Toyota Establishes Research Institute In China To Study Hydrogen, Green Tech (reuters.com) 82
Japan announced on Sunday it was setting up a research institute in Beijing in partnership with Tsinghua University to study car technology using hydrogen power and other green technologies that could ease environmental problems in China. Reuters reports: The initiative, outlined by Toyota's President and Chief Executive Akio Toyoda in a speech at Tsinghua University, is part of the Japanese carmaker's efforts to share more technology with China as it seeks to expand its business in the country by beefing up manufacturing capacity and distribution channels, a source close to Toyota said. The Tsinghua-Toyota Joint Research Institute will conduct research into cars and new technology to solve environmental problems in China, including reducing traffic accidents, Toyota said in a statement.
The institute will "cooperate in research not only related to cars for Chinese consumers, but also in research related to active utilization of hydrogen energy that can help solve China's energy problems," the company said. The move dovetails with Toyota's announcement this month that it would offer carmakers and suppliers around the world free access to nearly 24,000 patents for electric vehicle technologies.
The institute will "cooperate in research not only related to cars for Chinese consumers, but also in research related to active utilization of hydrogen energy that can help solve China's energy problems," the company said. The move dovetails with Toyota's announcement this month that it would offer carmakers and suppliers around the world free access to nearly 24,000 patents for electric vehicle technologies.
what's this "hydrogen energy" nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
it takes energy to make hydrogen. three quarters of china's electricity production is based on coal. large scale electrolysis of water loses half the energy, so you'll be burning extra coal to power something.
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Add more energy to convert it into something you can actually store and pump like ammonia. Leaving it as hydrogen makes your container brittle over time.
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It's worse than that. Hydrogen, even in liquid form, has much less energy per volume than gasoline. You can easily get into a situation where it costs as much energy to transport the fuel to stations as is contained in the fuel you're transporting. For automobile fuel, you don't *just* have to make it, you also have to transport it, and there's a significant cost to that also, relative to the benefit.
Hydrogen makes a lot more sense if you can use it in place; for instance, as fuel for a fusion plant.
But
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I remember when fusion was only ten years away. We used to be so much closer.
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For automobile fuel, you don't *just* have to make it, you also have to transport it
Actually, H2 can be generated on-site if you have electricity and water.
In the electric car competition, it is clear that lithium batteries are winning, but it still makes sense to do research on H2. There are some applications, such as mid-range aviation, where hydrogen could be superior.
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> Actually, H2 can be generated on-site if you have electricity and water.
True. But then, H2 becomes merely a way of storing the energy in electricity, minus the losses of creating it. That still may make sense, depending on what you need it for, assuming it didn't make more sense to store the electricity in batteries and use it directly, which seems to be the direction we're going in now.
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Actually, H2 can be generated on-site if you have electricity and water.
Indeed, but you can't generate it purely. Which means you're stuck with:
a) a product not suitable for hydrogen fuel cells which is one of the leading areas of H2 vehicle research.
b) a product that stores 1/3rd less energy than Hydrogen which already stores less energy than other fuels.
c) you need an expensive process to separate the two which is hardly worth doing unless it's done at scale.
More fundamentally though, why would you settle for the hugely inefficient way of storing electrical energy involving l
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most the hydrogen in water can't be used for fusion anyway, you need a star sized reactor, heh.
of course, we already have a fusion reactor in the sky that can process hydrogen... but China mostly isn't using that.
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most the hydrogen in water can't be used for fusion anyway, you need a star sized reactor, heh.
of course, we already have a fusion reactor in the sky that can process hydrogen... but China mostly isn't using that.
And the photovoltaic cells they *do* make tend to produce toxic waste as a byproduct.
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Well, that's one way of making hydrogen. I was under the impression that there was a cheap way of making it from natural gas or something like that. Of course, what's the point if you could just power your cars directly with natural gas (which is not unusual for fleet vehicles but hasn't caught on for consumers).
So, yeah, I've yet to see any decent argument for powering vehicles with hydrogen over whatever is used to create the hydrogen.
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Because then you're burning something, releasing carbon compounds into the atmosphere, which just makes a bad problem worse. Better to do something else with it -- or better yet skip all this hydrogen stuff and just focus on better energy storage technologies, and better secondary battery cells.
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When you reform natural gas into hydrogen, it either releases CO2 and O2 or it releases CO that reacts with O2 in the air and becomes CO2. The only real differences are that some reforming approaches add oxygen to the air and others remove it, while burning natural gas releases water vapor. The CO2 part is a constant, because that carbon has to go somewhere.
I suppose that, pedantically, it might be easier to sequester the CO2 and store it if you're doing it at a reforming station, but you still have the
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And, to be pedantic, using the hydrogen in a fuel cell produces water vapor just like burning it, so really that's not a meaningful difference once you actually use it.
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I didn't miss it. I just thought it was important to note that reforming natural gas into hydrogen is basically still burning it. :-)
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I was under the impression that there was a cheap way of making it from natural gas or something like that.
Steam Methane Reforming, or Partial Oxidation / Gasification as a front end to a water-shift reaction. The SMR takes Natgas as a feed stock. The Gasifier can take anything that burns. The problem is the reaction is:
Something burning to create CO + H2O. Which is then shift reacted to H2 + CO2, which is then separated.
The good thing is that you then end up with concentrated CO2 contained. The bad thing is that it still needs to be sequestered. The ugly thing is that even if you sequester the CO2 from the end
It's not possible to fly (Score:2)
it takes energy to make hydrogen. three quarters of china's electricity production is based on coal. large scale electrolysis of water loses half the energy
You sound like the guys claiming flying was impossible because humans hadn't done it yet.
Meanwhile you ignore many other up and coming mechanisms [energy.gov] to product hydrogen.
Don't you think it would be smart to prepare for a time when Hydrogen is cheap? The actual for-real scientists at Toyota do.
What kind of chemist are you again, exactly?
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The scientists at Toyota are looking for ways to make hydrogen cheap because they're being paid to do so. This has nothing to do with preparing for availability of cheap hydrogen, because the only reason to even try to come up with a cheap way to produce hydrogen is to make fuel cells less appallingly expensive, and even if you did that, fuel cells would still be a terrible solution t
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In fact I can only think of a single situation in the history of humanity where fuel cells actually made sense, and that's on the Space Shuttle. And the only reason it made sense there was because the waste product of the fuel cells was used for drinking water, thus eliminating the need to carry that with them. But here on the planet Earth, where we don't need to carry around huge amounts of water in our cars, fuel cells truly make no sense, and they never will, no matter how cheap hydrogen gets.
They make sense for people making war in the desert. Military war machines spend lots of their time sitting still. A HFCV can quietly operate its air conditioning and produce drinking water for soldiers while waiting for action. Hence GM's Chevy Colorado ZH2 [greencarreports.com] and SURUS [motortrend.com]. Remember the streetcar conspiracy? Profitable bus, rail, and streetcar lines were bought up and shut down by a corporate conspiracy consisting of automakers, tire makers, and oil companies — military suppliers, all. They were fined, as
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It made sense for the shuttle because they had to have water while away from Earth for (often double-digit) days, and they used relatively little power. Military vehicles use a *lot* of power to move around — way more than the shuttle did for its internal electrical systems. And military vehicles are not going to be significantly impacted by the weight of carrying the single-digit gallons of drinking water that you would need between when you leave the base and when you come back.
Military vehicles
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That is mostly backwards (Score:2)
Hydrogen technology was never about providing a superior solution for the customer, it has always been about providing a superior solution for the manufacturer.
It takes minutes to fully reload a hydrogen fuel cell car. How long does it take a Tesla to reach full charge again with the most recent supercharger if the car is near empty?
And you say it was never about a superior solution for the customer...
They really dislike Electric cars
Then they would also hate Hydrogen cars.
Those are the reasons why you see
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Hydrogen technology was never about providing a superior solution for the customer, it has always been about providing a superior solution for the manufacturer.
Almost. Corporations exist to serve markets. The market wants fast refueling. But the average citizen is not the only customer. There are also sales to governments. Many of those sales are of military equipment. Some governments are now looking at hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the future of military technology. The fuel can be made from air or water, using any energy source. The vehicles are quiet, and they produce water as their emission, which is extremely handy if you're fighting in the desert. GM has a
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The tragedy is that under the current stewardship in the US, we are hopelessly stuck in the fossil fuel past. Any new breakthrough here will benefit China fist, not the US. We should be the ones changing things, on the forefront of the future were we own it and benefit from it - not where we're forced to buy it or rent it like some 3rd world country.
Don't lock yourself out of s
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I was talking of China and how they will get most their energy for the next 25 years at least... which is by burning coal
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oh really? pick china from the pull-down.... do you see that line going to the sky, AC, or are you thicker than molasses in January?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/ma... [carbonbrief.org]
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Yeah, it does.... if only we had some energy source that was both practical and unlimited for all practical purposes that we could tap into.
(looks up) Oh... wait.
Or are you worried that any inefficiency will somehow make the sun burn out faster?
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irrelevant, I'm talking about how China gets their energy and will get theri energy for a very long time.
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their coal consumption graph is arcing skyward, please do tell when it will go flat or down? answer: not in the next decade
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(looks up) Oh... wait.
*looks up too*. You're not talking about solar power are you? I mean can you find a more expensive, less efficient way of producing hydrogen that is never used at scale for a very good reason?
Are you shilling for the EV lobby by any chance ;-)
Any hydrogen generation at scale is done through steam methane reforming, not by using solar, electricity or anything else you get by looking up, and there are very good reasons for that.
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Well, the sun won't burn out for a couple of billion years *regardless* of what we do.
So for all practical purposes here on earth, it's an inexhaustible energy source... it's surplus energy, so why not use it?
Caffeinated Bacon, Why you lying? (Score:2)
In 2018, direct coal burning was 65% with another 5% coming from methane that was mostly obtained by coal conversion. So yeah, the OP was far more right than your continued lies.
Here we see that your nation gas been adding more new coal than either America or Europe has, which will be in place by end of 2020. [google.com]
and are now adding another 300+GW by end of 2030. [greenpeace.org]
your nation now accounts for over 50% of all coal consumed and you are continuing to add more. Time for you to
Re: what's this "hydrogen energy" nonsense (Score:2)
Seems like there is only one car maker (Score:2)
that doesn't have any plans or ideas for the production of all-electric vehicles. (Yep Toyota)
Hydrogen, while plentiful is not a long term solution for anything (unless you're talking fusion, and in this case, you're not)
Based on that, I'd consider Toyota to be just about dead. Hybrids are all fine and dandy, but most countries are looking for just electric. Sell short and cash out before it's too late.
Toyota Establishes ... In China To Study Hydrogen, (Score:2)
News flash "Toyota backs wrong horse" (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in NZ and work in China and the USA, Not a lot of EVs at home home in Auckland but a few. In Palo Alto EVs are everywhere, in 12 months they have gone from "Oh there's a Tesla, oh there is another" to "Boy they love their Teslas around here, they are everywhere!". I also see quite a wide range of other EVs in wide spread use. In Shenzhen most buses and half the taxis are BYD EVs. I would see about 10 Teslas a day in use there.
What I have never seen, ever in my 56 years on this planet, is a hydrogen vehicle moving on a public road. Toyota can waste money on a hydrogen research institute in China if they want, the Chinese are not dumb, they will take the money, but they are going find that the Chinese are not going to waste their own money on developing hydrogen vehicles, they have already signaled they are all in on EVs by the support given BYD.
Re: News flash "Toyota backs wrong horse" (Score:2)
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Toyota really doesn't want BEV (battery electric vehicles) to win, because it missed the boat and now other companies have all the patents on it. It could produce an EV today if it wanted to, but then it would be buying components (which include the patent licencing fee) from other companies.
Of course Toyota has close ties with its suppliers, the ones who make the hybrid drivetrain components for them. They are all in the same boat - they need to pivot because things like gearboxes and fuel/emissions manage
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I have, but that doesn't mean you are wrong. The fundamental problem with hydrogen is ... errr fundamental. It requires a distribution and storage network that is similar to petrol except orders of magnitude more complicated to achieve, all the while delivering far less energy density and having a front end of supply being incredibly CO2 intensive. We can charge EVs at scale with renewables. We can't generate H2 at scale without Steam-Methane-Reforming or Gasificaiton (both incredibly CO2 intensive), and al
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Introducing The New 2020 Toyota "Pilfer"... (Score:2)
Lol. Caffeinated Bacon, too funny (Score:2)
Re: umm... (Score:2)
Toyota's problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The most likely reason for why is their competitors are beginning to eat their lunch. Every now and again I see murmurs that they're working on some kind of solid state battery. Assuming that project ever reaches fruition I bet they'll drop hydrogen and their BS hybrid messaging. But for the time being I wouldn't believe a word coming from their mouths. Hydrogen is going nowhere. Toyota knows it as well as anyone else. It's just part of the smokescreen to buy more time.
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Once upon a time Toyota started the green revolution with hybrid cars.
If it hadn't been Toyota, it would have been Honda, whose original Insight hybrid's development paralleled that of the Toyota Prius.
Of late it seems like they're doing their level best to stop or delay it. [...] The most likely reason for why is their competitors are beginning to eat their lunch. Every now and again I see murmurs that they're working on some kind of solid state battery. Assuming that project ever reaches fruition I bet they'll drop hydrogen and their BS hybrid messaging.
Welcome to the wide world of corporate PR.
Hydrogen and other (Score:1)
Good for japan (Score:2)