Volvo Starts Testing Trucks With Fuel Cells Powered By Hydrogen (cnbc.com) 141
Volvo Trucks said Monday that it had begun to test vehicles that use "fuel cells powered by hydrogen," with the Swedish firm claiming their range could extend to as much as 1,000 kilometers, or a little over 621 miles. CNBC reports: In a statement, Gothenburg-headquartered Volvo Trucks said refueling of the vehicles would take under 15 minutes. Customer pilots are set to begin in the next few years, with commercialization "planned for the latter part of this decade." Fuel cells for the vehicles will be provided by cellcentric, a joint venture with Daimler Truck that was established in March 2021. Alongside hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Volvo Trucks -- which is part of the Volvo Group -- has also developed battery-electric trucks. [...] While there is excitement in some quarters about the potential of hydrogen-powered vehicles, there are hurdles when it comes to expanding the sector, a point acknowledged by Volvo Trucks on Monday. It pointed to challenges including the "large-scale supply of green hydrogen" as well as "the fact that refueling infrastructure for heavy vehicles is yet to be developed."
Described by the IEA as a "versatile energy carrier," hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries. It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it "green" or "renewable" hydrogen. Today, the vast majority of hydrogen generation is based on fossil fuels. Last week, Volvo Construction Equipment, which is also part of the Volvo Group, said it had commenced testing of a "fuel cell articulated hauler prototype."
Described by the IEA as a "versatile energy carrier," hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries. It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it "green" or "renewable" hydrogen. Today, the vast majority of hydrogen generation is based on fossil fuels. Last week, Volvo Construction Equipment, which is also part of the Volvo Group, said it had commenced testing of a "fuel cell articulated hauler prototype."
this is somehow better for the environment than... (Score:2)
...batteries?
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Because it is scalable to the rest of the world outside of North America and Europe. In fact it is more scalable in North America and Europe because the current electrical infrastructure is so old and brittle in those places, that the added capacity required for everyone to switch over to electric would crash the system, and take till next century to fully upgrade. As for the rest of the world, they don't have much of an electrical infrastructure compared to North America and Europe, so they just can't hand
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In fact it is more scalable in North America and Europe
In fact it is more scalable THAN in North America and Europe
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It takes significantly less energy to move a vehicle on batteries and motors than it does to move it around on gas. Like, staggeringly less.
2. Cars charge on the grid when there isnt peak demand. That makes the grid more profitable for operators who can use lulls in demand to incentivize charging during those times.
3. A giant portion of consumers and businesses will be adding solar generating and battery storage capacity to offset their newly acquired electricity consuming vehicle. This would be akin to drilling for oil and refining it yourself for part of your needs in an ICE vehicle, which is obviously impossible. This solar and battery capacity provides time-based supply, and provides it closer to consumers in peak times. That makes transportation costs on the grid lower than they otherwise would be, and generating it cheaper as well, as the peaks do not need to move up on those supplies.
4. The energy not used for automotive power can be repurposed for electrical generation, which will lower the demand for those resources, which grid operators have to pay market rates for anyway.
Hydrogen is a waste of time and engineering effort for automobile efforts. The right answer is clearly battery power. Lastly, in many jurisdictions, right to charge laws are being passed, usually with massive incentives for landlords to install chargers in parking stalls in multi-dwelling units. You can keep track of that progress here [pluginsites.org].
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:4, Informative)
> Hydrogen is primarily produced by electrolyzing water.
See, now I know you're full of it. Right now, the primary method of producing H2 is through natural gas reforming [energy.gov].
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not wrong, but I wonder if the OP was thinking about the "large-scale supply of green hydrogen" line in the summary / article, and simply omitted to make this clear.
Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is not classed as 'green hydrogen', even if the CO2 is technically left in the ground.
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Hydrogen is primarily produced by electrolyzing water.
In developed countries a major source of hydrogen is natural gas obtained from the petroleum refining process.
Methane is a favorite feedstock to the hydrogen sythesis process (steam methane reforming) since it is a simple molecule (CH4) and a primary component of "natural gas".
Spend some time studying the details of petroleum refining to find out why that is.
Also have a look at this: refinery flow [wikipedia.org]
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Wait, they take CH4, and split it into H2 and a CO2 byproduct? Wasn't CO2 byproduct to whole impetus for electrification in the first place? So what is the killer benefit of fuel cells over batteries when the "what do we do with this CO2" problem still exists?
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The key is that, though reforming is what they use today, they would switch to electrolysis fed by nuclear or renewables to eliminate the CO2. It isn't as cheap or efficient, technically, but eliminates the fossil fuel component and becomes renewable as the H2 eventually is transformed to H2O and joins the water cycle somewhere.
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1. It takes significantly less energy to move a vehicle on batteries and motors than it does to move it around on gas. Like, staggeringly less.
One big difference is that gasoline is an energy source while battery electric vehicles would place extra load on electricity generation. If we made this switch overnight then we'd just end up burning the gasoline in the power plants to produce the electricity we need.
2. Cars charge on the grid when there isnt peak demand. That makes the grid more profitable for operators who can use lulls in demand to incentivize charging during those times.
3. A giant portion of consumers and businesses will be adding solar generating and battery storage capacity to offset their newly acquired electricity consuming vehicle. This would be akin to drilling for oil and refining it yourself for part of your needs in an ICE vehicle, which is obviously impossible. This solar and battery capacity provides time-based supply, and provides it closer to consumers in peak times. That makes transportation costs on the grid lower than they otherwise would be, and generating it cheaper as well, as the peaks do not need to move up on those supplies.
Have you seen the math on how much batteries would be needed for this to work, and how much mining would have to be done to produce those batteries? Or, how much mining would have to be done for the solar power? I have and the amount of mat
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Why are you moaning about mining when fossil is mined, transported, refined, transported again before its burnt or do you think it comes already packaged and i
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Best not use nuclear fission. A court in Japan has just ruled that the Japanese government is not liable to pay compensation to victims of Fukushima, meaning that the unlimited insurance they were offering is now worthless. All nuclear plants in Japan are effectively uninsured now, and will never be able to get insurance because it would need to cover trillions of Euros of loss.
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Welcome to another Amimojo misinformation post, where the court argument was about Japan's government being on specially on the hook for the earthquake and tsunami that wiped out much of the Sendai region, killing tens of thousands. Because it included a nuclear power plant in the region so it was obviously all about nuclear power plant. Remember, nuclear power scary!
Which led to amateur and professional purveyors of misinformation and disinformation (as defined by US Department of Homeland Security) like A
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TEPCO doesn't have the money to cover the losses. They have been effectively nationalised already.
So TEPCO goes on but the victims don't get properly compensated.
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The right answer for transportation fuels is synthesizing hydrocarbons.
Oh yeah? What's the energy efficiency of that process (synthesis followed by burning)?
Where will you get the raw materials for synthesis in quantity? How much will it cost per kilometer traveled?
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Have you seen the energy densities we get with batteries today? And how that compares to hydrocarbon fuels?
How about you have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sure, we could "mine the sea" for lithium. We can also "mine the sea" for uranium. The difference is that getting lithium out is a net energy loss and getting the uranium out is a net energy gain. The US Navy has been working on a process of making jet fuel from seawater. This is important to them because while the aircraft carrier can go
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Have you seen the energy densities we get with batteries today? And how that compares to hydrocarbon fuels? How about you have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So I had a look, though to be honest I'm a work right now so wasn't able to take a great look at the article. Though I was able to do some quick math and compare Gasoline to the bog standard Lithium Ion 18650 cell. With an average 34.20 MJ/L for Gas against the 18650's 2.29 MJ/L Gas is the clear winner, especially when you consider that to drive a Nissan LEAF 100km it takes about 16.6kWh.
I did some math, and assuming an 80% battery efficiency versus a 20% Gas efficiency (lots of different websites but num
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Have you seen the energy densities we get with batteries today? And how that compares to hydrocarbon fuels? How about you have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Ah, but you're making the same mistake that so many pundits make — assuming that density matters. It doesn't, or at least not beyond the point where the weight of an equivalent amount of energy is feasible to put into a car.
The record for thermal efficiency of ICE engines is just 50%, IIRC, and typical cars' efficiency is under 30%. Electric motors are over 90% efficient. So an EV can likely be as much as three times as heavy as an ICE car and still be more efficient end-to-end.
And that's not even
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I think EVs will supplant hybrids much sooner than you might expect.
Of course they will because you are lumping BEV and PHEV together.
No, I'm not. Unfortunately, the government does, which makes it hard as heck to get hard numbers.
In fact, a whopping 12.4% of California new vehicle registrations were either pure EV or plug-in hybrid, with 6.5% of new vehicle registrations coming from Tesla alone.
A PHEV is still a hydrocarbon burner.
Not necessarily. A PHEV *can* burn hydrocarbons. But the California definition IIUC, requires a minimum of 50 miles of pure EV range, which means a lot of those aren't frequently doing so.
Either way, the point is that Tesla sells more pure BEVs than all the plug-in hybrids and non-Tesla EVs put together, and something like one fifth of all the hybrids and EVs put together. By themselves. One company. And T
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Battery power is, at best, a stopgap. It is not a sustainable solution and will maybe get us a few decades as we transition to something else, but long term they are pretty terrible.. It is hard to say if hydrogen is going to be the right long term solution, but it is the type of thing we need to be working on now.
That's a joke, right? The long-term replacement most certainly will *not* be a consumable, like hydrogen. Transporting around physical "stuff", whether it be gasoline, diesel, hydrogen, or unobtanium, to use as fuel is inherently inefficient compared with transporting electrical energy. Whether the future storage mechanism is batteries or some other similar technology, such as capacitors, I can pretty much guarantee the future is not hydrogen, nor anything else that must be pumped or trucked around. Tha
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It takes significantly less energy to move a vehicle on batteries and motors than it does to move it around on gas. Like, staggeringly less.
How much energy does it take to move a vehicle, through the courtesy of Fred's two feet?
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Hydrogen is primarily produced by electrolyzing water.
Absolutely not. But electrolyzising water does have a specific advantage which can be used to ease load on energy grids: It can easily ramp up and down on demand.
And that's precisely what is happening with several green hydrogen projects at present. They are being built as peaking units using excess grid capacity at a time when it's really windy / sunny and demand is low to supplant the steam methane reforming actually used to generate hydrogen.
2. Cars charge on the grid
No one here is talking about cars except for you. And Toyota, b
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"1. It takes significantly less energy to move a vehicle on batteries and motors than it does to move it around on gas. Like, staggeringly less."
I'm not sure I would be staggered. According to my calculations, a gasoline-powered car getting 30mpg uses about 4 megajoules/mi, while an average EV uses about 1.6 megajoules/mi.
However, that does not include transmission losses, other infrastructure losses, or the relative costs of convenience.
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:5, Insightful)
So...the whole "hydrogen-powered fuel cell ELECTRIC trucks" in that article just whizzed right by you? Are you aware that fuel-cell vehicles are still EVs [ecobattsolutions.com], just not using batteries?
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In fact it is more scalable in [...] Europe because the current electrical infrastructure is so old and brittle in those places, that the added capacity required for everyone to switch over to electric would crash the system, and take till next century to fully upgrade.
That is just nonsense. People charge when there is suplus solar or wind, or charge at night. No single wire for upgrading needed.
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And that is true for private cars, which are parked 95% of the time and have plenty time for slow charging whenever the grid has availability. This does however not apply to trucks (or even taxis), which have to move on a schedule in order to make money. Fast-charging stops are bad enough, degrading the battery, have somewhat lower efficiency than slow charging, and require chargi
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This does however not apply to trucks (or even taxis), which have to move on a schedule in order to make money.
They usually won't drive at night. And even if they do: that has nothing to do with our GP's claim that the grids need upgrades.
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I suspect that at least in the U.S., cars are not parked for anything close to 95% of the time.
I have a shorter than average commute, but that alone requires almost 5% of my time, and my wife is out on the road for kids' sports, etc. probably more than 15% of hers on average, and, sometimes, 8 or more hours in a single day. Note that this is almost exclusively in the northwestern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. It's just that this area, and the places she and our kids need to be, are quite spread out, just as
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The topic was about: how to create and handle H2.
We did not talk about global warming.
Probably you clicked reply on the wrong link?
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Then you are wrong, as I just clicked parent :P
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In Fukushima, Japan, they have a 10 MW research plant converting electricity fro
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Building the infrastructure to manage hydrogen distribution isn't exactly trivial either.
If we are going to avoid a climate catastrophe we need to help developing nations avoid the mistakes we made with huge emissions. That is going to mean infrastructure. Might as well be electricity distribution and generation, because that has many other advantages for quality of life and reducing emissions, where as hydrogen is fairly limited.
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None of these problems are unsolvable and honestly your fight is a dead end because of one single reason; the market is moving to battery-electric cars independent of environmental concerns and there is not a viable contender on the horizon unless gasoline prices can be brought back to the ~$2 a gallon mark for the next decade. You can claim it's manufactured consent and be right in a way but people want EV's now.
EV's require less maintenance over their lifespan
EV's are not nearly as subject to shifts in e
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Whoops, forgot to give fair credence to the one alternative fuel option; cellulosic ethanol but that is part of the "10 years away for 30 years" that fusion is.
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tesla is claiming under 2 kWh/mile [hotcars.com] We can be skeptical about the claim, but to say it is 3.5 kWh/mile we need some substantiation
Also 4000 Kg is 8800 lb. Not sure how you got it up to 25000 lb. But 4000 kg for a 1 MWh is an under estimate. A 1 MWh battery would probably around 12000 lb with all systems included.
Till we actually see a semi actually delivered to a customer and goes through a Sandy Munro tear down, we would not know any
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Any manufacturer will provide optimistic estimates that not always hold water, e.g. driving at constant speed in flat terrain with no traffic and good weather. It is actually reasonable, they must provide something verifiable.
Batteries are already pretty close to 100% efficiency and there is no way to increase beyond that. Any increase in truck efficiency will be in the driveline, air resistance or regeneration, and can be transferred part & parcel to hydrogen (or even
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Tesla is following chip/electronic industry mode of design. "This product will hit the shelves in two years. What will be the chip price, performance at that time? design based on that future spec". Tesla's estimate, battery price half in 7 years, (11% a year) weight half in 7 years are quite conservative and the industry is beating it. But the curve is not smooth. That's the hiccup on top of craz
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assume a 300 KW "fast" charger and this is 3.5 hours and 300 KW is pretty much not achievable "yet"
Tesla has installed several megawatt-scale chargers ("Megacharger") that scale up to 1.5MW at their Gigafactory facility and at some of their Tesla Semi byers' locations.
The other issue is that 1 MWh of battery will weigh over 4000 kg just for the cells without the mounting and cooling.
That's actually close to the finished battery pack weight with newer cells that are now becoming available. This is pretty much in-line with existing semi tractors.
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The problem is that Americans love big vehicles. They'll drive a big truck by choice rather than a car if they can. It was a trend started in the 90s by getting people wanting SUVs and then pickup trucks even though their needs can be fulfilled by a regular car.
Granted, there is a need for pickups, but the vast majority of them a
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In the EU there are strict rules about how long someone can drive for before taking a break, and current BEV trucks charge very fast (350kW at first, down to about 250kW at 90% SoC) so fitting in with mandatory breaks isn't difficult.
Trucks will also drive at more efficient speeds, not 120kph+ like passenger vehicles. They seem to be getting by just fine with 350-500kWh batteries.
There are trials of on-road charging as well, either through inductive coils in the road or through a pantograph like a train. I'
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For some applications batteries are simply not an option, whereas liquid hydrogen is. Long haul trucking, airplanes, etc.
A large green hydrogen economy is pretty much a necessity to meet targets. Some industrial processes will require green hydrogen as an alternative coke/etc. Also putting energy intensive industries now using natural gas on the grid would make grid expansion even harder, reusing industrial natural gas distribution for hydrogen would avoid that.
So green hydrogen is coming, with or without t
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> whereas liquid hydrogen is
Point of order: Nobody uses liquid hydrogen. The energy cost to liquefy hydrogen is far too high and the liquid itself is far too hazardous.
> reusing industrial natural gas distribution for hydrogen would avoid that
Except you can't, because they're not compatible gases. There is some efforts to dilute methane with some hydrogen, but there's a limit before you have to significantly derate the capacity of the pipe line because pipes made for methane are just not suitable for
Re:this is somehow better for the environment than (Score:5, Interesting)
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LIquid hydrogen is used all the time as an intermediary to lower transport costs. My local H2 station gets cryo LH2 deliveries from the cryo LH2 Air Liquide facility north of Las Vegas (steam reformation of bio gas, so yes it is green H2).
Wait, what? You are getting liquid H2 trucked in to your local H2 station? You know that has to be government subsidized top to bottom, right? There's no way that is practical as a means for fueling cars on a mass scale.
Liquid hydrogen is so difficult to deal with even people launching satellites to orbit don't want to deal with it. They are instead finding methane to be a far more practical fuel.
I have to wonder if natural gas cars won't be more popular. This is a fuel that is already piped to people'
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steam reformation of bio gas, so yes it is green H2
No it's not green, it's grey. The colour refers to its CO2 neutrality. Biogas is "renewable", that's not the same as being "green" hydrogen. Not even the oil industry calls this green hydrogen. Biogas and the reforming thereof releases a fuckton of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The rest of your post is on point.
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We're all still burning fossil fuel, but with the set targets from 2030-2050 that's no longer an option. Power to gas/liquid is far more costly in round trip losses than liquefaction of hydrogen, biological sources of gas/oil are completely unscaleable. You can fill a desert with PV, you can't fill it with bio-reactors. Biofuel needs water and arable land, both in too short a supply.
Hydrogen can use existing infrastructure, the problems of embrittlement and leakage are overstated. Especially if you just dro
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> Power to gas/liquid is far more costly in round trip losses than liquefaction of hydrogen
Don't misunderstand - I'm not advocating for carbonaceous fuels. I'm saying nobody uses liquid hydrogen in vehicles because it's far too problematic. LH2 is only a thing in industrial/bulk handling situations where things can be more controlled and you have leverage of scale.
> the problems of embrittlement and leakage are overstated
Hydrogen embrittlement is only an issue for pressure vessels (and industrial pro
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Hydrogen doesn't pool as easily as methane. Also the industrial network is a lot of pipes, but with relatively few taps. This makes the exercise of retrofitting it a lot easier.
Energy intensive industries are mostly 24/7/365 which use gas for heat, if you don't have a low duty cycle it's better to just engineer an electrical way of delivering heat than sidestep to hydrogen/oxygen. Industry which needs hydrogen for reducing purposes could generate it on sight, but regardless going full electrical means massi
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The reason few use LH2 is that there are few plants (e.g. only 4 in all of Europe), and there is little demand. The technology is not that expensive actually, and can be brought down to 5 kWh/kg [idealhy.eu] of hydrogen; as hydrogen holds 33 kWh/kg this is significant, but not a showstopper. In terms of safety, people go around with gasoline tanks all the time and those are far more dangerous overa
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> In terms of safety, people go around with gasoline tanks all the time and those are far more dangerous overall
No, no it is not more dangerous. Not even fucking close. I can spill gasoline on my foot and not lose my foot to frostbite injury. I can let a container of gasoline sit for a days and not have to worry about liquid oxygen pooling up inside it. Hydrogen gas has a MUCH wider explosive range and will actually detonate in open air, compared to gasoline vapor which will not. Of course I can also se
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How much more are you willing to pay for all those features of gasoline? LNG is already economical for truck fuel right now despite all the problems of cryogenic fluids. Problems have solutions, risks have cost/benefit considerations.
The time towards 2030-2050 are full of deadlines, all solutions to meet those deadlines suck and are costly. Some more than others, hydrogen likely least for a lot of niches.
Re: this is somehow better for the environment tha (Score:2)
Absolutely it is. First, with the fuel cell model it doesnt matter if a battery or hydrogen is used. Re H2 safety, who brings you a tanker full of h2 today? A hazmat certified, (DHS security checked extra training) professional driver. Professional drivers can handle the safety protocols. The key idea here is a truck that can fill up trucks, no additional infrastructure, because the trucks keep everything going if it all shuts down.
Regarding the viability of all these transitions, the hundreds of millions d
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It's not necessarily better, it's more available. There's only so much battery production capacity and it takes time to build out more, not just building plants but also sourcing more lithium supply and so on.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Now that battery cars are picking up worldwide, there has been a spike in lithium price [dailymetalprice.com]. Price increased ten-fold during 2021. The war in Ukraine slowed it down a bit, but apparently it's climbing again.
Yes, lithium is (was?) not a major cost in Li-ion batteries. Also other elements increased their price (cobalt [dailymetalprice.com], alluminium [dailymetalprice.com], nickel [dailymetalprice.com], copper [dailymetalprice.com]), but these are used in other areas than Li-ion batteries and can be influenced by other dynamics; about two thirds of Li goes in batteries [usgs.gov], so it is reasonable its price
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With fuel cells the power plan and storage are two separate things, so if you want to double the storage, you just add a bigger tank, and those tanks are made of fairly mundane materials. All the exotic stuff goes into the
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No. Hydrogen tech is all about saving jobs in the auto industry, by keeping complex ICE-type designs. Toyota, another big hydrogen car proponent, all but admitted this [slashdot.org].
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They need something that works for large long range trucks. Batteries are too heavy, and if you have an EV long haul truck powered by batteries, it has little if any payload capacity.
That is if you can even make it legal in most of the West in the first place. Things like Tesla Semi for example cannot be even made street legal, because they're so massively overweight per tractor axle due to batteries being as heavy as they have to be at reported range specs assuming best case of various NMC batteries with e
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Yes, if you can get a gree method for generating the hydrogen, and you had a good way to store the hydrogen (possibly as a compound instead of a pure element), and it wasn't toxic, then yes. Right now batteries are toxic, and they may require some mining for rare materials which leads to other problems. Also the fuel cells themselves might require rare earth minerals. But hydrogen is abundant and easy to produce. So it is a bit unknown in the long run what the best answer might be.
New headlines (Score:4, Funny)
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Oh that huge manatee!
Not so practical (Score:2)
Aside from the problematic generation of hydrogen using either fossil fuels or large amounts of electricity, which makes it not so efficient, there's the elephant in the room of distribution and storage, which are both expensive and hazardous.
Granted, for some applications, hydrogen has greater range and faster refueling than batteries, but that comes at a high cost due to generation, distribution and storage problems.
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Your *knowledge* is outdate, minimum 30 years, probably 50.
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Do enlighten me, oh wise one. Explain, specifically, how hydrogen is efficient to generate, easy and safe to transport and store. At scale.
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Why don't you google?
At scale - if you want it gree - you use hydrolysis. If you have bio-gas, or don't want it green you use Steam Methan reforming.
For transport you do the exact same as with other fuels: put into a tanker. Either ship or truck.
No idea what your stupd questions are about.
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Hydrolysis costs 55 kWh/kg. compressing the result to enough pressure to transport it costs another 10 kWh/kg.
A Toyota Mirai gets about 100 km from 1 kg of hydrogen. A Tesla can convert that 65 kWh into 300 km of range.
That makes hydrogen a rather inefficient method of storing energy. It may still find a niche for high duty cycle applications, but not a universal replacement for batteries.
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That was not the topic, and your numbers are WAY off.
Hydrogene versus "pure electricity" is roughly 70% ... not 30%.
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Rechecking with Wikipedia: they have 50 kWh/kg, plus 15 kWh for compression. Still 65 kWh/kg. Average consumption for BEV hovers around the 20 kWh/100 km mark. Mirai consumption also tracks published figures.
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I explained already how it works, no need to google anymore :P
You seem to have reading comprehension problems.
Hydrogen is a terrible idea for fuel. (Score:2)
We will get synthesized hydrocarbon fuels before we get to hydrogen as anything close to a practical fuel.
Hydrogen as a gas likes to leak out of the tiniest cracks. It makes some materials brittle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The tanks to store gaseous hydrogen in any meaningful volume would have to reach very high pressures. Hydrogen fuel tanks would be incredibly heavy and complex, and therefore very expensive.
It takes a lot of energy to liquefy hydrogen, and very expensive equipment to handle. L
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The energy needed for direct air CO2 capture and ethanol production makes hydrogen liquefaction look efficient.
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The energy needed for direct air CO2 capture and ethanol production makes hydrogen liquefaction look efficient.
Assuming that is true it still leaves us with hydrogen being a very difficult to handle fuel.
With kerosene we can use the wings of an airplane as the fuel tanks. We can't do that with liquid or gaseous hydrogen. The tanks to hold gasoline, propane, diesel fuel, kerosene, fuel oil, or most any variation on a hydrocarbon we need only a simple tank made of steel, aluminum, plastic, or any of a number of common and inexpensive materials. Methane (or it's less pure form we call natural gas) is a bit more diff
Hydrogen is dead end tech- time for NH3 (Score:4)
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You'd think there would be a lot more interest in DMFCs. It's so much easier to fill your tank with wood alcohol... and so much easier to make your own wood alcohol. A nice closed-loop situation, too. Burn a tree, plant a tree. Net carbon neutral.
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On the other hand NH3 can be produced at the well head
Uhh... No, it can't. NH3 production requires extremely high pressures and temperatures to work, and it can't be done efficiently at small scale. If we ever develop catalysts for NH3 production at milder conditions, we might get there.
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It makes hydrogen tanks difficult to make , heavy and large in size (you cant store Hydrogen at high pressures or it starts to leak through metal). ...
That is why you store it at high pressure in plastic tanks
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The problem with ammonia is that it's very hazardous to humans. It better stay in the tank because if it gets out it causes severe skin burns, frostbite and eye damage. Inhalation causes lung damage and respiratory failure.
On the plus side, it is at least easily detectable with your nose, unlike hydrogen.
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Hydrogen made from fossil fuels (Score:2)
Nope... It's sad to see people continue to waste time on this. There must be some oil company funding.
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Energy Density Facts (Score:3)
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So you need easy, at least 4 times the space for any battery solution.
I believe you mean 4 times the space for fuel cells. With batteries it's more like 10 times the space. When comparing the energy density by mass the difference becomes even larger. A battery would get something like 0.4 MJ/kg and diesel fuel is 40 MJ/kg. Make all the worst case assumptions you like about the efficiency of turning diesel fuel into energy, the mass and volume of the engine, and so on and so forth, and it still works out that diesel fuel comes out ahead by a wide margin.
Synthesizing hydroc
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An electric car does not use inverters.
And if you buy an inverter with 10% loss, you are an idiot, and deserve no better.
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> An electric car does not use inverters
Can you name a single mass-produced electric vehicle that doesn't use an inverter? 'cause I can't think of one.
To the best of my knowledge they all use either AC induction or some form of PMEC motor, which require inverters to generate the necessary drive waveforms. I'm only aware of brushed DC motors in DIY vehicles or things like literal golf carts.
=Smidge=
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Can you name a single mass-produced electric vehicle that doesn't use an inverter? 'cause I can't think of one.
None does. they use DC engines. And the battery provided DC.
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Energy density isn't a limiting factor for road transportation, it is for air transportation.
Limiting factor for long-haul trucking is downtime, specifically the large amounts of energy required to be put into a vehicle in a short time. That makes batteries a non-starter.
It makes battery swapping somewhat plausible.
There's a reason why all eyes are on H2 fuel cells in this scenario.
And there's a reason why the only company producing battery powered trucks has its CEO in jail for fraud, and a website still p
Gas reforming? (Score:2)
BTW, if the intention is to reduce CO2 emissions from vehicle use, the vast majority of people live in cities. In this case, we'd get better ROI by reforming our cities so that they generate less CO2, e.g. better public transport/less private car use & ownership, more efficient 0 emissions short-rang
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Wouldn't it be more efficient to use LPG rather than convert natural gas to hydrogen?
Efficient? Yes. But that's not the goal here. Hydrogen can be made green (electrolysis powered by green energy) and it can be made blue (reforming + CCS). All eyes are on the industry for the second option. If CCS gets off the ground then then end result is a conversion that produces no emissions. Not something you can do with LPG.
BTW, if the intention is to reduce CO2 emissions from vehicle use, the vast majority of people live in cities. In this case, we'd get better ROI by reforming our cities so that they generate less CO2, e.g. better public transport/less private car use & ownership, more efficient 0 emissions short-range vehicles, & better electricity supply infrastructure. Wouldn't that make more sense?
Literally none of this has anything to do with personal vehicles or mobility. Literally none. The only idiots who still are going down that path is Toyota, not even the oil indust
Fuel cell tarnishing (Score:2)
Have they figured out how to prevent the breakdown of fuel cells when used with air and not pure oxygen? I recall that so far all air fuel cells tarnish over time from impurities in the air and stop working and there was no easy way to prevent this or to clean the cells.