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.
Good point. If you have to “swap” something that heavy, might as well make it all electrice from the get go. That 60 pounds of Al sounds more likely than 350 pounds, unless he was talking about the weight of the water PLUS the Al needed to produce the H. Either way, that’s a lot of mass to haul around. What is the weight of a 20 gallon tank of gasoline or diesel fuel? Plus, can you imagine the “filling station” there would have to be to implement this system? The storage area would have to be huge! Cars would have to line up for hours while forklifts ferried container after container of these “pellets” to the next car, or conveyor belts. WHile this seems a nice lab curiosity, I cannot see it being a practical way of delivering fuel to billions of drivers all over the world..............
That's not a fair comparison. It leaves out all the conversion losses incurred in generating the hydrogen. A fair comparison would start at the primary source of energy and include all the conversion losses on the way to the wheel. Gaseous hydrogen is hard to store. You can lose half a tank in a week without driving anywhere. That is also a loss in the total chain from primary energy to the wheels.