So where's the savings? I already get around 450-480 miles to a tankfull of gas and even at $3 a gallon it still only costs around $50 to fill up.
No savings are involved. This isn’t about cheaper fuel but less polluting fuel.
The article continuously compares this to gasoline, but in fact this amounts to a type of battery technology. If it's advantageous, it is so not in comparison to gasoline but to other ways of storing electrical power.All discussion of a "hydrogen economy" boil down to that, since hydrogen is not available from any source other than a carbon-containing chemical fuel or directly from electricity.
So where’s the savings?
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Ultimately, the savings would be huge if we no longer were dependent upon oil from foreign countries, especially those that are hostile to us.
350 pounds of aluminum! The tank would be the size of a trunk!.......
First, I think the “350 pounds” was a typo. Since the article several times said with recycling, the aluminum would cost one dollar a pount, 350 pounds would cost $350 rather than $60.
And 350 pounds of aluminum wouldn’t fit in a tank either. And since 350 was also the number of miles listed that they would travel, I’m guessing the 350 was replicated by mistake.
So let’s assume instead that it was 60 pounds of aluminum — that would fit in a tank, and would cost about $60.
Comparing things using a car driving 350 miles isn’t useful though, because we all think about different vehicles. For example, my car would do 350 miles with about 8 gallons of gas, costing me about $24 bucks.
The real way to compare is to compare the amount of energy in the hydrogen vs the energy in the gasoline, and then feed that into the efficiency of the hydrogen-to-wheel power transfer vs gasoline-to-wheel transfer.
We probably wouldn’t “burn” the hydrogen, usually we convert it to electricity in a fuel cell and then run an electric motor. The question is, can we incorporate that into this hydrogen generator directly? There’s apparently a lot of waste heat in the process, which maybe you could capture as well.
The real question is, does a “battery” using flow-through water and replaceable pellets cost less, and work better, than actual battery packs that are replaceable, or rechargeable?
I mean if you are pulling 60 pounds out of your car and putting 60 pounds (plus water) into the car, why not swap a charged battery instead?
It sounds like the 60 pounds of material has to be swapped every 350 miles.
Even at $3.00/ gallon, its actually only a little more than $2.00/gallon for gasoline (And this is the highest prices EVER).
The rest is taxes.
This is a cool science project, nothing more.
The savings will be there when gasoline hits $15 a gallon. Once the population of China and India own cars at the same rate that Americans do we will see the price of gas shoot up to astronomical figures.
Its simple supply and demand.
The billions spend on monitoring the middle east. Just because you don’t see it directly effecting your wallet, doesn’t mean it doesn’t.
That being said, I think we need something as closely cost competitive as petro...but it would be good enough to me if it was mildly more expensive.
We don’t have to spend a few hundred million bucks defending our access to the raw materials.