Toyota Names Upcoming Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car 194
An anonymous reader writes Toyota has announced the name of its new hydrogen-powered car: Mirai, which means "future" in Japanese. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said: "Today, we are at a turning point in automotive history. A turning point where a four-door sedan can travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, can be refueled in under five minutes and emit only water vapor."
How do I refill it? (Score:2, Insightful)
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You won't be able to generate or store hydrogen at your house.
Says who? I've got a couple of test tubes, water and electricity... :-)
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Why would you carry around the mass of the water - that's just going to make the car less efficient.
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It takes a lot of power to isolate hydrogen from H2O. To do it efficiently, it's a rather slow process that would not be suitable for in-car use. Better to have a station at home that produces 24/7 so you can refuel as required.
Re:How do I refill it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hydrogen is still a stupid idea.
Look, either go full 100% electric and just put in chargers everywhere, or use CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and just forget this nutty hydrogen idea. Hydrogen is hard to obtain and store and there is no existing distribution infrastructure to speak of.
Does anybody here know where we get most of our industrial hydrogen gas? From Natural Gas. Guess what? We already have a distribution infrastructure in most of the States for Natural Gas. We should just cut to the chase and go to CNG which burns very clean with a minimum of modifications to existing engines. All this hydrogen talk is just hype..
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Huh? Who's talking about safety here?
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Why do you think Hydrogen is not safe? In terms of a similar quantity of energy stored as gasoline, Hydrogen is even safer than petroleum distillates in terms of a fuel, not to mention that tanks full of Hydrogen are usually better engineered as well.
Don't let the scare tactics of people who cite the Hindenberg zepplin disaster as justification for why Hydrogen is bad. You need to treat it with care, but you need to do that with all high density energy storage technologies of any kind and Hydrogen is pret
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Again, just in case it wasn't clear from my first response. Who is concerned about Hydrogen's safety? Hydrogen Gas is no less safe than Natural Gas and I'm not debating this aspect.
What I AM saying is that Hydrogen is a stupid idea when you consider the engineering efficiency of the whole system. Just burn Natural Gas as a motor fuel, it's easier and more efficient (and cheaper as a result).
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Oh sure Natural Gas is cheaper, it has to be.
As I posted previously, where do you suppose we get hydrogen now? For industrial supplies we reform natural gas, which involves steam and fairly high temperatures. Processing and storage of hydrogen is harder than for natural gas. So, hydrogen will be more expensive, it simply has to be. Start with Natural gas, process by adding heat to get hydrogen, suffer larger losses in the storage and distribution of hydrogen and it will ALWAYS be more expensive.
And bef
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Where, pray tell, are you going to get burnable hydrogen? From Water? Have fun with that.
You obviously don't understand what it takes to convert water into hydrogen fuel. HINT: Lots and LOTS of electricity, which, despite what you might think, cannot be produced for free. Windmills and solar cells cost money and harm the environment. Industrially, Hydrogen is currently produced FROM Natural Gas, not water.
But never mind all that.... Try this one. Using hydrogen as a method to "store energy" is a stupid
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Look, either go full 100% electric and just put in chargers everywhere, or use CNG
If you're going to talk about existing distribution infrastructure, why not choose Option C: Propane autogas? It's #3 in the States (behind gas and diesel) as well as the most common alternative fuel worldwide...
Re:How do I refill it? (Score:4, Informative)
To put this in perspective, California is aiming for 100 fueling stations by 2024 and as of May this year only 9 actually existed.
"California, Oregon, New York and five other states pledged to put more than three million zero-emission vehicles on their roads by 2025"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... [pbs.org]
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"Electricity is not free. Any business that provides 1 or more "high speed chargers" has to pay for the hardware AND the cost of the electricity. They are in business to make money, and if any good at "business", they want to maximize profits. They will do this by passing on the costs associated with the "high speed chargers" on to their customers, in the form of higher prices. Those people who do NOT have a need for "high speed chargers" will not be pleased to subsidize the few who do (pay the higher price
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This car is going to have a major problem with most people because there are no stations that carry hydrogen to refill it.
That is a temporary problem. A gas station already has water and electricity, and could quickly install a hydrogen tank and meter, if the customer base is there.
You won't be able to generate or store hydrogen at your house.
Why not?
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And make the process even less efficient? The hydrogen fuel cycle is as-is about 1/3rd as efficient as simply using electricity to power BEVs directly - and that's with efficient industrial H2 electrolysis. Trying to scale down dand "localize" H2 just makes it even worse.
And honestly, given how much hydrogen - completely unlike gasoline - likes to detonate rather than just burn, no, I'm not too fond of large numbers of potential points of failure. Yes, gasoline burns with a tremendous amount of energy. So d
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Hydrogen is a stupid idea.
Use CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and just forget this nutty hydrogen idea. Getting Hydrogen from water and electricity is wildly inefficient and thus extremely expensive. It's also not a very good motor fuel because it takes some pretty major modifications to existing motors.
Do you know where we get most of our industrial hydrogen gas? From Natural Gas. Guess what? We already have a distribution infrastructure in most of the States for Natural Gas. We should just cut to the c
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Man don't you get it? Hydrogen is extremely dangerous. If you've ever seen the stupid things people do with gas and how many die from it then you'd realize that hydrogen will be several orders of magnitude worse.
No, really -they don't say how. (Score:3)
Compressed gas? Cryo-slush (unlikely!)? Metal Hydrides?
And, of course, hydrogen - like batteries - is just a storage mechanism. The power still need to be generated somewhere, and there are the typical transitional losses.
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I didn't see costs per mile either (for fuel).
The secret of NiMH (Score:2)
Compressed gas? Cryo-slush (unlikely!)? Metal Hydrides?
I'd pay a nickel [wikipedia.org] for that last one.
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There's a Secret of NiMH [imdb.com], you know. It'll cost you more than a nickel to get them to talk.
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What I'm really concerned about here is the price. At over $60000, they won't be selling many of these.
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Maybe that might be the best answer -- if one can spend the energy it takes to pull apart hydrogen from water, one can pull CO2 from the air and make propane. Propane has 73% of the energy of gasoline... but for most tasks, that is good enough. Plus, Truma has their VeGA [1] fuel cells which can use propane, so it can be actively burned in a vehicle's engine, or used in a fuel cell to keep the batteries topped off.
[1]: Would be nice if Truma sold more than their propane gauge in the US. I'm not sure if
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SOFCs are neat, but they have long warmup times and are bulky. They're efficient in continuous operation but wasteful in short operation. They're not really ideally suited to vehicles.
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http://www.nature.com/news/199... [nature.com]
Furthermore, hydrogen gas is a bitch to store, as it can permeate out through metal. So, not only do you have a the inefficiency of electrolyzing water, you have to do "something" to try to keep it from escaping. Probably substantial compression, but then that has its own set of issues. You can crack hydrogen gas from of natural gas, but that's retarded if you're intending to create a vehicle fuel.
We should just use hydrocarbons. They are an excellent energy store by every m
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Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is what we should use. We have a LOT of it in the States, it's currently cheap, and we already have distribution infrastructure for it. Industrial sources of hydrogen come from Natural Gas anyway...
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Chicken/Egg (Score:2)
Obviously as more companies build Hydrogen cars, more refueling stations will be built. With a real 300 mile range you don't need them ofter to make long cross country trips possible.
If you think about it it's easier to convert existing stations to hydrogen refueling than it is to convert them to something like a supercharger station, so buildout of hydrogen stations will happen more rapidly as the percentage of hydrogen vehicles increases.
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Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is what we should use. We have a LOT of it in the States, it's currently cheap, and we already have distribution infrastructure for it. Industrial sources of hydrogen come from Natural Gas anyway... Oh, and gas stations that sell CNG already exist.
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Unlike EVs a lot more public refueling stations are required. For example with my Tesla I do most of my charging at home overnight where it takes me 5 seconds to plug in and 5 seconds to unplug. The rapid charging stations and battery swap stations (when they're built) are only needed for long trips. For HFC vehicles a lot more filling stations will be required since most people will not be filling up at home or work. Many companies (though not mine) offer EV charging stations to their employees so they can
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They don't have tanks for that yet, but could easily replace existing gas tanks, or add new tanks, since all existing gas stations are built to accommodate large underground storage tanks.
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I think there will be a killer app needed in the form of a home electrolysis machine to be able to make enough hydrogen at night to top off your car for general commuting. Without that there is a huge barrier as you point out.
EV's today solve the commuter problem by the fact that they can be readily recharged at home. The infrastructure of chargers on the road for longer trips is still spotty and "adventuresome". Hydrogen fuel cell cars face that problem in the local neighborhood as well. If you have to
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The problem is that it takes a horrendous amount of electricity for electrolysis compared to steam reforming and it is far far more expensive, that's even with the catalysts available. 95% of all commercial hydrogen produced uses steam reformed natural gas. The cost difference is very significant.
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Probably contract with Tesla to put a hydrogen station next door to their electric station, since there's already an all-electric network from coast to coast. The "green infrastructure" is already there, now Toyota can leverage off of that
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How do I refill it? (Score:5, Informative)
Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.
Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).
There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.
On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.
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Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
If you're in the car when this happens, it's still going to be bad.
I blame hollywood for the common misconception that cars and petrol tanks explode.
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If you're in the car next to a car having a hydrogen explosion it's going to be bad.
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old films of the Heisenberg.
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Fantastic reference. Best series ending song of all time. I need to listen to it now.
Oh, the huge manatee (Score:2)
the 24 hour news stations are going to be showing old films of the Heisenberg
"Oh, the humanity!"
"It's uncertain how much humanity though."
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Re:How do I refill it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but batteries aren't a cryogenic liquid that embrittles everything it touches. Ooops.
You think hydrogen stored for use in commercial fuel cell vehicles is stored cryogenically.
Cute.
I can see why you didn't log in.
Re: How do I refill it? (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't the temperature a result of high pressure? As in, if you jam enough atoms into a space eventually they have less room to move and get colder? I'm sort of basing this off observation of my air compressor relief valve and not science. Air duster canisters can generate frost. That kind of thing.
So pressurizing a bunch of hydrogen would mean if it ruptures and someone touches the canister, instant frostbite.
What about the "destroying everything it touches" part?
ps: I am a different AC than OP.
The Ideal Gas Law determines what happens to a gas under pressure: PV = nRT
Pressure is proportional to volume, so if you compress a gas it shrinks in volume until eventually it liquefies - but the point at which it does depends on the phase diagram for that particular gas. The properties change depending on the molecules.
If you release pressure quickly then it expands very rapidly and cools down. This is a function of thermodynamics. Similarly, if you compress a gas it will heat up for the same reason. This is common to all gases. Jamming the molecules in ever tighter will increase the temperature. Your air compressor heats up when it is compressing air because of this. When you let the pressure out, the temperature of the air drops rapidly.
Where things like hydrogen are special is that you can't liquefy them by simply pressurising it. You need to cool it down too - the triple point of hydrogen is about 22 K and the critical point is about 32 K - hydrogen simply can not be a liquid at any pressure unless the temperature is between these two values (22 K is -251 C or -420 F - cryogenically cold temperatures).
Any gas under pressure is a hazard - cylinders of nitrogen are pressurised to 300 bar and if one of those ruptures you're in a world of hurt, despite the fact that nitrogen itself is inert, but we routinely handle high pressure gasses in industrial and commercial environments. You take more precautions with a hydrogen cylinder (or any cylinder of flammable gas), but the handling procedures for flammables overlap a lot with the non-flammables like nitrogen and argon.
Not For Me (Score:2, Insightful)
Let’s see, my Volkswagen Passat, which I paid 18K, for will go 450 miles and refuel just about anywhere.
Green is nice and all, but why even bother rolling something out that is obviously not ready for primetime? At least Hybrids can refuel anywhere even if over priced. I’ll go all electric or hybrid once the economics are in place, and I have no problem with early adopters, but getting one of these seems to be for masochists only at this point. Give me a range of 500+ miles, or the ability to
Re:Not For Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it
How many batteries can be completely recharged in under five minutes?
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Only very high pressure hydrogen stations can pull off such rapid fills, more common lower pressure stations can take several times longer.
And as much as I don't want a large tank of an extremely combustible gas (yes, it's far, far more combustible than gasoline, see above), near me, I really don't want the same amount of hydrogen at extreme pressures.
And it's so pointless. The hydrogen fuel cycle is so wasteful that it defeats its purpose right off the bat.
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How many batteries can be completely recharged in under five minutes?
How many people really care?
If your battery can take you 300 miles before needing a 30-40 minute charge, that would be absolutely fine for most people. Maybe a slight delay compared to what they would normally do (a five minute stop, not very good from a safety point of view...) but that is offset by the advantage of being able to charge at home or at work, meaning time saved not going to the petrol station once or twice a week. They money saved on fuel would also pay for a rental if they were really desper
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If battery replacement was so easy, why hasn't Tesla set up a network of battery replacement stations in Silicon Valley (much less anywhere else)? And to note that the Model S was even designed with the idea in mind that it could be replaced at such a station, but the company has pushed away from the concept in favor of high voltage recharging stations instead. I'm suggesting that such replacement stations are not economical even when you have a relatively high density of such vehicles in the area.
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No one said it's easy for Tesla, but they have clearly demonstrated that they can make it easy for you - in fact easier than filling a tank of gas! I don't have any insight into their strategic plans, but I can imagine they would want to first install the easier (for them) alternative before rolling out nation-wide something as complicated as battery swap. I can imagine such solution has huge fixed costs that will not be covered until they become considerably more popular. They have not pushed away from the
How many gas stations were there... (Score:2)
when the first ICE cars rolled off the assembly line?
It is truly remarkable how short-sighted people on a tech site can be.
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I may be shortsighted, or... there is no advantage to this car over conventional electric or hybrid at this point and will likely stay that way. Sure internal combustion engines (ICE) took off, but how many other inventions since then haven’t? Are you still riding around in your Stanley Steamer?
The 5 minute fueling is no advantage if there is nowhere to refill. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to contain, should these become common no doubt we will start to here stories about hydrogen leaks and is unl
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conventional electric
Now that we're discussing hydrogen, electric is conventional I think that shows where this is heading.
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They already had one hydrogen fire at the hydrogen fueling station in my county for the county fuel-cell powered buses, and this isn't some place where idiot joe public can fill up their car.
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Standard Oil was already huge when ICE cars started being made. Most of the infrastructure for refining and delivering gas was already in place.
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Standard Oil was already huge when ICE cars started being made. Most of the infrastructure for refining and delivering gas was already in place.
Indeed. Remember back before the IC engine was huge, gas/oil lamps and heating systems were around and popular because electricity wasn't.
Browsing wikipedia [wikipedia.org], 1885-1888 seems to be when the first 'practical' IC engine powered automobiles appeared. The model T, 1908, marked the beginning of automobiles entering the homes of the middle class and lower.
Meanwhile, only 70% of households were electrified by 1930. [wikipedia.org] Homes not yet electrified would typically be using a gas like propane or liquid like kerosene for
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That is why certain groups like fuel cells so much more than electric cars. You can still sell the nice hydrocarbon fuel stacks to get the hydrogen. And even though you generate carbon dioxide from reforming natural gas to hydrogen it is also significantly less efficient than just burning the gas directly. In fact a CNG car would probably use less gas per mile than these fuel cell cars will ultimately end up using.
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In most cases hydrogen is generated from natural gas, generating, you guessed it, carbon dioxide in the process.
Hydrogen have the advantage to be generated by a lot of chemical process. Probably the simplest one is the water electrolysis that only require water and electricity. Of course some others process are not so clean, but at least there is large choices and so range of possible improvement, unlike fossil petrol.
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There is also thermochemical cracking [wikipedia.org] which could solve two problems at once - use waste heat from a high-temperature nuclear reactor to make hydrogen as well as conventional baseload generation.
Or, just use concentrating solar - some of these projects reach the temperatures necessary as well.
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"Hydrogen is really just a battery"
Hydrogen is really just a battery in exactly the same way that gasoline and coal are really just batteries.
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Your Passat has neither.
How often do you need to drive for hours at a time? The answer to that will determine whether an alternative fuel vehicle is practical for you.
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The great thing about the Hydrogen economy, is you can increase the amount of renewable on the grid, and convert excess to hydrogen, when you have an excess, like in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
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You have to start somewhere. If we required the full infrastructure to be in place first then we would never advance at all. This may or may not end up working in the long term, but could theoretically have the advantages of gas (i.e. pour some liquid into your car every few miles) and the advantages of electric vehicles (efficiencies of scale by generating large amounts of power instead of all the cars generating small amounts inefficiently).
Why do the hydrogen canard then? Why not burn Compressed Natural Gas? Nearly all the benifits and CHEAP fuel too...
Oh, and before you start into the "Using free solar electricity to disassociate hydrogen from water at home" exercise, let me remind you that even solar power costs (both in money and environmental damage), the process is wildly inefficient and currently the industrial source of hydrogen today is reforming natural gas.
Hydrogen is a nice alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Toyota is currently considered as one of the best companies and great strategic planners. Pioneers too. I did follow the development of this innovation and it is worth saying that Toyota has invested billions of dollars into this project. The same way they have invested in gas-hybrid prototype currently known as Prius.
There will be Hydrogen energy skeptics, the same way there was a reasonable skepticism towards electric cars. Most of the skeptic comments coming from the opponents of electric cars are actually, valid. Such as electric cars are being charged with the coal burned electricity.
The key risk will be mentioned that Hydrogen is extremely volatile and combustive. BMW has developed hydrogen powered cars long time ago. Toyota has actually solved the issue by developing fuel cell. Fuel cell basically is a sponge of certain minerals which chemically absorbs hydrogen so that it is not that volatile.
I am taking a risk and predicting that in ten and fifteen years there will be marketed systems that will convert photovoltaic energy to hydrogen, which will be used to fill Hydrogen cars.
Do not listen too seriously to those who say that there will be no hydrogen refill stations. A decade ago there were not too many electricity recharge stations (though you could recharge your car home). I am sure Toyota has a plan in their sleeve to be in the hydrogen business.
While former criticism for current EV cars was valid, there will be valid complains for Hydrogen cars, let's not forget the key thing: competition is actually a good thing. Embrace it, because even if you are driving a gas car, hydrogen cars will keep the price of gas down due to lower oil demand. Win-win.
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> There will be Hydrogen energy skeptics, the same way there was a reasonable skepticism towards electric cars. Most of the skeptic comments coming from the opponents of electric cars are actually, valid. Such as electric cars are being charged with the coal burned electricity.
Mind you, I want to see this succeed (although I think it's a long shot) but I feel duty bound to point out, hydrogen is usually created with electricity, making it highly likely that hydrogen cars will also be fueled via coal burn
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Fuel cell basically is a sponge of certain minerals which chemically absorbs hydrogen so that it is not that volatile.
No. A fuel cell is a device which turns chemical energy into electrical energy without having to turn it into heat first.
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No. A fuel cell is a device which turns chemical energy into electrical energy without having to turn it into heat first.
Though they do tend to generate quite a bit of heat as a byproduct.
Honestly, they have fuel cells that work with natural gas all the way up to alcohol. While they don't have the energy by mass that hydrogen does, by the time you add in the mass of the storage systems and account for the necessary volumes(or energy needed to compress it to the point of liquification), fuels with some carbon in them often achieve higher practical densities, and it's not like we can't generate NG and alcohols fairly readily.
H
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It does and it's a natural way to "store" hydrogen safely.
I'd argue that carbon is what allows us to 'naturally' store hydrogen safely, not carbon dioxide... ;)
Plus, well, once you're producing your hydrogen from a renewable resource it's not really any harder to break up some CO2 while you're at it and make a hydrocarbon that's far easier to store.
As for my thing about using a fuel cell, I've done the figuring using a IC engine and figured out that all you'd need would be a 5-10hp generator to extend a Model S's range to rather more than most people would be will
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Basically you're not taking a risk by saying such systems will exist in 10 years.
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One of the primary issues I see is separation costs and poor energy efficiency. With gas (petrol on the other side of the pond), energy is expended to boil a bunch of oil and filter out the primarily six-seven-eight carbon molecules at about 350 kJ/kg, which is easily stored and distributed in liquid form to yield about 42,000 kJ/kg upon combustion. That's a nice 100:1 energy produced/separation energy without any need for compression. Obviously more energy is needed to procure the oil, pre-process it, e
oh, I thought it was Japanese for "Hindenberg" (Score:4, Funny)
seriously, folks, I gotta tell ya, it drives 300 miles, period. there is one fuelling station in the country, out in the toolies, because of zoning rules. 400 miles from the dealer.
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seriously, folks, I gotta tell ya, it drives 300 miles, period. there is one fuelling station in the country
So you're really saying unless you want to run out of fuel it has a maximum range of 150 miles from a fixed location. Doesn't seem to threaten Tesla too much...
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> That's because. with electric cars, every owner's garage is also a personal fueling station. The GP was pointing out that difference.
I dunno, for compressed NG cars, every owner's garage who has natural gas piped in is also a personal fueling station. It's a strong argument, but didn't seem to have helped in that case.
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there is one fuelling station in the country, out in the toolies [...]
Yeah, it's not like there aren't any Toyota dealerships in America where they could put in some kind of fueling station...
I suppose this is an advantage to having a dealership network...
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You may have missed the main point.
One fueling station 400 miles from the dealership and the car only has a range of 300 miles. Do the math.
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He's using that new math.
Hm, Prius="Before" vs Mirai="Future" (Score:3)
"Prius" is Latin for "before" [wikipedia.org] while "Mirai" is Japanese for "Future." Kind of sets a bold statement; an old language for hybrids and a new language (Japanese roughly dates back to the 8th century [wikipedia.org]) for the purported future of cars ... which still has yet to be determined.
Contrast this with Nissan, another Japanese automobile manufacturer, which has invested so deeply into battery technology [hybridcars.com] that if the Leaf [wikipedia.org] were to fail, it's quite likely that they'd become a battery company. (A while back, I read (or watched?) a really compelling article/documentary on Nissan's battery research. It concluded that Nissan was gambling so heavily on both its own future with the Leaf and the future of automobiles as being electric that the company would likely stop making cars if the Leaf were to fail. Sorry I can't find a good citation to that.)
The presumption that Hydrogen Fuel Cells will be the "next" car fuel (after either gas or after electric) is still quite a strong one. I've seen it painted (iirc, by the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? [wikipedia.org]) as something the oil companies latched onto because it competed with electric cars (which are ready now) and because hydrogen fuel cell cars are still quite a distant future prospect.
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Contrast this with Nissan, another Japanese automobile manufacturer, which has invested so deeply into battery technology [hybridcars.com] that if the Leaf [wikipedia.org] were to fail, it's quite likely that they'd become a battery company. (A while back, I read (or watched?) a really compelling article/documentary on Nissan's battery research. It concluded that Nissan was gambling so heavily on both its own future with the Leaf and the future of automobiles as being electric that the company would likely stop making cars if the Leaf were to fail. Sorry I can't find a good citation to that.)
You cant find a citation because it isn't true.
Nissan sells 5,000,000 cars per year and made US$3 billion in profit last FY. Nissan makes good cars that sell well, pretty much the antithesis of American car corporations, so they're quite safe.
The Leaf has sold 100,000 units worldwide since 2010... which is actually 45% of the total EV's sold in that time.
Besides, I wouldn't read too much into names. Nissan made a car called the Skyline that was pretty low to the ground and the Pulsar doesn't emit r
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I can guarantee that the combustion products will not leave the engine at -40.
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You know what the major by-products of combustion of regular gasoline are, right?
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You know what the major by-products of combustion of regular gasoline are, right?
Oh stop with all the facts... You are confusing people with the truth.
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To be fair, there is likely some fire to go with the smoke. Regular vehicles which are only driven short distances can collect water in the exhaust which can lead to corrosion. Hydrogen vehicles might experience something similar. And I guess fuel cell exhaust would not reach similar temperatures to an ICE exhaust. But I'm sure the system could easily be designed to ensure icing up would not be a problem.
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You know what the major by-products of combustion of regular gasoline are, right?
Soot, CO, CO2, and nitric oxides, besides the water vapor. Just like burning diesel fuel, except the proportions are different and the soot is finer.
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Water vapor is a Green House Gas, you know!
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haha
you had two jokes in one there.