Fuel Cell Car Goes Cross-Country

person-0.9a writes "CNN is currently running a story about Daimler-Chrysler's fuel-cell concept car completing a trek across America. The CNN article is more about the trip, but details about the vehicle can be found here."

Safety?

[Rhubarb Crumble]

I keep hearing about "safety concerns" in connection with hydrogen fuel cells, which is fair enough. But is there any real test data available? Have these fuel-cell designs been subjected to the the same kind of destructive testing (drive into a concrete wall at 50kph etc) as normal cars, or are these 'concept cars' too precious to ram into a wall just to see if they do blow up?

DCX Also Has Directly Powered Hydrogen Car

[zentec]

Last year, DCX was driving a directly powered hydrogen car all around Germany, but you never hear anything more about it.

From what I remember, the car used liquified hydrogen and achieved normal speeds and fairly comparable mileage to gasoline. The only issue was keeping the liquid hydrogen cold.

Initial rear-end crash tests on this car showed that this wasn't any more dangerous than gasoline nor more explosive.

Nice technology, but pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's interesting technology, but unfortunatly it's been overtaken by events. First of all it's been reported recently that oil supplies will not run out in the near future, possibly not at all, as it's likely that oil is not in fact a "fossil fuel" but remains of methane spread throughout the earth. And secondly it's becoming increasing clear that the environmental issues are just hype and disguised anti-capitalist rants and have little basis in fact. There is in increasing amount of evidence that so called global warming does not exist

Re:Safety?

[gewalker]

Gasoline burns like gangbusters. Safety concern is not that hydrogen burns. Concern is focused on hydrogen in the gaseous form (which burns explosively when mixed with oxygen). For gasoline to be explosive, you have to heat it enough to vaporize.

I do get tired of reading that burning hydrogen produces no emissions (NOx and others), but ignoring the fact that hydrogen as to come from somewhere (you can't just pump H2 out of a hole in the ground) that tends to be fossil fuels today in another forms.

Hydrogen is a storage technology, not an energy source. Now, methane based fuel cells are much more interesting because we've got lots of methane (pumped from the ground), but there is not an infinite supply of methane, and lots of CO2 is added to the exhaust mix.

I'm no Luddite. I want microfusion powered cars, or more realistically, some decent storage technology for transportation use, and nuclear or renewable resource for evergy generation.

What about biofuels?

[jkichline]

I've been evaluating both fuel cell and another technology that is well on its way to mainstream use... biodiesel. http://www.biodiesel.org. This diesel fuel is made from vegetable oil and methonol. It runs on all existing diesel trucks and cars, has a 100% clean production cycle (no fossil fuels required to make it), heck, it can be made with recycled cooking oil! It mixes with petro diesel allowing a easy integration plan (use a little at a time...). Also, its production requires agriculture which equals oxygen... creating a method to take whatever CO2 is produced and convert it.

Now, this isn't as clean as burning pure hydrogen... but is MUCH better than burning gasoline or diesel. It reduces emmissions by more than 50% and eliminates sulfur, odor and reduces the stuff that make smog by a good bit (all this is commonly associated with petro) And when you take a look at what you need to do to produce hydrogen you're looking at producing electricity (fossil fuels/nuclear) or some other chemical process that is harmful. You still end up putting pollution into the air. It seems to me that fuel cells are a way around battery technology, but I feel it is a very inefficient way to do it.

Also, the fuel cell car cost 1 million to build and broke down once? The National Biodiesel Board drove to the nearest Ford dealership, picked up a diesel pickup, filled it with 100% biodiesel and have been driving it around with no problems for 500,000 miles. They just completed there 10th trip across the country! The fuel cell car got up to about 90 MPH... My Jetta TDI (VW) gets up to 90 everyday! The speedometer goes up to 140 and I have no doubts that it can do that. 750 miles per tank, 55 MPG, road rage baby!

So think about it. A fuel source that is renewable, is produced with no waste or by-product, and its growth produces oxygen and cleans the air. Its also a domestic product and is already in use in Europe and the States. It can also be used on all existing diesel vehicles. I say we take all that money we're burning in research and start to build some pumps, fund agriculture and kick start the future!

There is one great benefit to fuel cells

[chuckgrosvenor]

which is that it doesn't matter how the hydrogen is created, all the vehicles run off of the same power source.. this means that if petroleum can be cheaply used to make hyrdogen, than it will sell the best.. if it happens that methane can be used cheaply, than it can be.. it would go a far way from divorcing the current "it has to be gasoline, or nothing can run" mono-culture that prevails now.

What I would love to see, is something that used solar or wind power to trickle charge a fuel cell.. so I could just set something up in my backyard.. a distributed source of energy would be less vulnerable to attack than the current system is.

Other biodiesel advantages

[RayChuang]

Actually, there are a few other advantages to running biodiesel fuel:

1. Because of its purity, biodiesel fuel has no issues of sulfur dioxide emissions or particulate emissions. That means with a relatively low-cost catalytic converter a biodiesel-powered vehicle could easily meet the current ULEV and possibly even the SULEV standard for exhaust emissions.

2. Diesel engines by nature if properly implemented can actually offer the same power output of a gasoline engine but consume way less fuel for that same output. For example, GM's amazing Duramax engine for the large pickup trucks has easily as much pulling power as their top-end gasoline engine for that truck, but instead of getting 9 mpg pulling a 9,000 lb. trailer you get 18 mpg!!

3. People forget that when Rudolf Diesel first developed this engine design the primary fuel he used was peanut oil, of all things. That means he knew that using oil extracted from any high-carbohydrate plant it could fuel this car.

In short, with the right policy in place we could take huge tracts of farmland here in the USA and grow any high-carbohydrate crop (corn, wheat, sorghum, alfalfa, sugar beets, sugar cane, sunflower, and rice) and turn a large fraction of the production surplus into the distillate needed for biodiesel fuel. Even a diesel fuel with a 30% biodiesel and 70% mineral diesel fuel mix that has sulfur particles reduced to 80 parts per million could result in cars and light trucks getting 35-45% better fuel mileage, given diesel's natural efficiency.

hybrids more practical

[rakerman]

Personally I think in the near term, the introduction of the 2003 Hybrid Civic [honda.ca] is going to have more impact.

I think fuel cells are going to be more important in the near term for stationary power generation [stationaryfuelcells.org].

Diesel Particulate

[xtal]

I love raining on environmentalist's parades. It turns out that diesel particulates are really, really bad for you - much more so than previously expected or understood. One researcher concluded there may be NO safe level of exposure to micro-fine particulates.

However, unlike most enviromentalists who ignore things like this (and I'm trolling a bit here, for sure) and worst, I never see quotes regarding what it would take to match any signifigant fraction of current raw energy consumption.

Good reading:

http://www.ems.org/diesel/facts.html

http://www.google.ca/search?q=diesel+particulate +s afety&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&hl=en&meta=

I'll take my CO2 from a fuel cell anyday. It'll all be moot once we start fighting over who gets the last of the oil, anyhow.

Re:Honda's feel-good policy.

[ncc74656]

Few people are going to buy the Civic HEV or the Insight. In 2-3 years, GM will probably have as many hybrid electric city buses as Honda has sold subcompact hybrids. I believe GM's estimates were that converting one large city to hybrid buses would save more fuel and reduce emissions more than *thousands* of Honda subcompacts. Why?

Because the buses are much larger (need the boost in fuel economy more), and run much more often (Hours on end, as opposed to a Honda owner commuting 15-60 minutes each way to work and running errands around town.)

...not to mention that most buses are considerably dirtier than most cars. Every time a diesel-powered bus accelerates from a stop, it throws off a cloud of thick black smoke. When you consider how frequently these buses stop (not just for traffic lights, but also between lights to pick up and drop off passengers), they're pumping much more crud into the air than you do in your daily commute. The only time most cars and light trucks even come close to that level of pollution is if they're driven hard and poorly maintained.

Re:Safety?

[Analog Squirrel]

I do get tired of reading that burning hydrogen produces no emissions (NOx and others), but ignoring the fact that hydrogen as to come from somewhere (you can't just pump H2 out of a hole in the ground) that tends to be fossil fuels today in another forms.

It is true that hydrogen BURNED IN AIR does produce other pollutants. After all, the atmosphere is about 78% Nitrogen(by volume). However, the reaction that drives fuel cells is NOT combustion. It is an electrochemical process that forms water from hydrogen and oxygen, happily producing a modest amount of electrical current at the same time. No other reactions take place!

As far as the explosiveness, most hydrogen advocates say that it is not really anymore dangerous than petroleum products: www.hydrogen.org [hydrogen.org].
I know, I know - Your propaganda versus mine. :-)

Production of biodiesel

[horza]

There are a couple of problems with biodiesel. The first is the sheer land area needed to grow enough crop to extract the necessary amount of fuel (also add the manpower to harvest and process it). The second is that Carnot's Law, where by burning a fuel to extract energy you can only get a maximum of 40% efficiency (fuel cell theoretically you can get 100%). This makes biodiesel a good intermediary fuel to help wean us of fossil fuels whilst we get the hydrogen economy in place, but not a long-term solution. Finally watch out if you have an older car. From memory (please correct me if I am wrong) biodiesel will ruin any rubber seals in the engine but this is not a problem in newer cars which only use plastic seals. There are lots of interesting articles on biodiesel at Future Energies magazine [futureenergies.com].

Phillip.

Re:Power not there yet...

[jafac]

Interesting you mention that, because Porsche (the professor, not the car company) built the FIRST hybrid car, the first all-wheel drive car, and the first front-wheel drive car. Almost 100 years ago.