Posted on 04/08/2008 3:33:28 PM PDT by Dane
GM, Daimler, Honda Betting on Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Posted: Apr. 08, 2008 10:04 a.m.
Car and Driver reports, “Fuel-cell vehicles -- where hydrogen is converted to electricity onboard and there are no emissions -- are real today and even more feasible tomorrow under a carefully scripted development plan at General Motors that culminates in as many as one million affordable FCVs by 2020.” GM has nearly completed development on a fuel cell propulsion system “that has been reduced to half the size for half the materials, less weight, and less cost” that previous models. “The next-gen fuel-cell stack will hit the road in a still-to-be-decided vehicle (we’re guessing a small car to show off the diminutive dimensions) in four years,” GM VP Larry Burns told C&D. “Burns will only say that the vehicle sports an exciting design.”
Reuters reports, “General Motors Corp plans to have 1,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in California between 2012 to 2014 to comply with the state's goal to put thousands of cleaner cars on its roads.” The automaker already has about 60 hydrogen-powered Chevrolet Equinox SUVs on the road in southern California, and Burns recently told reporters, “The next logical play for us is to take that up to a car scale of about 1,000.”
Those fuel cell powered Equinoxes are part of “Project Driveway,” and effort “designed to get some real-world data on the performance of the hydrogen-powered vehicles – as well as to garner some publicity, since many of the motorists who’ll have the Equinox FCVs – for three months at a time – will be policy makers and celebrities,” according to The Car Connection. GM recently modified one of the vehicles to fit the needs of 6’9” former basketball star Magic Johnson.
Autoblog Green reports that GM’s Burns sees “mainstream acceptance and financial viability of hydrogen cars following in 2017 or 2018.”
All of GM’s green car efforts may ultimately point toward hydrogen. In an interview with Design News, Charlie Freese, the engineer leading GM’s diesel efforts, argues that all green vehicle technologies will “start to dovetail together where one feeds into the other and provides the infrastructure that eventually builds into that next phase. So, this electrification of the vehicle is a basis that you need before you can make a hydrogen vehicle work.”
GM may not be alone in pursuing a fuel cell future. Autoblog Green reports, “Daimler chairman Dieter ‘Dr. Z’ Zetsche believes that the technology for fuel cell vehicles is here today and that vehicles using the hydrogen-for-energy system will be available in five to eight years time.”
Honda is getting into the act, too. Car and Driver adds, “Honda is ramping up for production of its FCX Clarity, the industry’s first dedicated fuel-cell vehicle for customer use. The automaker will begin assembly in May in Tochigi, Japan, and will build a small pool of vehicles available for lease in the U.S. this summer. A still-secret number of consumers will be able to lease a Clarity fuel-cell vehicle for $600 a month for three years, which will include maintenance and insurance. The lessee must pay for the hydrogen, which costs about $5 per kilogram in compressed-gas form.”
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Hydrogen flame is colourless.
My understanding is that there has been a lot of advance in storing hydrogen in sponge like materials to which it weakly bonds in a hydride form and can be easily extracted in the vehicle using a catalyst.
In many ways it is like a ni-cad battery only instead of extracting electricty one extracts hydrogen, and then periodically re adds it.
The major problems are weight and size (currently about 3x as big as a gas tank and 6x as heavy), cost (metals used as the sponge may be expensive not to mention the catalyst), and safety.
The big push is for the tank to store about 50% of its weight in hydrogen. At that point you probably have something commercially feasible.
We should be building more nuclear plants, not only does it create jobs, but will help the US get off OPEC oil, a win-win situation for America.
Liquid is so much better. Has anyone heard of a BLEVE?
Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor EXPLOSION!
But which has more available BTU's in it?
I agree, hydrogen isn't going to save the day. It would be nice if it was easily stored though. I could be energy independent in less than a week : )
But like my mama used to say, if pigs had wings they could fly.
Yes, new materials are being found all the time. If I can find this, it is an article from just yesterday. Yes, here we go.
In a new paper researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) have demonstrated that a novel class of materials could enable a practical hydrogen fuel tank.
A research team from NIST, the University of Maryland and the California Institute of Technology studied metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). One of several classes of materials that can bind and release hydrogen under the right conditions, they have some distinct advantages over competitors.
In principle they could be engineered so that refueling is as easy as pumping gas at a service station is today, and MOFs don’t require the high temperatures (110 to 500 C) some other materials need to release hydrogen.
In particular, the team examined MOF-74, a porous crystalline powder developed at the University of California at Los Angeles. MOF-74 resembles a series of tightly packed straws comprised of mostly carbon atoms with columns of zinc ions running down the inside walls. A gram of the stuff has about the same surface area as two basketball courts.
Yes, we know all about the B.L.E.V.E.
You, too can live half a mile from a natural gas storage facility.
And in the early 20th century some said the Wright brothers would never fly.
What happened to the fuel cells that were going to run on unleaded, or possibly ethanol?
Where is the hydrogen going to come from?
There is actually an excellent source, right down at your local coal mine. When finely crushed coal is fed into a coking plant, and all the volatiles driven off, nearly pure carbon black remains. If this carbon is then heated to about 1,000 degrees F., and superheated steam is injected into the bed, in the absence of oxygen, a form of the Fischer-Tropsch reaction takes place, generating free hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide is separated and used as fuel to burn in the furnaces needed to keep the bed of carbon black at the optimum temperature, and the hydrogen is captured and compressed into the fuel tanks that will be then sold on the basis of weight, to refuel the hydrogen-powered vehicles, by the simple means of swapping out depleted tanks for fully charged ones.
Of course, one of the by-products of this process would be carbon dioxide, but remember, folks, CO2 is plant food, and part of a very necessary process by which life continues on this earth.
And doesn’t this just insure we have plenty of carrots for our supper?
Or we could just go directly to nuclear power, and use the power thus generated to hydrolyze water into its components of free hydrogen (which would be captured) and release the oxygen to the atmosphere, thus bypassing the production of CO2 altogether.
Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs first. And with what we know of atomic power and its use in generation of electricity, a great deal more energy can be extracted from radioactive elements than is now utilized.
The world is NEVER going to run out of energy sources. That is why God made us so smart to begin with.
Hydrogen is not a source of energy (unless you are thinking fusion). At best it could be a good battery, but that would help : )
I have done that calculations and I think I can get more energy out of compressed air than I can out of compressing hydrogen and burning it (including the energy cost of making the hydrogen).
and all the volatiles driven off
~~~~~~~~~~~
You left out the part about what is done with these “volatiles”.
Of course. We’re not looking at efficiency so much as getting more than a dozen miles down the road.
Check this out:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08099/871486-100.stm
If not for the greens, nuclear would have already been the standard. I see two benefits to the global warming stupidity:
1. Greens and their fellow travelers are now willing to accept nuclear power
2. More private investment in non-muslim-enriching energy alternatives (high efficiency solar, wind, hydrogen fuel cells, advanced electrochemical cells, etc), spurred by targeted tax cuts or not
The cap and trade, emissions limitations, carbon credits, forced third-world income transfers, UN climate treaties, and so on need to be headed off at the pass, abducted, drowned, and buried before light.
That was covered above, or mentioned anyway. Adsorption is the preferred storage mode, like acetylene tanks only much better.
Another benefit of nuclear is the potential for cogeneration: there are efficient processes where power generation and desalination can be combined. I wonder if high-T electrolysis could be used as a form of “heat sink” at the same time? Or perhaps one could use periods of low electricity demand (like at night) to focus on running the high-T electrolysis tanks?
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