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Hybrid Powertrains and Hydrogen Fuel Cells 275

Posted by michael from the stick-shift dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes "Nice article from cars.com detailing a panel dicussion with reps from Chrysler Group, Ford, General Motors and American Honda agreeing that hybrid powertrains and hydrogen fuel cells are the future of automotive propulsion, and discussing their companies' different approaches in both areas."
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Hybrid Powertrains and Hydrogen Fuel Cells More

Hybrid Powertrains and Hydrogen Fuel Cells

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  • Hydrogen is not free (Score:4, Insightful)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @05:53PM (#3380995)
    Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.

    So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale). The advant of a clean and cheap way to get massive amounts of hydrogen is I understand a ways off.

    Love to get links / info to the contrary.

    - August
    • Here: http://hometown.aol.com/lcenergy/cheap_hydrogen_py str.html

      Someone more science-minded than myself can probably debunk them in a matter of minutes, but that's the first hit for "cheap hydrogen" on Google :-)
    • Well, but the main point is that you get a clean and efficent form of energy storage. This would enable cars to use energy form many different sources, not only petrol like today.
      • I'm a proud owner of a Mensa membership card.

        I'm sure it's occurred to you that the above statement, in the absence of an explicit declaration of your Mensa membership, leads the reader to infer that the omission is deliberate and that you probably stole the card. :)


        Burn, karma! BURN!

        • Ah, but if he stole it, it's not his, so he's not the owner. Then again, even if it were "his" Mensa card, aren't Mensa cards the same as every other organisation's cards - "This card remains the property of Mensa..." in the small print? This would leave the logical conclusion that since he's the owner of a Mensa card, he must be Mensa. The other possible logical conclusion is that it's dangerous to interpret people's sentences literally :-)
      • > I'm a proud owner of a Mensa membership card.

        Please return it to its original owner. Thank you.

    • Until recently I would have agreed with you, but see this recent Slashdot story [slashdot.org].

      If this does become feasible it'll take much research and lots of capital, I'm sure, but it's still pretty cool.
      • It is a fairly efficient means of storage. However, to store it well, you probably need Pallidium Hydrides. Thes store about 800 times their volume in hydrogen. For a car to run 500 miles on hydrogen, you would need to shell out about 1,000 for the hydride storage, however.

        I can't stress this enough: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE! It is energy storage. To make hydrogen, you lose more energy than you gain. However, hydrogen fuel cells are better than electric cars.

        Right now, hydrogen or electric cars are a stupid idea. They pollute more than gasoline engines. Heres why:

        An electric car mostly gets it's energy from highly polluting coal and oil plants. About 50% of the energy is lost in power generation. Another 10% of that is lost in power transmission. Now you have 45% of the power you started out with. Then, it is put into batteries. You lose about 30% of your power. Now you got about 30% of what you started out with. Then you run it though the electic motor. This gives about 40% efficiency under ideal conditions. That leaves you with about 17% effiency.

        So here are the energy effiencies:

        Gasoline
        about 30%

        Electric
        about 17%

        Electric uses much more energy and pollutes much more than gasoline. Gasoline powered cars now are very low emission. The coal plants that would power electic cars are not.

        Electric and hydrogen only make sense if we have a clean, very cheap form of power generation, such as hydro or nuclear. Solar and Wind wouldn't work to well to power electric cars. Electric cars need lots of electricity. Solar or wind power at 10 cents a KW hour is wayyy to expensive to power a car with. Nuclear and Hydro, each at about 3-4 cent a KW hour, would be more expensive than gasoline, but they wouldn't pollute at all.

        Hybrid cars are the best solution right now. They offer substantial pollution reduction and gas mileage improvements over ordinary cars. Plus we don't have to build a whole bunch of new power plants to power them, as we would if everyone switched to electic.

        Anyway, I think by far the best solution to our energy problems right now is to build more nuclear plants and use hybrid cars.
        • I think that is what is usually called a straw-man argument.

          Few if any people are promoting the idea of electric-only cars powered by traditional batteries, and refilled by plugging it into the wall socket. For the very reasons you describe, it would be expensive and ineffective.

          As described in the article, and often on slashdot, the idea is to have a fuel cell in the car which uses hydrogen very efficiently. The problem then becomes a matter of storing and generating the hydrogen. Storing it (and there are a number of options) is expensive but possible. The fact that there are working experimental hydrogen-based cars demonstrates this. It is a one-off cost though, so shouldn't be taken too seriously.

          Generating the hydrogen can be done at the site of another form of power generation. Even if this is done with coal and oil plants (which of course is a very poor way to create power to begin with when compared with (say) natural gas) one eliminates the losses due to power transmission etc. Further, the pollution that eminates from the burning of fossil fuels is much more easily contained at a single site (like a power station) than it is when it's generated by 234723849 cars.

          There are much more efficient ways of generating hydrogen though, from natural gas or methane directly, which completely bypass the very dirty and relatively inefficient coal and oil power production systems.

          The only reason why hybrid cars are the best solution right now, is that there is a lack of a hydrogen supply infrastructure. Fix that, and hydrogen as energy storage comes into its own.
          Again, as described in the article, a promising avenue to this is through converting local bus services to hydrogen-based, which even in the absence of an established hydrogen infrastructure, can then be cheaper to run. This in turn creates a market for distribution,

        • Re:Hydrogen is not free (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          > Then you run it though the electic motor.
          > This gives about 40% efficiency under ideal conditions.

          No. 90%. Minimum. Electric motors are way more efficient than thermal energy ones. Don't know about your other numbers, though.

          > Electric uses much more energy and pollutes much more than gasoline.
          > Gasoline powered cars now are very low emission.
          > The coal plants that would power electic cars are not.

          Hey, loaded today, aren't we? Cars became the primary source of pollution in cities as anti-polluting laws forced filters on industries. Cars, in my city, are restrained from downtown (only pedestrians allowed) *and* until recently were left home one day-a-week to fight air polltuion.
          Which coal plants? My country doesn't have them. We use dams. Pretty clean (albeit dangerous to wildlife). Instead of getting oil to pollute your country, go to international warmer waters and get sun/wind or hydrogen energy. It costs roughly the same to transport, but it's nearer and free.

          Electric or hybrid cars are great because you recover energy when climbing down (very important in cities with irregular relief, like San Francisco) or when deaccelerating (important everywhere).

          Don't use too much common sense -- you'll look, well, very common.
        • As you've pointed out, hybrid cars are more fuel-efficient than pure gasoline-powered cars. What you seem to have missed is *why* - basically, they don't waste fuel idling at traffic lights, and they turn the energy from braking back into battery charge rather than pissing it away as heat.

          Any half-intelligently designed pure electric or fuel-cell electric car is going to do exactly the same thing, and therefore your in-practice efficiency is going to go up - I'd hazard a guess to the point where the energy-efficiency is about the same.

    • Hydrogen can be produced in many ways, including the hydrolysis of water (H2O) using electricity.

      Hydrogen is a good way to store energy, because when you burn it, you get the reverse reaction of the above mentioned hydrolysis, it just produces water.
      • I understand, but to get the electricity to perform the hydrolysis you have to generate it, usually using some pretty dirty fuel. I think it is clear that cheap usable hydrogen is not going to becoming from hydrolysis. Some of these other methods look excellent.

    • Re:Hydrogen is not free (Score:5, Informative)

      by hex1848 ( 182881 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @06:18PM (#3381083) Homepage
      Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.

      This article [canada.com] was posted on slashdot last week..

      "The most promising source of the hydrogen may be geological "traps" similar to those now drilled for natural gas. Professor Freund said: "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."

      Apparently mining these geological "traps" would be no more energy intensive then current natural gas mining. And with such a vast supply right here in the United States, it like this is an inevitable migration.

      I wonder If the oil companies are starting to look into hydrogen as the next money maker. They have the infrastructure (gas stations, transportation) to do it, it seems like it would be a no brainier to jump right in.

    • Re:Hydrogen is not free (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @06:22PM (#3381096) Journal
      So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale).

      I think you are underestimating the value of centralizing production of energy. It is not feasible to produce nuclear-powered cars. However, we can get the same effect simply by making hydrogen-powered zero-emission vehicles and producing the hydrogen with nuclear power. The benefit of centralizing energy production is total freedom in how the energy is produced. It also easier, cheaper, and better for the environment to have one big, expensive, highly advanced pollution scrubber at a fossil-fuel powered plant than to have jillions of less-efficient catylitic converters all over the place, and eventually taking up space in landfills.

      • At the current state of the art, gasoline automotive engines are cleaner than most power plants. The exceptions are natural gas fired power plants. California has mostly natural gas and some nuclear electricity, so electric and/or hydrogen cars would make sense there. But the rest of the country runs on coal (or hydro, but that has its own problems). State of the art coal plants are pretty clean, but not as clean as gasoline motors. And most coal plants are nowhere near state of the art.
    • Just set these bacteria [ornl.gov] loose in your swimming pool!
    • Virtually all the energy stored in any form usable by people ultimately comes from our sun. Strangely, outside of bizare projects like a Dyson Sphere [d.kth.se], and solar panel research, there seems to be very little interest in getting more power directly from our sun.

      Regardless of all that, any energy that we manage to collect may be relatively efficiently and conveniently stored using hydrogen. We may synthesise hydrogen from water, and may use it in a variety of reactions before and after it is used for energy. Hydrogen is of course, very versatile.

      Yes, it's all theoretical, having reached only the beginnings of proof-of-concept in this application - but to look into the possibilities would hardly be a waste.

      :^)

      Ryan Fenton
      • Then perhaps eventually something extraplanetary, yet of course, short of a Dyson Sphere. The density would of course go up closer to the sun, though creating a system that would self-cool well enough in a vacuum may be difficult. Using shielding of things like solid meteors and the like would perhaps help. This seems an entire realm of theory and experimentation that has very little online exploration - at least Google isn't revelaing very much in any of the searches I've done on these topics in the past few months.

        :^)

        Ryan Fenton

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by antis0c ( 133550 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @05:55PM (#3381007)
    [Refering to what includes Hydrogen] Examples include petroleum, natural gas and biomass -- a nice way of saying plant and animal waste.

    Finally! I can power my DeLorean off a rotting banana peal, coffee grounds, and a quarter can of malt beer.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Nate B. ( 2907 )
      Indeed!

      Living out here in farm country we routinely deal with a large amount of "bio-mass" (I like that term, gonna make this farmboy sound educated down at The Well some evening). To be able to readily utilize it to produce hydrogen before spreading it on the fields would be a good thing. It could also help stabilize the rural economies.

      Right now ethanol plants and soybean processing plants are being constructed to provide for the increasing demands of renewable fuels and lubricants. Let's face it, internal combustion engines will be around for some time. Anything we can do to wean ourselves off of imported oil while at the same time benefiting agriculture and the rural communities is a good thing, IMHO.

      WRT hydrogen powered vehicles. Since the byproduct is water, perhaps it would be a good idea to collect the water as the car is driven until the next refueling stop. Imagine in the larger cities where commuters would exchange the collected water for a portion of their fuel at each refill. The water collected is then delivered to the community water supply and filtered. This could have a positive impact on the future of water use in the larger urban areas lessening the demand on ground water wells and reservoirs.

      Think of the impact several million cars, not to mention large trucks and other vehicles contributing to the water supply in this way rather than fouling the air could have...
      • "perhaps it would be a good idea to collect the water as the car is driven until the next refueling stop"

        Or just emit it and it will find its way into rivers, lakes, and the water table itself. Hey, maybe if enough people drive through the midwest...
      • I agree with you that ethanol helps with reducing oil imports and could benefit the farmers who certainly need the help.

        On the hydrogen vehicle thing, wouldn't there be too much contamination of the wastewater from engine oil, radiator fluid, and other lubricants? Also wouldn't the wastewater be in the form of steam and reduce the thermodynamic efficiency to condense it into water? And how much extra weight would the car have to carry when collecting the water which would also lower its fuel economy? I wonder if more water couldn't be saved by replacing the washers in everyone's leaky faucets than could be collected from hydrogen vehicle emissions.
    • Lol. Now you wont have any reason to complain when your neighbor's dog craps in your yard, just shovel the mess into your hydrogen-extracter and get enough for a quick outing to the pizza parlor. Make it a trip out of town if you catch the dog and toss it in too.
    • The article talks a lot about alternatives to gasoline but I've heard that the easiest way to reduce dependence on oil imports is to adapt diesel engines. On TV they said that for a few hundred pounds any diesel car can be modified to run off vegetable oil. You can even use the leftover dirty oil from frying. If this is true I'm surprised it hasn't taken off yet - maybe we'll just have to wait for the next oil shock.

      • The problem is quanity. There is a glut in the waste cooking oil market today. However there is not nearly enough waste cooking oil to power many cars.

        That isn't to say it is a bad idea to try to use waste oil for cars (considering we have a lot of it that we have no idea what to do with it), but it isn't enough to make a difference. We need something more, but like most solutions this is one that sounds better on paper than practice.

        • How expensive would it be to manufacture vegetable oil, compared to diesel? What's the crude oil price at which this becomes economical?

  • Oh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ShaniaTwain ( 197446 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @05:55PM (#3381008) Homepage
    Please oh please, whatever you do just don't make them like this [popealien.com]
    • Many of those are valid complaints.

      1 The stock speaker of the Insight do suck, but I have replaced mine and put an mp3 player in anyway.

      2. Tough to control. mainly when huge vehicles pass and on lousy roads

      3. Loud. there is plenty of road noise.

      but I didn't buy mine expecting a luxury car. I don't want to drag around a couple tons with me wherever I go. It's a cool car IMO, and I'm pushing the technology.

      After a year of owning it, though, the biggest problem with it is peoples reactions to it. I had to tint my windows to keep people from fucking staring; expecting a hippie or something. And every once in a while it pisses some guy in a truck off. hehe

      -metric
  • When do we get the flying cars? I can't wait to see a hovering Delorean. LOL.

    • When do we get the flying cars?

      According to some research into the rates of technological advancement, we could see these as soon as the early 1980's, and possibly sooner!

      Personally, I'm far more excited about colonizing Titan. Heck, I'd settle for the Moon or Mars. I figure we should have several cities on these by 2008, maybe 2007 if we really try.

  • Honda Civic Hybrid (Score:5, Informative)

    by noodlez84 ( 416138 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @06:06PM (#3381036)

    It may be interesting to some of you that Honda is releasing (for its 2003 model year) a hydrid version of its Honda Civic, named Honda Civic Hybrid [honda.com]. It is a four-door sedan with gas mileage in the upper-40s / lower-50s.

    This proves that electric hydrids are not only available technologically-speaking, but that they are commercially viable. Now imagine what would happen if a tax break (perhaps coinciding with George W. Bush's huge breaks) were offered for electric hybrid vehicles. It would stimulate the economy _and_ lower taxes. Of course, the oil industry wouldn't be too happy because of lower profits. Boo-hoo. Gas mileage has been going _down_ since 1986, when it peaked in the upper-20s (about 29).

    BTW, you might want to read a review of the Honda Civic [edmunds.com].

    • Toyota has had their Prius [toyota.com] since 1997 in Japan, and 2000 in the US. Honda is just catching up (the Insight is more of a speciality car, I think -- only 2 seats, very cramped, so not as practical as the Prius or this Civic hybrid)
    • You might note that Toyota has been selling a 4 door hybrid for the last two years. Unlike the Honda, the Prius can actually run on battery alone for some time. Good for sneaking up on people in the parking lot.
    • The new hybrid Civic is like a 4-door Insight. I believe the main difference in the drivetrain is that it uses a 4 cylinder motor instead of a 3. It has a CVT transmission, and I assume a manual too. You can read more about it at www.evworld.com [evworld.com].

    • Re:Honda Civic Hybrid (Score:3, Informative)

      by Herbmaster ( 1486 )
      This is cool and all, but consider the 2003 Civic Hybrid against my car, the 2002 Civic HX:
      The Hybrid gets a few more features (ABS, cd player, power windows) and a whopping 13/7 more MPG of fuel efficiency.
      My car gets most of the same features (including automatic (CVT) trans and AC), 20-25 more HP, for about $5000 less.
      Losing 25 horsepower while gaining about 150 lbs, on a car that wasn't particularly muscular to start out with, with the price difference in the wrong direction, isn't especially "viable". At current gas prices, $5000 = 650000 miles before you break even going with the hybrid. No.
      • You're forgetting the horsepower of the electric motor. I don't know what the actual rating is, but keep in mind that electric motors have a perfectly flat torque curve, with max torque available from zero rpm to redline. In the real world, horsepower should be veiwed as area under the curve rather than peak or instantaneous (ie, at a certain rpm). With this in mind, the hybrid meets or exceeds the output of its predecessor, just as Honda intended. And if you drove the hybrid, you'd see that this is true.
        • This is not true in practice. The Hybrid Civic's electric motor generates 13.4 horsepower @ 4000 RPM. The 1.3 L VTEC engine generates 85 @ 5700 RPM. If you were getting maximum output from both sources at once, you'd have 98 hp. This is significantly less of the 117 output by the gasoline-only Civic (with a 1.7 L VTEC-e) in my comparison. Honda doesn't even claim 98 hp, however, rather they claim 93 net hp. Perhaps the horsepower doesn't add linearly, or there's other loss.
          In any case, you're wrong - this vehicle does not come close to exceeding the power of the predecessor (although non-Hybrid Civics don't seem to be going anywhere).
          • Perhaps the horsepower doesn't add linearly, or there's other loss.

            No, it doesn't add linearly, which is why I said it's the area under the curve that matters, not the peak.

            Don't forget the hybrid has a CVT too, which allows peak torque or horsepower to be applied over a much wider range of road speeds.

            The net result is that the hybrid meets or exceeds the performance of the Civic HX, while delivering better fuel economy.

  • Popular Science had a recent article on a Honda sports car hybrid. Unfortunately the name of the car escapes me. Anyone know?
    • Is what I think you're looking for. I saw the same article-- now THAT is a hybrid that would sell in the states. 400hp at 42mpg!!!

      Now, cut it in half and make me one that gets 200hp at 84mpg and I'm sold. :)

  • Blessed Altruism (Score:4, Interesting)

    by layingMantis ( 411804 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @06:48PM (#3381178) Homepage
    "GM has taken a little different tack in hybrids," Sloane explained. The researchers asked themselves, "What is it we're trying to solve or fix? Is it that our customers are demanding higher fuel economy? The honest answer to that is no. The cheapest fluid you can get at a gas station is what? The gasoline. It's sure cheaper per gallon than this is," she said, raising some bottled water from the dais. "But we do have a societal interest in reducing the use of fuel. So maybe it's the places where you use a lot of it that you should try to make the reductions."

    Heh. This mildly amusing, and mildy insulting, bit of spin-doctoring aside, it's good to see that the American auto makers aren't actually light-years behind their Japanese counterparts anymore. They've closed the gap to just a few generations. :-)

  • What are the estimates for the cost per mile of running off of hydrogen?

    Right now, hybrid automobiles cost more per mile because the initial price of the vehicle is more expensive.

    So when we factor in the costs of making hydrogen powered vehicles, and making hydrogen (probably most cheaply from hydrocarbons -- fossil fuels), what will be the final cost per mile? Has anybody seen good figures?

  • Seems to me... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Xeo2 ( 301694 )
    Even if we do change over, where are we going to get the energy to liberate the hydrogen from where is is sitting now? Fossil Fuels, maybe?
    T( H)GSB [slashdot.org] Apr 21-27
  • Sure, everyone's in a love fest for H2, which will be fantastic when its viable, but no one in America wants to talk about passenger diesels. My Golf TDI gets 40MPG even under my lead foot, will outperform any gas/electic hybrid, has much more cargo space (and passenger space). As far as emmissions go, the hybrids are much greener, but the modern passenger diesel emits less greenhouse gasses then the average gas car. Sure it emits more NOX, but with better fuel and better pollution control systems coming in 2006, this will become a non issue.

  • Toyota Prius (Score:3, Informative)

    by fo0bar ( 261207 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @07:55PM (#3381339)
    (No, arouse.net is not a porn site :)

    On Tuesday I bought a Toyota Prius, mentioned in the article. Very nice car for the dollar. Hybrid gas/electric car, uses the gas engine only when needed. In fact, I still haven't gotten used to the fact that the onboard computer will actually turn off the engine while driving, when it is not needed.

    Gas mileage on the sticker is very impressive. 52 city, 45 highway. No, that is not a typo. It actually performs better in traffic, mostly because slow acceleration is almost exclusively under electric power. Coasting and deceleration use regenerative braking to recharge the battery [arouse.net], meaning you never have to plug the car into an external power source.

    This car is the perfect geek toy -- many functions are performed via the touchscreen LCD screen [arouse.net], and all the other displays are 100% digital. Sound system is very good for a stock system, and you gotta love the static cling sticker on the back: Eat my voltage. [arouse.net]

    Sticker price was about $21k, and from my experience, has been worth it. I'm currently getting about 42MPG according to the consumption display [arouse.net]. More pics are located here [arouse.net].

    • So, is your Prius priapic?

    • My wife and I have had our Prius since last fall. The best car either of us have owned, bar none. Great mileage, plenty of pickup when needed, very low emissions (SULEV, ZEV being the only lower category). And the LCD touchscreen makes it fun to show off :-)

      We recently took a youth group from our church to Tijuana from the SF Bay Area to build a house for a needy family, and I drove the Prius. We drove a bit more slowly than the speed limit (~65 MPH vs. 70 MPH) because our caravan of vehicles included a pickup with a large trailer. The Prius got 53 MPG on the drive down (about 500 miles), and did it on a single tank. For the 1000+ mile trip overall it got 48 MPG and did it on two tanks of gas. The lower mileage coming in part from the 2+ hour wait at the border to return to the U.S., during which we had the AC running to avoid the exhast fumes.

      The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight (a 2-seater with higher MPG but smaller load) are now available. Besides Honda's recent announcement of the hybrid Civic, there's also been dicussion of a hybrid Ford Escape (their smallest SUV) and a hybrid Dodge Durango (one of their SUVs), though I heard the latter had been cancelled. (Around the time the govt. failed to pass the higher MPG requirements. Coincidence?)

  • From what I gather, using Hydrogen would be equivalent to having batteries. We could then make hydrogen from all sorts of fuels, such as coal, gas, nuclear, wind, ethanol, corn or even solar? If this is ineed true, then we should jump on this technology like a hot potato. This may give us the energy *flexibility* we will need in 10-15 years. It may be in 20 years "microwave" power from the sun or some other strange technology may power our vehicles... without requiring a huge retooling of our consumption and distribution system.

  • The Limits of Fossil Fuel Tech (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saihung ( 19097 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @08:22PM (#3381441)
    While I like these ideas, projects like this [vwvortex.com] make me think that we haven't even approached the limits of efficiency in fossil fuel engines. This thing might be a concept, but VW made it now, it runs on normal diesel fuel, and gets nearly 240 MPG. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore in the near-term. While I think that pie-in-the-sky exotics are sexy, I also think that they won't be ready for production or have a working support infrastructure for years - here is something we could do now to cut our fuel usage.
    • The vwvortex is a nice concept car. No one will buy it however, and very little of the technology will translate into improved fuel efficiency in the sort of cars consumers will buy.

      If you want to make a more efficient car, you
      1) Make it more aerodynamic
      2) Use diesel, tweak fuel injection and compression
      3) Use a small engine
      4) Reduce weight wherever possible.

      After following these steps, you get a 200+ MPG car (provided you only drive it on flat ground). However, make a small engine motorcycle fully faired and you'll get more than half-way to this.

      Hybrid cars are just plain more efficient. And fuel cells will come about for one simple reason - they will require MORE fossil fuel to run than current cars, but more of it will come from American sources. You gotta get the hydrogen from somewhere - current plans indicate it will come from natural gas at home. So, you come home, plug the gas line into your fuel cell car, and fill it up with hydrogen. It burns as Zero Emission because it makes only water as a by-product of combustion.

      But there are conversion losses, so we end up using even more natural gas than we would have used gasoline. More money for energy companies - and more of it American.

      This is the American way - big business marketing laws to pass so that consumers end up giving them even more money. Zero emission is nice. But is it worth an even greater use of fossil fuels, and even greater CO2 release than before ?
      • Zero emission is nice. But is it worth an even greater use of fossil fuels,
        and even greater CO2 release than before ?


        Perhaps... if it means that when the fossil fuels run out, or become too scarce to be cheap anymore, that we already have everything in place to easily switch to hydrogen from renewable sources.

      • If I remember something correctly these concept cars are massively expensive prototypes anyway - partly because so much has to be invented. Even with mass production they're still going to work out to be more expensive in the short term.
    • I've seen all sorts of cars like that (including one which got upwards of 1000 mpg).

      The thing is though, as you continue adding weight (people, cargo, air conditioning and other amenities) the mpg curve decreases in a non-linear fashion.

      So yeah, 240 mpg sounds nice, but put that motor in a real usable car and it wont get anywhere near it. It's just a showoff thing.

  • Hydrogen On Demand (Score:3, Interesting)

    by niola ( 74324 ) <jon@niola.net> on Saturday April 20, 2002 @09:02PM (#3381550) Homepage
    This one company I have been keeping my eye on called Millennium Cell [millenniumcell.com] has a technology called Hydrogen on Demand that seems pretty cool. They invented a way to store hydrogen in a borax solution and extract it only when needed to generate energy. The cool thing about Millennium Cell's technology is that they figured out a lot of other issues competing fuel cell companies have not. For example, they can retrofit an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen, and it's exhaust would be 100% free of carbon monoxide. They also even worked in gas stations into the equation and have figured out how to retrofit them to "refill" the hydrogen fuel cells. Also of note is that their fuel cells have a range similar to that of a full tank of gas, and takes up slightly smaller area of space. Definitely some cool R&D going on out there...

    --Jon
  • Chrysler had a working gas turbine engine system. See here: http://www.turbinecar.com/turbine.htm

    Now, this thing could run on anything that burned... even tequila :) So, it would seem to be a natural stopgap for hydrogen. One could easily construct a pumping system that could use gas or hydrogen (or just have dual pumping systems feeding injectors at the same location.) In either case, you have a car that is perfectly capable of running on gasoline or hydrogen.

    Works for me.

    • One year an indy 500 car tried a turbine engine, it was terrible.

      The main reason is that turbines don't rev like normal engines do. They're designed to be kept at a constant speed for long amounts of time.
      They also accelerate to a higher speed slower, as well as decelerate slower (an innate characteristic of turbines)

      Recent advances of CVT's (continously variable transmissions) can help ease the inherent problem with turbines, but its hardly worth taking time and research away from the hybrid and fuel cell cars, which are truly the future of automobiles (electric motors are vastly more efficient and powerful than combustions), to go back to something that was tried and failed already.

      • One year an indy 500 car tried a turbine engine, it was terrible.

        Andy Granatelli's turbine indy car worked great. Parnelli Jones had it in the lead from the beginning of the 1967 Indy 500, until, with 3 1/2 laps to go, a transmission part broke and the car coasted to a stop. The rules were then changed to prohibit turbine Indy cars.

        The turbine was a stock helicopter powerplant, which is a rougher job than powering an Indy car.

        The big problem with gas turbines is that little ones are expensive. This is why general aviation is still running on piston power plants, decades after the big aircraft went turbine. There's an effort underway to develop general-aviation turbojets, headed by the guy who developed the cruise missile engine (and the backpack personal flyer!).

      • Actually, there were several attempts to run gas turbine powered cars at Indy. 1969 was the first year, but there were at least two turbine-powered cars in the 1970 starting field. Then USAC placed restrictions on the diameter of the air intake, which made cars that used turbine engines non-competitive.

        Later in the 1970's there were a couple more attempts to run turbine race cars at Indy, using Allison engines (originally designed for helicopters), but none of these later attempts ever made the race.

        BTW, my dad worked for Allison.

        /Don

    • As others have stated, turbines arn't that great at accelerating/decelerating.

      However, at one point chrysler was investigating using them in a hybrid vehicle, where the turbine was essentially an electric generator and the drivetrain was powered by electics.

      Didn't do too bad, averaged about 50mpg, but the gas/electric hybrid they were toying with was able to achieve 70mpg.

      Too bad they havn't decided to bring any of that technology to the market....
    • interesting reading, thanks for the URL.

      when reading the magazine reviews of the concept ran across some really cool stories about turbine experiments, but this one was great

      Vince Granatelli, Andy's son, built a turbine-powered Corvette in 1979. The engine for this conversion was originally designed to power an oil-field generator. It developed 880 bhp and delivered 1,160 lb./ft. of torque. Rpm was so high that at idle the Corvette was running 60 mph, and the only way it could be slowed in city traffic was with the brakes. Needless to say, performance was a little hairy

      that sucker musta been something to drive in traffic, guess he didnt plan on spending much time in the city in it, or else he would have to carry a case of brakepads around with him... bet it was fun on a track though ;)

  • Protectionist conspiracy theory (Score:3, Insightful)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @09:32PM (#3381644) Journal
    Who makes hybrid gas/electric cars right now? Toyota and Honda.

    Who showed hydrogen concept cars early this year? Ford and GM [cnn.com]. When do they expect to be ready for market? 10 years.

    Which technology is really better? They're comparable [howstuffworks.com].

    What did President Bush decide to do? End support for hybrids and spend money on fuel cells instead [google.com].

    Connect the dots?

  • Promotion and FUD in the Same Article... (Score:3, Informative)

    by NeuroManson ( 214835 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @10:15PM (#3381744) Homepage
    "Hydrogen can neither be mined nor found through exploration.": Wrong.

    Recently NASA discovered that large concentrations of hydrogen gas exist in the earth's rocky crust (as much as several hundred pounds of hydrogen in a cubic meter of rock). It can be mined, and as NASA has proven HAS been found through exploration. Mind you, not the same variety as "Lets blow a hole in the ground and see what comes up", but still far more available than previously believed. Essentially left over gasses from the formation of the solar system.

    Mining can still be environmentally damaging if not inefficient, but still can be much more economical than existing means of hydrogen extraction.
  • We should think of hydrogen not as an energy source, but as an energy storage medium, like a battery. But batteries are too bulky and heavy, and don't have the capacity we need (low energy density). They're expensive, with a short service life, and present a huge disposal problem. Flywheels are very expensive to build, with delicate moving parts, and a dangerous failure mode. So in comparison, hydrogen looks pretty good. Plus, it comes closest to matching our existing infrastructure- vehicles, filling stations, pipelines- and producers. The trick is convincing Big Oil to become Big Hydrogen.
  • http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
    (not my site, just the first mirror I could find)

    I'm sure some of you have seen this, but most of you haven't. It's a device which uses aluminum as the 'storage medium' for energy. It was patented back in 1988 in Cornish, England. The original website (layo.com) no longer exists, but you can find many mirrors to the pages.

    At first glance, you'll think the process is straight hydrolysis, but it's not. Pure aluminum wire (abundant in supply as welding wire today) is fed against a spinning aluminum drum. An 18Kv differential is maintained across the interface between the wire and the drum. The entire apparatus is immersed in plain old H2O.

    From my admittedly lacking understanding chemically, the aluminum and the O2 bind, liberating H2 as a gas. Here's the formula they give at the websites:

    2al+3h2o ---- A12 + 3H2

    I know the numbers don't add up, and I know the oxygen seems to disappear, but I'm sure it's a typo. Certainly there's some slashdot expert out there can correct it.

    The apparatus was supposedly test by none other than BMW back in 1981 with positive results:

    "The unit as present assembled in a 2000cc car produced sufficient gas to power the engine continuously.

    The aluminum consumption averaged out at 180 cm per minute over a 70 minute test run."

    This device may solve the energy storage problem with excellent safety aspects, since only a small amount of H2 gas is maintained in the device at any time. The world is very experienced at taking refining aluminum, so it could easily be recycled back into the process at fueling time. Basically, you would put a wire canister and some water in your car to 'fuel up'.

    I've tried for a while to find a way to develop this as a product, but I simply don't have the time. Therefore I urge the slashdot community to develop this, OPEN SOURCE even. :)

    Zondar
    • I think the reaction is as follows:

      2Al + 3H2O --> Al203 + 3H2

      I think Al2O3 is standard aluminum oxide (white powdery substance).

      In other words, pure aluminum metal is oxidized, and as a by-product, hydrogen is evolved. I always thought that the hydrogen-oxygen bond in water stored MORE potential energy than the aluminum-oxygen bond in Al2O3 (aluminum oxide), which would make the above reaction endothermic (meaning that it wouldn't happen without supplying some energy from somewhere else). I could be wrong, though. In any event, it is certainly possible to extract energy from aluminum, one way or another. It is not obvious that it is better to do so than to simply use hydrogen directly.

      MM
      --
      • Interesting - I'm thinking about this chemical rxn also. On first glance my gut reaction was that this is an exothermic process [i tend to thing of breaking bonds as endothermic and creating bonds as exo]. I'm thinking, hmmmm, put some pure aluminum powder into a glass of purified water and you SHOULD get heat, H2 and the aluminum oxide as a by-product. Someone correct me but this appears to be exo and sounds like a pretty cool idea to me

  • One interesting point re: pollution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ghjm ( 8918 ) on Saturday April 20, 2002 @11:08PM (#3381898) Homepage
    Several people have pointed out that electric cars simply shift the point where pollution is generated from the car to the power plant. But there's a big difference between electric and hydrogen in this regard: Hydrogen can be shipped.

    With wall-powered electric cars, the power generation has to occur relatively nearby - say, within a few hundred miles. With hydrogen, the power generation can occur anywhere in the world. Hydrogen canisters can be transported via container shipping.

    What this means is that if the U.S. were to convert to hydrogen power, it would allow all the power generation (and therefore pollution) to be moved offshore. In essence, all the pollution from the U.S. automotive fleet could be shipped to the Third World, in exchange for hard currency - which is the traditional method used for getting rid of the rest of the "not in my backyard" unpleasant underside of the affluent U.S. (and for that matter Western European) lifestyle.

    Economically, it's a win all round - though of course environmentalists will probably disagree.

    -Graham

  • Some more links for folks ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by felicity ( 870 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @10:27AM (#3383068)
    I own a Toyota Prius [toyota.com], and love every minute of driving it. I have been promoting hybrids at work and came up with this list of URLs about the various mass-produced "green"/alternate fuel vehicles available today. There are also some other links associated with these cars (fuel efficiency guides, etc.) I know it's not a complete list, but it's a decent representation of what's out there. Here you go ... :)

    There's a good amount of information available about clean vehicles at:

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