stations would fail if carb didn't cover more expenses. We should get a new estimate in July as now required by law. I hope the construction gets back on track.

 

I'd take whatever they say on the subject with a grain of salt.
The body of CARB's report on hydrogen refueling talks about 51 stations, but a chart shows only 10 or so are actually open. The majority of the rest at the publishing time were in the planning or permitting stages. Meaning ground wasn't even broken yet.

 

Because hydrogen is a farce, at best. THAT'S why. 198,000 reservations in two days seems to send a message. Some are just heads in the sand. Can't wait for FCV to land that much interest. <sarcasm> CARB should do all of us a favor and focus on real solutions for sustainable transport. Only one company is currently doing that. yet another hint: it isn't toyota.

 

You're entitled to your opinion ;-)

 

It's not opinion. It's physics 101. Most everyone can see the hydrogen lie.

 

If CARB had an incentuous relationship with any plug in lobby groups or plug in charger business, I'd like to here about it.

 

Who said that? Lots of push back against some bad CARB policies before the fuel cell mandate with david lloyd head of carb also in cahoots with the CAFCP which has been heavily publicized, and no one has ever found an excuse that this conflict of interest should have been allowed.

CARB rushed to force MBTE into all gas tanks, despite the science at the time, resulted in putting a carcinagen into california's water supply. Its all cleaned up now but it was quite a mess. EPA has now banned doing this.
Why California mandated poison in your tank

Were there similar conflicts of interest with mbte like there are with fuel cells, that pushed CARB to make the bad decission?

Sound familiar? That is exactly what queen mary nichols is doing now and what David lloyd did. Hell she even had a guy with a fake phd put out bad research on diesel emissions, and covered up knowing about it because the bad research supported the policy she wanted.

All of this is neither here or there on hydrogen, other than the same political motives and bad science is pushed to get the desired result. No CARB didn't suddenly get bad in 2002, there were signs much earlier, and IMHO the MBTE debacle was much worse than the waste of money for fuel cell favortiism.

 

That's an interesting revisionist MTBE history...look, nobody including CARB wanted ethanol and MTBE mandated into gasoline. Congress mandated it. ARCO, originally a very innovative R&D company, developed the process to make low-cost MTBE in the late 1960's, and they used it since that time. Then early 1990's there was a huge science program Govt/Auto/Oil testing fuels for emissions, and it was surprisingly found oxygenates (MTBE/ethanol) did NOT make fuels burn cleaner w/ the advent of the 3-way cat converters. Ethanol fans in Congress were livid with the science results, and demanded oxygenates be mandated in gasoline anyways. Huge "bad science" adversarial debate at the time. Bottom line Congress wanted to add oxygenates to gasoline, come hell or high water. Upon widespread use of MTBE, as mandated by Congress, eco-probs became apparent. Mainly taste issues: you get a MTBE taste at like 1 ppb in water and it does not biodegrade well, so MTBE was showing up everywhere (keep in mind ARCO was using MTBE since like 1968 - many years).

Look at New York...they are talking about incentives for Plug_ins and FCEV to help California try to commerciallize these technologies. Nobody on the whole planet is politically bashing FCEV and CARB the way you guys here are.

 

I moved to california after the mandate but while the water was still polluted from the mbte. Its teh first article that poped up. People seemed to agree back then that carb had faked the science and forced all the gas stations to switch over fast despite the health warnings from a good number of academic scientists. You know Politics trumps science, and carb that was founded on science by the time of mbte was a political arem.

That congress screwed up too on ethanol but did not poison the water give carb a pass?

There are some people that belive the bs coming out of carb. Lots of people have been mad at them about diesel rule fake science and mbte fake science.

So here we have a thread where mary nichols that claimed 50,000 fcv by the end of 2017 if only congress overode the doe and got fuel cells more money. Now that what we are getting 41 a month, she is pimping how great these cars are. Its here job to clean the air, not promote and lobby for hydrogen. She gavels down all the arguments. Seriously look at some of the meetings on line. Its awful.

If I had never lived in california, I probably would not be so negative on carb, but yes they poisened my water, and my dad's first cousin was at standord at the time. He thought CARB had faked the whole thing to get it to pass. I know hearsay, but, how do you explain the poisened water?

 

My recollection (and this is dangerous at my age) is CARB fought a good fight against the oxygenates, but finally acquiesced to pressure to accept it. I am not a fan of CARB either, but I think they have made a contribution. Not saying I agree with current direction, which I do not.

PS- Here is something I do remember clearly. last week I paid $2.39/gal at ARCO in Modesto.

 

Welll we have the word of one of CARB's engineers versus your recollection, but ...

CARB was in favor of MBTE, the engineer said they rushed it even though there were safety warnings. Fairbanks was given a waiver pretty quidkly once it saw science that MBTE might be causing problems. CARB which has easier waivers from its special place in the CLean air act did not ask for one until after governor davis banned MBTE use, after a lot of damage was done.

News Release: 1991-12-12 ARB Sets Clean Gas Rules to Cut Winter Pollution
In 1991 they were ahead of the epa on oxygenates. In 2016 most carburated cars are gone, and oxygenates are not required to reudce carbon monoxide.

What you are probably remembering is CARB asking for a waiver against alcohol (ethanol) based oxygenates based on it raising the price of gasoline in the state. The EPA under bush rejected the waiver. The basis of rejection was that money has nothing to do with the ethanol mandate. The epa's position then was that carb needed to show california's air would be cleaner without ethanol, not just raise doubts that ethanol did nothing (likely in fuel injection cars by then). By then congress was using the ethanol mandate to reduce ghg and oil usage. Al gore later admitted that the ghg argument was wrong, and he cast the tie braking vote because he wanted to run for president and get iowa primary votes. The Bush administration continued the policies of congress and the clinton administration when it came to ethanol. The oil argument is probably true. Ethanol displaces around 4% of oil the US would normally consume in transportation today, which helped to break the back of opec along with fracking. Ethanol has its politcs, but does not make the gasoline less healthy like mbte or tetra ethyl lead.

Anyway, let's not rely on memory. CARB definitely was on the wrong side of history here. Carb has politicians and engineers, and one of the engineers accused it of letting politics of the governor in favor of mbte trump the science. That engineer says he doesn't think they reallized how bad it would be, but they didn't want to hear the arguments against. I'm sure if they knew it was a lot unhealthy instead of a little unhealthy they wouldn't have passed. This was much worse hiding of the science than fuel cells.

David lloyd and Mary Nichols had precedent when they ruled to gavel down the science in favor of politics.

 

1991 probably predates the Auto/Oil research data on oxygenates, which showed no benefit for newer cars. I don't recall an implemented phase when CARB forced MTBE, but they may have liked MTBE over ethanol because ethanol has volatility (VOC issues) and of course oxygenates did help old cars reduce CO. MTBE was always very unpopular with some people because you can smell it, but true MTBE toxicity is mild as far I know (re: your very interesting article, MTBE toxicity was over-hyped to the most extreme possible extent). Also ARCO would have been using MTBE for 20-years by 1991, so CARB would not have been initiating first use of MTBE.

It is understandable that in 1991 CARB may have thought MTBE was the "way to go" over ethanol. But that was during a period of steep learning curve. The true "nail in the coffin" for MTBE was when it did not biodegrade so it was showing up in water and giving bad taste at trace levels.

 

I don't think the leakage into the sensitive California water table was overhyped. It cost hundrsds of millions of dollars to clean up just santa barbara's water. Absolutely the damage was done by leaking tanks, but when that possibility was brought up, according to the carb engineer at the time, the chairwoman pulled him aside and told him the governor wants this.

I linked carb's statment from when they made the choice, and were ahead of epa. Both CARB and EPA screwed up Its like both michigans DEQ and EPA screwed up on flint's water. I don't know why we should doubt the science explanation that they ignored the science for politics.

Sure, but ... why did the chairwoman gavel down comments from university scientists before the choice was made? The only palatable explanation is politics. That is also why california was much slower to react than fairbanks alaska. CARB implemented in 1991, for compliance in 1996 and didn't stop using it until a lot of enviromental damage was done. In fairbanks they also started in 1996. In 1997 the science was pretty clearly against mbte, and they got a waiver as soon as they asked the epa, which was not going to force it to pollute water to reduce carbon monoxide.

I think its a poor excuse that it was just a bad taste and not unhealthy. It was many times the epa healthy levels. This is the same excuse michigan's DEQ gave about flint wanter and like california water later tests showed it was always unhealthy, and the environmental watchdog in the state sided against the health of the people in the states.

Harvard law review did a number of articles about how these lawyers at the safety regulators screwed up with mbte. They came up with 5 mistakes. With the EPA they bended over backward to try to satisfly the lobbyists for ethanol and mbte, without doing adequate scientific tests for either.

 

I am not supporting MTBE as the unexpected water issue is truly unacceptable, I only suggest CARB would not have know that in 1991. I am also suggesting MTBE is essentially non-toxic at trace levels. Your article basically said CARB was bad for exposing the population for the most toxic material known to mankind, which it isn't.

 

No but its hard to find articles from 1997. They were not regularly published on the internet, so you have to do google books.

CARB was guilty of exposing the california population to polluted water and ignoring the science at the time in favor of politics. This is the period in the aftermath that I lived in california and became quite skeptical at the science carb looked at. Later it put forth regulations that damaged diesel engines, at least that is just money. Given the history its hard not to belive that politics is not also the reason mary nichols is so favoring hydrogen.

Hey the Pete Wilson era is long ago in caifornia. Grey davis didn't really fix things. That is why the governator came to power, and he favored hydrogen, and put a guy at the top of carb thta favored hydrogen. Nichols and Brown favor hydrogen.