Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co) 630
Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla, believes hydrogen fuel cells are a "scam". Tarpenning, who is not with Tesla anymore appeared on Internet History Podcast last week to outline a number of issues with hydrogen fuel cells. He said (via Electrek blog): If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don't want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad. There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It's a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive -- it's bound up into everything. It's bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds. Electrolysis is the most common method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas -- and natural gas is not that easy. And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you'll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues -- and that's only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.Here's the podcast.
Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
And a poor way at that. Cannot agree more with his assessment. I have been saying things like this for years, could never understand why people thought it was a great idea.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
*People* never thought is was a good idea: oil and automotive executives do, because hydrogen maintains a gas station-style distribution network. That's why they try so hard to sell it to you.
They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
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They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
You apparently don't live in Canada. Where you have no choosing of your own, and by law in most provinces you must sell that electricity to the provincial energy board.
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It works that way in my house. Got solar panels installed last year. Inverter syncs to the grid, a couple of fuses make sure nothing melts, and that's about it. The meter runs backward when we're producing more than we're using.
Re: Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe the rules are different where you are, but seems common. I even found a standard for disconnecting a working solar system from a dead grid. DIN VDE 0126.1. Why have a standard on how to do it if it was never done?
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:4)
They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home? Even running the conversion on solar power.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:4, Insightful)
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home? Even running the conversion on solar power.
Nothing except cost.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:4, Insightful)
I think safety plays a factor too. You producing hydrogen at home is easy, even when you want to use solar as the energy source.
Your next problem is storage that is hard, hydrogen is pretty reactive, and h2 as molecules go is very small so you have to worry about leaks. Not such a problem dealing small amounts produced experimentally under the fume hood in your HS Chemistry class but could be a serious issue in quantities need to power an automobile. Next you have to start pumping it into some kind of pressure vessel which again without being special engineered for h2 will be even more leaky. If you have this indoors it might go boom.
Its the kinda thing your crazy uncle who got himself an mechanical engineering degree from Lehigh before deciding to get into abstract art and controlled substances might be able to pull off successfully in his garage. The problem is every yokel on the internet will try and copy it, and that's when it goes boom.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home?
Common sense. Conversion of electricity to hydrogen is only about 60% efficient, so you lose 40% right off the top. Then it takes more energy to compress it. If you store it in a metal hydride, that takes more energy, plus increases the weight by an order of magnitude. There are many more problems with hydrogen, such as metal embrittlement and permeability through almost anything.
Hydrogen fuel has mainly been pushed as greenwashing [wikipedia.org], or cynical phoney environmentalism designed to delay adoption of electric cars based on actual sensible technology like lithium batteries. This was most famously done by George W. Bush [cnn.com], to divert research from battery powered electric cars.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:4, Insightful)
to divert research from battery powered electric cars.
I think that may ultimately be the goal... but why would anyone consider hydrogen fuel cells as anything other than a way to store electricity... so really it should be compared to other types of batteries. To me, pronouncing hydrogen fuel cells as a dead end technology is premature. I wouldn't invest in it, but converting electricity into hydrogen to store energy does actually work and perhaps could be made as efficient as storing electricity in batteries. It is pretty far from a "scam" in that you actually have working technology. The issue seems to be cost and efficiency just aren't competitive at the moment. But you can say that about a lot of R&D types of technologies that could end up having some use.
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Apparently pushing a train to the top of a hill...
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It certainly has some efficiency problems and the infrastructure hurdles.
Efficiency and infrastructure are THE ONLY THINGS THAT MATTER. So if loses on both of those, then it is just irredeemably stupid to use it.
you can then burn it in a generation plant when you need a little more electricity.
Burning the H2 in a gas turbine heat engine is about the dumbest possible way to turn it back into electricity. The whole point of using hydrogen is that it works in fuel cells.
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absolutely nothing stops home scale hydrogen production. There is a Canadian company called hydrogenics that makes and sells pre-packaged installations at gas station scale.
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More than that....
Bulk commercial electrolysis hydrogen is terribly expensive - generally over $4/kg wholesale, about $6/kg retail (1kg hydrogen in a FCV gives a range of about 2x that of a gallon of gasoline in a non-hybrid), without any significant fuel taxes (unlike gasoline). Home-scale electrolysis will be inherently less efficient, and home users pay much higher electricity rates than industrial users. They avoid distribution costs/profit, but overall they're going to spend a lot more.
Home NG refor
Re:Home Hydrogen (Score:4, Informative)
Bulk commercial electrolysis hydrogen could be very cheap is there was real demand for it. Steam electrolysis is "over 100% efficient" if you're using waste steam from the power plant (you steal back some of the huge wasted heat of vaporization, making the electricity input low), so making it in vast quantities as a byproduct of power generation would work well. But no one does it because there's no distribution network.
I'm not sure how much sense home electrolysis would make from an efficiency point of view, but from a "I want off the grid, even if it costs more" point of view it's great. You can power a heavy SUV or jacked-up 4x4 pick-em-up-truck with it, which we won't see with battery power any time soon.
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This is the standard canard that can make any technology appear to be more efficient than it is in practice. You can always technically use waste heat for something else. In practice, colocation challenges and/or a lack of demand make this only applicable in specialized circumstances. Reusing waste heat also increases capital costs.
No, from that perspective, it's plain absurd.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:4, Interesting)
Plentiful. Convenient to refuel. Probably the two most important factors for something to be viable for wide scale commercial deployment.
I think the main advantage of hydrogen is that it's waste product is water so in theory it should have less polution but as far as convenience, instead of using electricity to make pure hydrogen, it makes a lot more sense to use electricity to make hydrocarbon fuel (some sort of artificial gasoline created by splitting co2 and/or h2o). An artificial fuel could use the existing distribution channels and doesn't need special pressurized containers. Batteries, fuel cells, etc... don't even come close to the amount of energy per pound of regular hydrocarbons. I wouldn't be surprised if firewood actually has more energy per pound than current battery technology.
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I gotta disagree... it makes absolutely no sense at all to create a new hydrocarbon fuel. Problem #1: availability of carbon... it will take energy to extract it from the air or other sources. Problem #2, nobody knows yet of a way to guarantee that every hydrocarbon molecule correctly decomposes back to CO2, meaning that some resulting CO will be created by the combustion process, the whole argument for hydrogen cars is the elimination of carbon from the cycle... why reintroduce it. Problem #3: Creating
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H2 is not plentiful. There is no natural source of H2. It is rare. You have to make it by electrolysis or from CH4 by very inefficient methods.
There is no distribution network for H2. You have to build plants and compressors and tank trucks and storage tanks and they all leak since H2 is such a small molecule. Millions of dollars for a single distribution point.
Electricity already has a ubiquitous distribution network. It's literally available everywhere. Just plug your car in at home (or work, etc.). Elect
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A lot of people travel distances larger than is currently covered by many electric vehicle ranges. Most of the good ones seem to target 250 miles per charge. While that's fine for going to work and back, for interstate travel people can easily travel 700-1000 miles per day. Turning what would be a single day's drive into a multi day trip waiting for recharges is not very appealing.
Then there's the question of things like towing capacity. IE - I fish a lot. My boat isn't that big (its a small 16ft fishi
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
So, where do you recharge your H2 vehicle on long trips?
I charge my Tesla at Superchargers which are already installed just about everywhere. Drive 3-4 hours, charge 30 minutes (usually ready for some food and a break by then), drive another 3-4 hours, repeat...
Tesla Model X can tow your boat (it has a 5000 lb rated hitch).
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So, where do you recharge your H2 vehicle on long trips? I charge my Tesla at Superchargers which are already installed just about everywhere. Drive 3-4 hours, charge 30 minutes (usually ready for some food and a break by then), drive another 3-4 hours, repeat... Tesla Model X can tow your boat (it has a 5000 lb rated hitch).
First, you're mistaken when you say that Superchargers are installed just about everywhere. There are only 624 Supercharger stations [teslamotors.com] in the entire country. There are a few very large states that do not have a single Supercharger. That just doesn't compare to the estimated 126,000 gas stations [slashdot.org] in the US.
Secondly, I believe that you're missing the point. Batteries are still not the most ideal energy storage mechanism for long-distance travel because of the time required to charge a battery (30-minutes) wh
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Superchargers are installed about every 150 miles. Mostly near Interstates. There are very few places without a Supercharger and there are also about 10,000 other electric vehicle chargers in the US (plus every house or business has an electric plug). Tesla will double the number of Superchargers in the next year.
H2 charging doesn't exist so you can predict anything but the $1-2 million cost for an H2 charging station makes them ten times as expensive as a Supercharger so I don't think many of them will get
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I'm waiting for the first video of someone trying to _launch_ a 5000lb boat with a Tesla. The intersection of stupid and rich is surprising and amusing.
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Well, you could look at it in a pragmatic way.
Seen the rapid evolution of electric cars these last 5 years, it's not all that far-fetched to predict that e-cars will continue to improve, and superchargers will continue to be built and improve too. In the very beginning, cars could not even muster 100 km, now they're doing 300km. Five years ago, you had NO superchargers, now you have several hundreds of them.
Now, continue this for the next 5-10 years. Then you'll have cars doing 900km and have thousands of s
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Hydrogen compressed at 700 bar = 142MJ/kg. 1.1 Kg is therefore 156.4 MJ. That's 3.25 x the density of diesel. So this equates to +/- 3,57 Kg of diesel which equates to +/- 4.2 liters of diesel.
So 4.2 liters of diesel would be good for 300 miles in this car. Not bad, that's 71 miles per liter.
What's the name of the company providing the figures? Volkswagen?
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Interesting)
That was...that was like the Onion or something. That's like saying Subway saying they're nervous about the pizza place because the pizza place doesn't use buns. Oil companies don't care how gas is distributed -- and they certainly don't care how hydrogen is distributed, as long as there is gas involved somewhere.
Fuel cell cars have been "on the verge" since the mid 90s -- I worked with a couple people who eventually were employed by Nissan and Honda. There are FCVs out there -- but they aren't efficient, there isn't a hydrogen infrastructure, etc. The idea of an FCV is nice: no giant battery, no pollution from the car...but like the Tesla employee said, there's a cost to getting hydrogen into the cars -- the whole cycle is a challenge to make efficient. Ideally, it may be cleaner than giant batteries from cradle to grave...but even after decades of work, it's still not there yet.
I think of the idea of roads that charge the cars as they drive...but that's not too far from just having cars get loaded onto a train for long distances. The US, at least in its populous areas, should think more about mass transit. Futuristic mass transit (think Asimov) Heck, even Uber and Lyft are making a dent in everyone using their car all the time.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are mod points when I need them???
This. This. This!
I remember talking with my grandfather years ago about the future of energy for cars. He's a EE who ran a telecom infrastructure company for years and always saw things from the infrastructure perspective. Whatever was least disruptive to the energy ecosystem as a whole was going to win. Given the entrenched players at every stage in the distribution chain, hydrogen made the most sense. Each industry segment would profit greatly from upgrading their infrastructure to support hydrogen while not having to abandon their place in the process.
Electric cars upend multiple industries - from oil services all the way to convenience stores. Change will be fought tooth-and-nail. I just hope Elon doesn't run out of cash before he's had a chance to force the issue on electric cars.
-Chris
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Insightful)
The H2 vision is based more on the thought that batteries will not get to a successful range/charge/recharge/cost balance. Batteries are progressing but not yet to that point, but close enough to re-think H2. I've never thought H2 made any sense simply due to inefficiency of the entire process. Fuel cells in general are still only niche products even after tremendous investment in development for the last 20 years. However, if cheap enough hydrogen could be produced, we would see that niche grow to a bigger portion of the market.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course existing infrastructure is bad for hydrogen, but upgrading existing infrastructure is part of the benefit for the hydrogen crowd. While the physical elements of our current infrastructure definitely won't support hydrogen, the business infrastructure is already in place to match the existing fuel distribution model. A one-time cap-ex investment to swap out fossil fuel infrastructure components with components that can support hydrogen is all that is needed to maintain the existing business model. Sure, it won't be cheap, but it will likely be a supported by tax incentives (create local jobs to do the retrofit, write off retrofit) and it provides an opportunity for the oil service industry to learn hydrogen infrastructure by developing it on the taxpayer's dime.
Don't think about this like a financial engineer, not a civil engineer. It doesn't matter what makes the most sense from a technical perspective, what matters is not disrupting cash flow for entrenched industries. I didn't really appreciate this argument until I started running a company. But after spending the last four years around finance people, I have a new appreciation about how they (and by extension, most businesses) view the world. They optimize around profits, not technology.
-Chris
Hybrids are the path of least resistance (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't think about this like a financial engineer, not a civil engineer. It doesn't matter what makes the most sense from a technical perspective, what matters is not disrupting cash flow for entrenched industries.
Well I am an accountant and an engineer. You are right about progress following the path of least economic resistance but I think you have that path misidentified. Part of the flaw in your argument is in thinking there is just one big industry in the fight here. Basically you will be pitting the electric generation companies against the refining companies. Except not really or at least not immediately.
The least disruptive technology is actually plug in hybrids because it bridges both types of infrastructure. It can behave exactly as current gas powered cars do. As battery technology gets better you'll see the range of the electric vehicles go up and the charging times go down and the charging infrastructure get built out. Eventually you reach a tipping point.where it makes sense to go all electric and drop the second engine. In the mean time the gas station still sells fuel, the electric company gets time to beef up their already existing infrastructure and you don't have to introduce any truly different infrastructure like compressed gas or specialty chemicals.
To make fuel cell vehicles work you have to build out all new infrastructure everywhere all at once and to date they are behind the curve in performance. There is no consensus on what form hydrogen should be distributed in or how it should be implemented on the vehicle. With hybrids you can incrementally solve the problem today. I don't think it is very likely that fuel cells will make some miraculous technological leap that will make building out all that extra infrastructure economically worthwhile in the near future.
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Eventually, they will if they have to, but they might not have to. People will give more business to less-traveled stations -
Where are they going to get the extra land from? Buy it? Should they relocate? Accommodating 2000 cars/hour is hard enough on a 25km stretch of highway, you think it's going to be easy in a parking lot? Right now the fuel stations can get by on a small patch of land primarily because cars aren't parked on that patch for 30-60mins at a time.
You're basically looking at the scenario of one car every two seconds and thinking that someone, somewhere, is going to invest in a parking lot that can handle the inflow
Electric vs fossil fuel infrastructure (Score:3)
Electric cars upend multiple industries - from oil services all the way to convenience stores. Change will be fought tooth-and-nail. I just hope Elon doesn't run out of cash before he's had a chance to force the issue on electric cars.
That's why you'll see hybrids first. Hybrids don't completely upset the apple cart and provide a transition technology. Plus you have to remember that there is the electrical grid which provides competing infrastructure to the fossil fuel system. The problem with hydrogen is that unless you can turn it into some sort of liquid form, the existing infrastructure for gasoline refueling is really no better than the electrical grid. Either way you have a substantial build out. Just because hydrogen is a che
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Well there is still the electric car issue of Charging speed.
With most electric cars today getting a decent 100 miles per charge, that makes them good for most people daily commute and they charge at home over night.
However if you need to take a trip over 100 miles then you will need to stop and charge up taking a lot more time than the couple of minutes at the gas station.
So if by a gas car you get 8 hours of driving a day (400 miles) That 8 hours would be 10 hours with an electric car with 4 30 minute cha
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There's a simple near-term solution for this "range anxiety" problem with long trips: don't use EVs for them, use gas cars.
All you have to do is have multiple cars. Have one EV that you use for your daily commuting and trips where you're sure you won't go over 100 miles (or 200-something for longer-range EVs) in a single day. Then keep around a single gas car for road trips. For families, this should be a lot easier; one person can drive the gas car, the other the EV, or if they can afford it, both peopl
Battery swap, not charge (Score:3)
Uh.. Just to be accurate, that's a battery swap station, not a supercharger. Basically a lift with a robotic wrench - undo all the bolts holding the battery on, remove the old battery(placing it into a charging port), grab a fully charged one and bolt it back on.
A supercharger still generally needs 30 minutes to an hour.
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*People* never thought is was a good idea: oil and automotive executives do, because hydrogen maintains a gas station-style distribution network.
I'm sorry, this is total BS. I've had arguments about this issue before right here on /., and there's no shortage of people willing to argue for hydrogen, and that's on a site with "tech nerds". Just scroll down a bit and you'll find plenty of pro-hydrogen, anti-EV posts right here in today's thread.
Yes, "people" do think hydrogen is a great idea.
That said, you'r
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People (government) also thinks it is a great idea to take USA food-stocks (corn) to make ethanol. It is kick-backs and subsidies -- these technologies would never exist on their own without the government subsidies (because the ideas are not profitable, and even wasteful).
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Informative)
People (government) also thinks it is a great idea to take USA food-stocks (corn) to make ethanol. It is kick-backs and subsidies -- these technologies would never exist on their own without the government subsidies (because the ideas are not profitable, and even wasteful).
While I am not a proponent of ethanol fuels, the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place. Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass which has similar yields but requires much less water to grow. So, using food stocks for fuel production did not happen on a large scale, although it is feasible that some farmers switched from food stocks to non food stocks most planted acreage that was not in production.
What any of that has to do with hydrogen fuel cells is beyond me.
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You think there are two types of corn, one for cows, and another for humans? Who are you shilling for?
94% of the ethanol produced in the United States is from CORN -- which is a staple of the American diet, see: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/us-bioenergy-statistics.aspx
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This is not true. Switchgrass is not used to any significant extent for ethanol production.
And really, what do you think people were using dent corn for before? Do you think they just stopped using it? Dent corn isn't eaten as corn-on-the-cob, but it's used for animal feed, making corn oil, corn syrup, corn starch, etc. Do you think people just stopped consuming meat and corn products? And instead are getting their energy and nutrition from air?
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It's true that Ethanol is not made with crops intended for human consumption, but it is grown on land that in many cases used to grow crops for human consumption. Ethanol production too arable land away from food production, which in the end is close to the same end result as if it took the crop itself.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of it is used as cheap feed for cattle, since Americans love beef. Some of it is given away as foreign aid. Someone came up with the idea of processing the corn to create HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) as a substitute for imported sugar (which grows readily in the U.S. only in Florida and Hawaii).
And someone came up with the idea of converting that excess corn into ethanol to use as a gasoline substitute. This is why our ethanol program is based on such a terrible source crop - the efficiency or cost to grow the corn wasn't a factor because it was a sunk cost. This was excess corn which was going to be eaten by mice and rats anyway - better to get some use out of it than none.
Fast-forward to today. The ethanol lobby has become a monster. We are no longer talking about excess corn which was going to go to waste. Through their lobbying, they've gotten subsidies to grow corn for the explicit purpose of turning it into ethanol. Now it's no longer a sunk cost - the cost to grow that corn and the efficiency of converting it into ethanol ARE a factor. And it's a huge waste of money and resources for what amounts to a needless subsidy of the corn-agri business.
This does have a roundabout tie to hydrogen as a fuel. Liberating hydrogen from water via electrolysis is massively inefficient (about 30% on an industrial scale - 70% of the energy becomes heat). But liberating hydrogen from a higher energy state like in methane can be done much more efficiently. If (big if since there's been little research) you can come up with an efficient and cost-effective way to convert plant sugars or plant matter into ethanol (highly unlikely to be corn), then that becomes a renewable source of high-energy hydrogen. Liberate the hydrogen from the ethanol and you can send it through a hydrogen fuel cell at a much better efficiency. (Of course simply burning the ethanol in an ICE or converting the plant matter into biodiesel may be even more efficient.)
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
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the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place.
The corn is fed to cows and pigs which are then eaten by humans. So indirectly, it is still food.
Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass
Switchgrass stores energy as cellulose. There are a few pilot projects trying to converting cellulose to ethanol, but it is not yet happening on an industrial scale.
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Even if the crop wasn't consumed directly, it arguably displaces food crops from aerable land, and could be used to feed livestock. The same objection holds with switchgrass, which can also be used for grazing.
The link between ethanol subsidies and world hunger has quite a lot of data behind it. The New York Times [nytimes.com] editorialized specifically on the effect on Guatemalan food prices due to the shift of US corn production from food to fuel. Or there is this artcile [forbes.com] from Forbes. Or the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com].
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People think it's a good idea because the president of the US (Bush Jr.) got on TV and said it was and people believe what they are told on TV.
Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen has lots of issues too. You need a pressurized tank, but hydrogen has a bad tendency to infiltrate the metal in the tank and make it brittle, increasing the risk of explosion. This also makes distribution difficult. Then fuel cells proved to be very touchy and plagued with short lifetimes, especially if the hydrogen wasn't laboratory pure. There's a reason fuel cells never took off and it's not a massive oil conspiracy, it just never made sense.
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>> hydrogen has a bad tendency to infiltrate the metal in the tank and make it brittle, increasing the risk of explosion
This is exactly why they're mostly made out of composites these days.
Re: Hydogen is just a way to store energy (Score:3)
Not here on earth it isn't. Here we have to extract it from other compounds, which consumes energy.
He got one thing wrong - the commonest source of bulk hydrogen isn't electrolysis, it's cracking of natural gas. Which is the core reason that fossil fuel companies love it -preserves their market, lets them green wash their image.
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We're still not very good with the oxygen side of the equation. If you're willing to not take half of your reaction from the air, then you can use chemicals that don't have overvoltage issues on the oxidizer end - for example, hydrogen/chlorine and hydrogen/bromine fuel cells are readily reversible and yield ~90% efficiency, as well as higher power densities and cheaper electrodes. But when you have tanks of both reactants and running power through in both directions then they're no longer considered fuel
Also (Score:2)
"They just have an extraordinarily bad battery."
Also, very interesting and insightful perspective...but does it also account for more efficient processes that are constantly being developed or aimed for?
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"They just have an extraordinarily bad battery." Also, very interesting and insightful perspective...but does it also account for more efficient processes that are constantly being developed or aimed for?
well the same could be said for batteries themselves.
If Hydrogen is currently a much worse battery than say Ni-MH, and we have much better batteries than NiMH, then why would we put some sort of faith in Hydrogen extraction not only getting better, but getting better at a faster rate than battery technology that has consistently out-paced Hydrogen, by a lot.
Hydrogen storage: an engineering trade off (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. This post seems to list all the disadvantages, and none of the advantages.
As noted, hydrogen isn't an energy source-- it's an energy storage medium. But then, Tesla's batteries aren't an energy source either-- they are an energy storage system that takes energy from somewhere else. Hydrogen can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it can fill up cars in gas pipelines. Electricity can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it charges car batteries by wires. Same principle, different medium. (In principle, electricity could be shipped to the charging station, and produce hydrogen on-site by electrolysis-- but it's probably more efficiency to make the hydrogen remotely.)
Hydrogen's advantage is that it is extremely light: you can react it with air, you don't have to carry the air around, and hydrogen is the lightest thing there is to react with air. Weight-wise, hydrogen is the best possible fuel.
Hydrogen's disadvantage is that it is extremely light: it is hard to store a lot of it because the density is very low. You can do a little better if you go all the way to liquid hydrogen-- but nobody is going to do that for a car (not, at least, until cryo storage gets a lot better)-- and even liquid hydrogen has about the density of the lightest grade of styrofoam. So, the tanks are either big, or high pressure-- or both.
Advantage and disadvantages. This is what makes an engineering trade off.
With current technology, I'd go with batteries. Two or three generations down the line? Your estimate of technology progress is probably as good as mine.
Re:Hydrogen storage: an engineering trade off (Score:4, Informative)
The point of the post is that Hydrogen is a really rotten method of storing electricity. You lose 20-50% of the energy converting to hydrogen, storing it and then reconverting it to electricity. These are hard losses, they cannot be recovered for reduced without eliminating the hydrogen. These losses are astronomical in comparison to directly storing and using the electricity from a battery.
There was a recent study looking at an economy that moved entirely to electricity. One of the interesting things about it is that we'd need to generate about 30% less energy as electricity than the total energy of the hydrocarbons we are burning because of all the inefficiencies of hydrocarbon energy conversion. Hydrogen is even worse than hydrocarbons.
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In practice, FCVs are much worse than just their electrolysis losses. Fuel cells don't run at optimal efficiency all the time, their optimal efficiencies are still lossy, and there's other losses in the system. As a general rule, an FCV gets half or less as much range per unit energy put in.
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There is the fact that hydrogen sucks to store compared to other fuels like propane, diesel fuel, or gasoline.
What would excel is a fuel that is pulled from the air that can use existing infrastructure, without needing exotic tanks, heavy expense in upkeep (a H2 tank needs inspected quite often, while a propane tank can sit in the back of a garage for decades and still be fine), and can be pumped by Joe Sixpack who might know enough to not smoke near the gas pump, but not much else.
I'd say the best solution
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The reason they're not talking about how you generate the electricity is because you have to do that step whether you use that electricity to directly charge your car, or whether you use it to split water. The loss is the same at that stage between EVs and HFCVs. Where the losses differ is in what the article talks about - splitting hydrogen loses you 60% of your energy, compressing it loses you another chunk, burning it in a fuel cell loses you yet another chunk. It's much more efficient to just store i
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At the risk of being pedantic, the same is true of fossil fuel. It's just that the fossil fuel is pre-packaged for us by nature. Crude oil is comparatively cheap and easy to refine into motor fuel. Natural gas and coal are literally grabbed and burned with next to no processing.
Actually hydrogen is packaged in rich form, mixed only with some helium, for us too. Just not on Earth, and very expensive to gather and transport to Earth.
For that matte
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Hydrogen's advantage is that it is extremely light: you can react it with air, you don't have to carry the air around, and hydrogen is the lightest thing there is to react with air. Weight-wise, hydrogen is the best possible fuel.
Gasoline and diesel also react with air. The chemical energy density per kg of hydrogen is pretty high, though. The volumetric density is low: 35.8MJ/liter of diesel at 1 atmosphere, 5.6MJ/liter of hydrogen at 700 atmospheres.
Advantage and disadvantages. This is what makes an engineering trade off.
Hydrogen is used in space rocket launches because you can set up an empty booster, pump the first single-stage full of liquid hydrogen as a reactant, and then blast off a little while later. Cars sit around with fuel in the tank for weeks, and the tanks aren't meant for recovery
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Proponents always resort to this stupid comparison. Tell me, when was the last time that you hopped into a cloud of hydrogen and drove it around?
A fuel is not a complete vehicle.
The mass of the best full hydrogen tanks for FCVs are only about 6% hydrogen; the rest is the tank mass. Increasing the pressure only decreases that number - pressure only decreases tank volume, but somewhat increases tank mass per kg hydrogen. On top of tankage, fuel cells have l
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"They just have an extraordinarily bad battery."
Also, very interesting and insightful perspective...but does it also account for more efficient processes that are constantly being developed or aimed for?
Well, it's not news. And you can't predict the future, absent an operating crystal ball or what have you. I'm fresh out of magic tea leaves. But let's say that a more efficient process for separating hydrogen is found. To me, this is the really interesting part:
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Excellent points, to which one more not widely realized should be added: there is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.
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Fuel cell cars all have significant-size traditional batteries as well, because during acceleration or climbing of hills you need more power than a practical fuel cell can provide.
Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen is an energy *vector*, not an energy source. The energy must come from somewhere - natural gas usually - and, as TFA's author points out, the efficiency of the entire chain from energy source to the wheels is quite insanely bad.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Funny)
What happened to massive solar farms producing electricity for hydrogen, as tended by robots who also serve up blueberries the size of softballs for lunch?
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Presumably, those massive solar farms could more efficiently convert atmospheric CO2 to diesel fuel.
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Hydrogen is an energy *vector*, not an energy source. The energy must come from somewhere - natural gas usually - and, as TFA's author points out, the efficiency of the entire chain from energy source to the wheels is quite insanely bad.
Vectors are an important part of the overall equation. Different regions of the world have different viabilities of energy production. Some areas have lots of wind, some lots of light, some with rivers that offer a great opportunity to dam and harness the energy. Iceland currently generates nearly 100% of their electricity from renewable energy (75% hydro, 25% geothermal). It might make sense for Iceland to use their natural energy production assets to store energy in a 'vector' and export it. If that
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Why would you expect that? (Score:2)
Water is everywhere. It's more likely easier in the end to produce hydrogen locally, using any one of the many promising techniques that are in research right now, than it is to have wires running everywhere to handle the load of every car needing battery charging.
Hydrogen is also VASTLY faster to fuel a car with.
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So, some maybe future, hydrogen might be possibly safer.
Hydrogen requires cold and/or pressure vessels and delivery mechanisms. All which will need replacing regularly as they become brittle. Also, hydrogen is much more explosive than gas, so will require extra vapor controls. But gas is more expensive? Right.
Upfront, hydrogen won't make it because the infrastructure for electricity is already there.
And then let's not ignore the 40-50% loss in extracting & using hydrogen.
He's Right (Score:2, Insightful)
He's right about all of the negatives, but even that being the case it doesnt mean that a "really bad battery" still isnt the best thing we have for a use case of converting excess power into storage which can provide long range to cars. Personally I hope batteries win but the argument for hydrogen isnt meritless.
He's not wrong, with one caveat. (Score:4, Informative)
There have been recent developments in using a catalytic reaction to generate H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) from sea water and sunlight. Hydrogen peroxide is much more reactive (i.e. easier to separate the hydrogen) than water, and much more energy dense at room temperature and atmospheric pressure than hydrogen alone. This is the only promising solution to the hydrogen problem that I've seen.
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You don't get free hydrogen from separation of hydrogen peroxide; you get free oxygen plus water. H2O2 -> O + H2O. And concentrated hydrogen peroxide (not the 3% stuff in the drugstores) is highly explosive and needs no other reactant, except a catalyst-- it's used as a rocket fuel. Not something going in my car.
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You don't want rocket fuel in your car? You are missing out.
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Damn greenies, won't let my hydrazine powered car on the roads.
I want a carbon fiber, blown W16 car that runs on _monatomic_ hydrogen.
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Hydrogen peroxide isn't in itself an _explosive_ so trying to paint it as high(ly) explosive is simply wrong. It is highly reactive though which means the storage and distribution of it have to use very clean, compatible materials. Rest assured that nobody sane will use a catalyst instead of a compatible material!
"we live on a planet where..."??? (Score:2)
Is he suggesting that there are places where hydrogen is *NOT* super-reactive?
Even if you try and take everything else away, since hydrogen won't actually react with anything if there's nothing else around for it to react with, that doesn't really change how reactive hydrogen actually is.
Oh, and as for the energy that it takes to get hydrogen from water... it also takes energy to make fossil fuels... over hundreds of thousands or millions of years,
Now generalize your thinking (Score:2)
You can apply this kind of analysis to just about and "green" technology and come to the same conclusion.
But at least here we have a start.
EVs aren't that much better (Score:5, Interesting)
From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla [futurepundit.com] is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor. Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)
So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ. Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.
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Your efficiency comparison model is woefully incomplete/inaccurate. Most research suggests a 3x efficiency margin for battery EV over Hydrogen FCEV:
http://phys.org/news/2006-12-h... [phys.org]
Misconception (Score:2)
FTFS:
Essentially correct, obviously. There is a very small concentration of hydrogen in the atmosphere, but mechanically extracting it is economically prohibitive.
Utter nonsense. 96% of all hydrogen produced comes from reforming fossil fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas. Only 4% comes from electrolysis of water. Electrolysis is very uneconomical
Pls decouple saving money & saving environment (Score:3)
>> If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible.
Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money", he's entirely playing on peoples existing misconceptions that "green" cars are also intended to save the owner money, which is entirely not true.
They're all and only about doing something to reduce emissions from fossil fuel emissions (so don't take into account any extra pollutants from manufacture or recycling of batteries etc). The total cost per mile of ownership of a "green" car is very likely going to be significantly more than say a small efficient conventional gas car like a Toyota Yaris, which is fine if your priorities really are saving the atmosphere not saving money, so please lets get off this stupid misconception once and for all.
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Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money",
They're related, and directly so. We manufacture energy by the application of labor; if you're going to store energy from solar, geothermal, wind, or other source into a different-source medium (i.e. not storing oil as fuel oil), you're going to spend more labor (and thus pay more wages, thus incur more cost) using a less-efficient one. That is to say: If you generate 5MWh of consumable hydrogen using 30MWh of electricity, you're going to spend more money than if you store 23MWh of usable electricity in
Picking Winners and Unaffordable Cars (Score:2)
A scam for mobile (Score:2)
Thorium! LFTRs fix everything (Score:3)
Thorium Remix 2016 [youtube.com]
Even if you don't bother with making cleaner burning synthetic fuels like they mention because LFTRs give you cheap power to do all kinds of fun things, just replacing natgas power plants with LFTRs would free up fuel for natgas powered vehicles. Actually, we have enough natgas to do that now but... Thorium!
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:1 billion batteries every ten years. (Score:4, Informative)
The primary constituents of lithium ion batteries are actually relatively straight forward to recycle (Lithium, Cobalt, Copper, Nickel, Graphite (carbon), Aluminum are the most common elements), and the batteries have useful lifetimes well beyond 10 years. However, the capacity degradation curve for Li-ion chemistries is mostly logarithmic, meaning even after it's done as an EV power store (say at 2/3s original capacity which might be reached after 10 years), it can last another 20+ years as grid storage, which doesn't require anywhere near the same weight/size to energy ratio.
Remarks off base in many ways. (Score:3)
*Hydrogen products takes power to make.
Absolutely true! On the other hand it doesn't leak away into the non-existence like electricity stored in batteries either. Our batteries don't maintain charge all that well, just ask an electrical engineer, they have the numbers on this stuff and it's not big secret either. You'd think someone from Tesla would know that.
The advantages of using Hydrogen are that it can be stored for a long time, be shipped to somewhere else, and can 'refuel' a vehicle a LOT faster than recharging a battery. (Unless you swap out uncharged batteries for charged ones, but that's a different story the electric vehicle manufacturers don't want to go into.) Also, unlike a rechargeable battery, if you maintain the system, you will almost never have to replace your fuel tank.
Currently, our common processes of producing hydrogen use electricity for electrolysis, and that has a few points on it's own to cover. First, there are some new versions of electrolysis that are more efficient, there is a new method that functions more like photosynthesis (it's a new development, you'll have to hit the science sites to read about it), and there's a mystery device by a paranoid inventor that I don't think has allowed any proper independent verification so this last one probably is an actual scam. Of course all of those methods do have an important quality, they can all be done with renewable energy sources, even those with limited functionality like wind and solar. (If the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing, those methods won't generate power, and that's why they are limited. You have to find a reliable way to store the excess for the non-productive times.) We do all agree that getting away from fossil fuels is good, right?
*Hydrogen hydrogen hydrogen... Yes, fuel cells that we have use hydrogen, but not all of them use the gas. Some of them are fueled by hydrogen from another source. Usually a liquid like methanol. (It would be great to use water directly, but that's a pretty tight molecule, and despite some unsubstantiated claims, it's unlikely to happen.) Again, if someone knew anything worth mentioning about fuel cells, they should bloody well know about this!
*Storage. Storing pressurized hydrogen gas is a bit of a pain, but it was solved years ago. In fact, they've designed those types of tanks for cars that are rated as safer than the gas tank your vehicle already has. (If you have an internal combustion vehicle.) And yes, it has a system similar to the traditional fuel station you're used to. Of course, it's totally non-compatible with the gas stations we currently have as it needs completely different tanks & pumps. If you didn't know, it's so expensive to replace those big storage tanks, it's cheaper to build a new station, which isn't something that any fuel company wants to do. They haven't been proponents of hydrogen in any form, they've consistently been opponents, except for a few one shot concept vehicles they've thrown out to mollify certain environmentalists and government types, and to catch a bit of 'environmentally friendly' press out of it. There's a huge history of their obstructionism on this field, go look it up.
*Oh the humanity! How many people that were on the Hindenburg were burned by the hydrogen? Zero. Yep, all those burns were from the diesel that fueled the engines. Ok, some might have been from the burning cabins and junk inside, but it still wasn't the hydrogen. By the way, for the hydrogen to ignite, it was exposed to flames or sparks outside of the gasbags. All in all, the biggest fear people apparently spout over hydrogen is the Hindenburg disaster, which is rather messed up. Even if they'd have had helium instead, the results would have been very similar. Unless the helium outflow smothered the flames on the outer covering, in which case it's descent speed would have been a lot slower, and might have avoided the rupture that spewed
Good for off-the-grid surplus solar. (Score:3)
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OTEC has been "coming" forever, I went to a presentation that reads astonishingly like that Wikipedia article 40 years ago when I started college. The mechanisms were the same, the idea of using the energy to generate chemicals rather than send electricity through long cables was the same (back then they were suggested ammonia rather than hydrogen, but that's in the Wikipedia article too.)
Curious that the efficiency could be up to 6% -- now, granted, we're not using that temperature difference at all now,
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Nor right.
Re:Lithium ion batteries in cars are a scam too (Score:4, Interesting)
The Tesla batteries are actually outlasting their estimates. At 8 years and 100,000 miles (the standard warranty), they still hold over 85% of their charge; and the Tesla Model S usually only allows an 80% charge, unless you tell it to fill up for a long trip. For commuters or a system with a high availability of Tesla's 20-minute super chargers, you'd still be going 100 miles between a charge (about an hour and a half) at 30% battery life, 37 years into the car's life; commuters particularly are doing under 50 miles per day and coming home to charge in between.
In the short-term, long trips are unfeasible on a new electric car due to lacking infrastructure and long charge times; in the long-term, severely-degraded cars 40 years and half a million miles into their life could still make cross-country trips on the original battery.
A properly-maintained gasoline engine often can't make 250,000 miles without a rebuild; the car is considered old and dead after 100,000 miles, but that's kind of dumb. breaking 400,000 miles on a Tesla battery in the above scenario should be doable. My car, at 100,000 miles, is getting 78% of its original range; I'll probably have sunk around $7,000 total into maintenance (including transmission maintenance--Teslas don't have one) after I've had the engine's systems repaired to get it back to its full range of 320 miles on an 11 gallon tank. Mind you the car's 12 years old; it's been cheap to maintain. Just a 2004 Mazda 3, and that's still on the L-Series engine (a Ford make; Mazda switched to their own engine for the 3 series, which is superior in terms of early-life maintenance costs, and thus total lifespan).
Right now they're on rough par for lifespan; electric cars are doing better for fuel costs and maintenance in most use cases.
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