CNET News:
"We asked ourselves, 'Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?' The answer, we felt, was 'no,'" Chu said in a briefing, according to Energy & Environment Daily.
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I looked at the website of the guy who sells the unit that adds hydrogen to the car's gasoline. Seems to cost , installed, between $1,500.00 and $2,000.00.
No guarantee that it will improve gas mileage. No payback period given.
But, if my Jeep goes from 17mpg to 22mpg and at $2.00 per gal I figure the payback at about 4 1/2 yrs. at $3.00 per gal payback is 3 yrs...if my cost, installed, is $1,800.00.
I will wait to a year or two to see if this idea, indeed, can save us consumers money and if it is a dependable product. I hope it is. I wish the guy luck.
JXJASON, the idea behind that "technology" is to improve the efficiency of the gasoline engine by making the combustion process more homogeneous. It can potentially work on really poorly optimized gasoline engines of the past which use a rich mix. It won't do squat (apart from maybe damaging your engine) on a modern gasoline engine with lean mixture like that used in the better hybrids.
Those kits have been sold for decades, by the way and are about as efficient as any do-it-yourself project which has no industrial R&D behind it that's driven by real engineering parameters.
There is a line of professional research into better combustion but you will not see it show up as after-market technology. It has been and is continuously built into new engine models by all car manufacturers. Some use it go put more horses into the same engine, some use it to make their cars more efficient.
So because a technology won't pay off soon you shouldn't research it? It would seem to me that a long payoff time is exactly why you should get the government involved in researching it and why you should get started now than later.
Hydrogen is an electricity storage technology Hydrogen stores way more energy in a kilogram of fuel than any battery. That is important in a vehicle. To get extra range in an electric vehicle you stick in more batteries but most of the extra battery is used in the overhead of pushing around the heavier battery. Then the larger battery has problems with recharge time. (Hooked to ordinary house service a Tesla takes 30 hours to recharge.)
The bottom line is that with its high energy density and quick refuel time Hydrogen is the only electricity storage method that can be your only car for both short and long trips. That sounds worthy of research to me. Talk to any electric car fan about long trips and it is always 'well you just use your gas car for them' Requiring everybody to have two cars? How green is that?
1) Hydrogen is a very poor storage technology in terms of physical efficiency limits.
2) With hydrogen it's not the energy/weight ratio that counts but the energy/volume ration. And that is absurdly low.
3) Nobody would recharge electric cars from the ordinary electric grid. A new grid is needed.
4) No current gas station could possibly be converted to hydrogen because of the extreme volumes of the storage tanks that is would take to replace the equivalent amount of gasoline.
The bottom line is that you think you understand while in reality you do not.
Its sentences like your last one here that reveal an arrogant.prig. How about toning down your vitriol? You catch more flys with honey than with vinegar.
I wonder why the German car companies think hydrogen is a good idea? Of course they don't really engineer cars like we do...
I have been there when Daimler spent enormous amounts of money on fuel cell technology in 1990. None of that delivered. It was, however, paid for by taxes through state R&D budgest. So you could ask yourself why Daimler should not have taken the free money?
Who needs stored hydrogen when you have scientist like Derek Zupancic owner of HH2 Hydroelectric Power LLC. A conversation system approved for use in California vehicles that's already on the market! Let's get with it... http://indigoproject.squarespace.com/hh2/
Finally a scientist speaking the truth about hydrogen. Very good pick, Mr. President.
Right. Too bad the CARB got taken over by a hydrogen true believer a few years ago. Think of what those extra years of EV development and battery technology advances would be worth to Detroit right now.
Because nobody was working on battery technology during that period? I mean besides the hundreds of millions that Toyota, Honda and GM were pouring into it .......
There's no magic bullet. There is no single way out of kicking our foreign oil addiction. EV's will play a part. Biofuels will play a part. Fuel cells will play a part. In the short term, none of them will have the impact that simply changing some of our habits could have, and in the long term .... well, none of us have a crystal ball to know what the truly revolutionary technology in this area will be.
But the last thing we should be doing is putting all our energy eggs in a single basket.
Bah Humbug - well I guess he has probably investigated this and determined it is not a good path for us. I surely hope that there was not a lobbying effect that went into his considerations.
It seems to me that there are hydrogen buses already on the streets. They seem to be performing well. Also as far as the distribution goes, why not create the hydrogen at the station?
I would like to understand his reasoning a bit more, but am happy for his leadership.
Fuel Cell Technology powered our Apollo Spacecraft..the last Apollo was in the 1970's the join US-USSR mission.
Time for this guy to go away....
Thanks for that. B1G O1L FUD.
Doug Korthof - http://www.youtube.com/liveoilfree
The fuel cells on Apollo only had to last for a week and were allowed to deteriorate during that time. And they did... efficiency was of no concern because the spacecraft had enormous quantities of hydrogen and oxygen on board in comparison to what was needed to power them.
You really need to learn the details behind the things you believe in religiously.
Forgive the off-topic query, KTM, but what do you see as the best way to store energy from wind and solar in order to conquer the "intermittent" critique? Does plain old compressed air hold any promise as a widely used means of energy storage?
Hydrogen "AGGLOMERATES" when it sits.(clumps together) Requiring large amounts of electricity to separate.
MONATOMIC HHO (water separated by pulsed electricty)
Hydroxy Gas, the new propane can run in your car now using a propane converter kit.
This fuel doesnt clump when it sits.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/05/05/Could-Monsanto-Be-Responsible-for-One-Indian-Farmers-Death-Every-Thirty-Minutes.aspx
I guess Japan is going to rule the next step in energy. They are already preparing for the Hydrogen Age. American genius Walter Russell already built a Hydrogen engine in the early 1900's for FDR, but then, as now, the oil and coal lobby is very powerful. The last thing corporations want is FREE ENERGY.
Still showing off that you failed science class?
MONORAIL!
Thank God we finally have someone in the administration that actually UNDERSTANDS real science!
Good! Maybe this guy does actually have a brain.
Remember the Hindenburg.
Gee, and I was so looking forward to my car fueled by an enormous thin balloon of gaseous hydrogen floating above me ...... or was that not what anybody ever proposed?
In terms of energetics the equivalent of the Hindenburg is exactly what the hydrogen people are proposing. Hydrogen is not an energy source because there are no geological deposits and no hydrogen trees. Hydrogen is a very poor energy storage medium because of the thermodynamics of its redox-cycle and the physical properties of the free element. You can teach all of this to high school students and they will understand. That we don't is what the hydrogen lobby relies on. Just another abuse of America's failing education system.
NON SENSE - "This is not rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. This is rearranging the chairs on the Hindenburg." -
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879
SENSE -
Doug Korthof - http://www.youtube.com/liveoilfree
Stan and Iris - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw6R2j3OTXQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_R._Ovshinsky
Currently, cost-effective production of hydrogen calls for stripping it from petroleum hydrocarbons. That means fossil fuel is used. Add to that the fact that there is no real distribution infrastructure, as there is for gasoline, diesel and electricity. Finally, to make it sufficiently "energy dense," very high pressures are required. Has anyone ever seen a scuba bottle blow up? Do you want to add a very flammable fuel to the power of highly compressed gas?
Chu is right on fucusing on wind, solar, and geothermal. Forget ethanol, as it uses more energy (in petroleum) than it returns in ethanol.
Work on electric cars and biodiesel. Our existing petro-diesel distribution system can be switched right over to biodiesel.
I hope Chu continues to bring a non-Big Oil approach into our nation's energy. As long as we depend on oil from other countries we will be at their mercy.
Which is why near term we should be doing more to supply our own oil from our own resources, realizing that it is just a short term solution to a bigger problem, but will allow us to sever our ties with OPEC while we transition to other sources of energy.
There is no estimate of cost-effective domestic supply that does anything to put a dent in our reliance on Gulf sweet crude. We could drill like dentists on crack and it wouldn't make any difference until we reduce our level of gasoline consumption, pure and simple.
The United States was the pioneer of the petroleum age, and the industry isn't even mature, it's downright old. Discovery peaked in the 1930s, and production in about 1970. The reason there is so much less discovery isn't because no one has been looking, quite the contrary, it is because all the good fields have been found and exploited. No nation on Earth has been more thoroughly explored, even places that are off limits today were often explored, but with old technology in the distant past. The juicy big fields were the easiest to find. unconventional and offshore has some potential, they are definitely not juicy as production costs are high and the eroei (energy returned on energy invested) is low. There is no choice that north america has to get off petroleum, it will hurt less if it starts sooner, rather than later, when it is forced upon us suddenly by geology and geopolitics. Personally, I think additions to capacity here should be capped, and import like mad for as long as it is available, while powering down, that way there will still be some to power the transition if non north american supplies are cut off.
This is a good decision based on technical outlook and forecasting. After considering a number of options, it is time to narrow focus and more strongly support those routes that can achieve. Hydrogen does not make the cut because of cost and sustainability. It has great combustion products but that is insufficient to solve our total energy problems of supply, cost, GHG impact and renewability.
Excellent move by Chu.
People have to understand where hydrogen comes from. The energy expended in Electrolysis or Water fracturing is high. If you go to using hydrocarbons then we are back to depending on big oil for the products to create hydrogen.
Therefore, I think Chu has a big love for wind and solar technologies. If we have offshore wind generation, you are basically getting the driving force almost free from nature and you create jobs from building wind turbine generators and parts.
The same goes for solar panels, the UV rays from the sun is almost free and we can supplement conventional power generation with Gigawatts of available rooftops.
From recent news, it looks like there are major breakthroughs in battery technologies thats almost ready for commercialization. Which would eventually revolutionize the Automotive Industry.
Forget hydrogen for now, hydrogen generation requires a ton of energy.
The first workable fuel cells powered the Apollo Spacecraft.
Research is research. It doesn't mean you are going to spend every nickel and dime to put it into service....right now.
Sorry, but all scientific research is good...maybe you don't think so.
Thanks for the B1G O1L FUD.
You know nothing about Apollo and there is no more research needed to know that hydrogen sucks. The required knowledge is over a century old and can be found in every chemistry text book which has the required reaction enthalpies and entropies for these basic redox reactions.
The problem with hydrogen fuel is that the industry is being hijacked by the same guys who want us addicted to oil. The notion of hydrogen filing stations that require specialized delivery is taken straight out of the oil industry playbook. We already have a perfectly safe delivery system built into our existing infrastructure that does not require dedicated stations - water split into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. There are people living off the grid who do this at home using wind power and collected rainwater. Clearly it can be done, but the hydrogen industry obviously would do everything possible to block at-home production (probably in the name of safety, even though propane and natural gas tanks are perfectly legal). As long as filling stations remain the only fuel source in the hydrogen solution, I would prefer to see more research into battery-powered vehicles, pure and hybrid, that have the option of being refueled at home using renewable energy.
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| 05/11/09 07:44 AM