Hydrogen Cars On The Road In California

ON a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a futuristic experiment posing as an ordinary fuel station may be bringing the world one step closer to the hydrogen age.

From the moment engineers started dreaming about hydrogen as an alternative to oil, they faced a nagging question: What should come first -- the fuel-cell car or the hydrogen pump?

Carmakers have argued that without a network of hydrogen filling stations they couldn't roll out fuel-cell vehicles from the research lab to the dealership. Energy companies, on the other hand, said that without large numbers of fuel-cell cars available at reasonable prices, they saw little point in building a costly new fueling infrastructure.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

Even if fuel cell vehicles actually existed as anything other than science fair experiments (they don't) they would be loosers. The fact that the EROI of hydrogen is about 0.5 dooms hydrogen as any serious basis for our economy. It will continue to be used in very limited applications, but widespread use will continue to be impractical, not because of technology but because of fundamental physics.

http://www.thewatt.com/node/78

[jsarets]

It would be easier, cheaper, and more energy-efficient to convert gas stations into capacitive electric charge points than to go with hydrogen.

Modern automotive lithium-ion batteries can charge in under 6 minutes (10C) and some in as little as 72 seconds (50C). The limiting factor is the power supply. Rapid charge stations would trickle-charge a bank of electrostatic and/or electrochemical cells overnight and during other off-peak periods, then deliver bursts of high power to customers rapidly recharging their BEVs.

These stations would charge a premium over utility rates for the added value of the rapid charge, and they would predominantly be used to recharge in the middle of especially long trips. Most would be located along major highways and in metropolitan transport hubs rather than in small towns.

[DRaymond]

I think that everybody lamenting the high cost of hydrogen infrastructure is presuming that it would have to look like the petroleum infrastructure: refineries, pipelines, tankers, etc. There is absolutely nothing requiring that. All you need to produce hydrogen is either water or natural gas and electricity. And pretty much every single service station in the country already has supplies of all three. So generate the hydrogen at the point of sale. MIT has recently made some major advances in catalysts to speed and ease hydrogen production from water. Consider what you save in energy costs and transportation infrastructure load simply for not having to be shipping around all that gasoline or biodiesel or ethanol in tanker trucks. Of the three alternatives mentioned in the article electricity has range and recharge time limitations and biofuels aren't all that clean from the emissions standpoint. Only Hydrogen gets you long range with quick fillups and no tailpipe emissions (yes generating the electricity creates pollution and depending on the method creating the Hydrogen creates pollution, but it is a lot easier to control the emissions of a fixed source than a moving source.

[KillTheMessenger]

Ray, your engineering scenarios are all based on make-belief. None of what you are describing works that way in reality. If you don't feel like getting a bunch of engineering textbooks on hydrogen from the library, please read at least the Wikipedia articles related to the topic.

[BLinCincinnati]

You are not going to generate sufficient hydrogen at the point of sale, especially with electrolysis. It's not that efficient, even with the advances. The best method to make hydrogen is high temperature electrolysis during off peak hours at a nuclear power plant. During the day when electric demand for H/AC and other uses is high, the plant produces electric for consumption, during the evening when demand drops for power that electric is used to create hydrogen.

A service station simply won't be able to produce the quantity of hydrogen needed. And if you are going to use CNG to produce the hydrogen you might as well just fuel the cars on CNG.

[Semaj51]

One of the major hurdles for converting to hydrogen powered vehicles is, surprisingly, the cost of making hydrogen. Sure, there is an almost unlimited source for hydrogen, but almost every method requires large amount of energy to separate the hydrogen atoms. Until they develop efficient methods to produce the large quantities of hydrogen needed to meet the projected growth, the hydrogen car will remain what it is today, a novelty.

[KillTheMessenger]

And just where does all that hydrogen come from? Could it have been stripped off methane molecules in a process generating copious amounts of CO2?

:-)

[jake106]

Why would they strip it off of methane? There are plenty of other methods available, the most obvious being electrolysis of water. Not that your concern isn't valid, but since I have yet to see you actually approve of any method brought up on these forums, I wonder what your motives are.

[KillTheMessenger]

Jake, please read up on how most industrial hydrogen is made in the real world.

Electrolysis is, in terms of energy efficiency, even worse than cracking natural gas.

My motives are to make people THINK about the things they read instead of believing that there is some magic technology like hydrogen out there that can replace oil for transportation.

Just because something looks cool does not mean it is. Hydrogen looks cool. If you spend just fifteen minutes reading up on the reality of dealing with hydrogen you will find that it is not only totally uncool but it outright blows.