No stupid ditching of an existing vehicle fleet. No great, expensive upgrade of Electric infrastructure so you can install charging points all over the country. No HUGE increase in mining of rare materials by poor Africans to provide the raw materials to make batteries. Just a few relatively minor tweaks to the existing systems vehicles have and an infrastructure setup.
Hydrogen is INCREDIBLY abundant. Wheres the down side ? And why is our idiot Govt so stuck on electric ?
tygertung,
Jun 24, 11:02am
Hydrogen is not abundant when it isn't bound to other elements. It is energy intensive to separate.
cjohnw,
Jun 24, 11:06am
“Part of the reason for the limited track time was that hydrogen doesn't offer the same efficiency as petrol. It needs more storage and combustion space compared to liquid fuel, which ultimately meant the Corolla was running at roughly a third of the efficiency of a petrol car.”
Sounds great.
nice_lady,
Jun 24, 11:40am
So, yet some industries and countries are seriously looking at hydrogen as a legit fuel. Hydrogen powered trucks for instance. Indeed it may be less of an efficiently stored product than petrol but it's FAR more environmentally friendly AND it doesn't require us to completely replace/rebuild our fleets. And it's a lot more environmentally friendly to 'mine'.
For example the best of both worlds : hydrogen powered 'electric' truck:
Incorrect. If you're referring to our current natural gas reticulation system it will take major upgrading of the pipe and valve system in order to make it able to hold hydrogen. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to keep contained as its very small molecule size allows it to find the tiniest weakness in gaskets and even pores of metal. Back to the drawing board on this one for you.
A big issue is the fact that you lose 50% of your energy creating the hydrogen, before any other inefficiencies. It is difficult to store, it causes hydrogen embrittlement of metals.
Fuel cell cars are just ev's with a smaller battery. The hydrogen is used as a range extender, effectively. It would make more sense to run a small gas turbine generator as a range extender rather than a fuel cell stack.
tygertung,
Jun 24, 12:06pm
How to extract the hydrogen please?
nice_lady,
Jun 24, 12:16pm
Well it's being taken seriously by some countries and Manufacturers.
I'm thinking it's looks to be a reasonable alternative to the electrification of entire countries vehicle fleets.
msigg,
Jun 24, 12:21pm
It will have a long way to go before it is user friendly. Most on here will be dead before that happens.
tygertung,
Jun 24, 12:24pm
I don't really think that the electrification of the entire country's vehicle fleet is realistic in the near future.
s_nz,
Jun 24, 12:34pm
Hydrogen is not looking good. For light transport that is.
Sweet fuel for rocket's, and other segments that can deal with the high costs, and cryogenics. (perhaps aviation?).
The article you link is about hydrogen combustion engines. Technically this is pretty easy to do, and there have been a number of demo projects:
But there is a fatal flaw that means this tech isn't fit for mainstream use. Hydrogen is really hard to store large amounts of. Either you need cryogenic temperatures, or large tanks at crazy high pressures. also green hydrogen is always going to be at least double the price of power.
Because of the above, burning the hydrogen in a cira 30% piston engine, rather than putting it through a cira 60% efficient fuel cell means double the fuel costs and half the range for the amount of tanks space.
The BMW above used a cryogenic storage system. This allows a lot of hydrogen to be stored in a small space. But if you leave it parked for more than 17 hours the fuel will start boiling and venting. Leave it for a few weeks, and the tank will be empty when you come back.
The type of storage for the Hummer wasn't disclosed to my knowledge.
Most production hydrogen cars use massive high pressure tanks to hold hydrogen rather than cryogenics. For example the Toyota Mirai First generation had 122L of 70Bar (10,000PSI) tanks. This gave a 502km range. The second generation has 141L of tanks at the same pressure giving a 647km range.
Note that those tanks are already pushing the limits of what you can package into a normal looking car, so if you want to use the hydrogen half as efficiently you can cut those ranges in half 250km - 325km. This is already beaten by Many EV's which also have the advantage of plugging in at home.
[edit] - no body is proposing ditching the current vehcile fleet, simply making newly imported cars cleaner, and letting cars exit the fleet naturally when they reach end of life.
marte,
Jun 24, 3:45pm
Might as well go back to LPG ICE cars for what that was. Much better than retrofitting ICE cars with hydrogen setups.
Hydrogen fuel cell EV dont seem to have any advantage over EV except for refueling, and if you have a EV then thats not a disadvantage because you got it for what it does already knowing how this works. & Probably still have a ICE anyway.
remmers,
Jun 24, 3:54pm
Not just our idiot government, the majority of the industrialized world are wanting to go to EV over the next 10 to 20 years. You really should do some more reading on Hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles.
marte,
Jun 24, 5:17pm
I just checked & found this [The top 3 gases of the dry atmosphere are Nitrogen, Oxygen and Argon. Together they make up 99.96% of the atmosphere. All the remaining gases make up the remaining 0.04% of the atmosphere and Hydrogen is not even in the top 10. According to Wikipedia hydrogen makes up 0.000055% of the atmosphere but I wouldn't assume that it is all that accurate as it is such a small amount.]
0.000055% isn't a hell of a lot.
tamarillo,
Jun 25, 2:14am
Because there aren’t any hydrogen cars to buy. Hydrogen is on list of solutions but there’s very little production of the cars as yet.
Oh no, it gets worse , quote { Hydrogen is found in great quantities on Earth combined with other elements, such as in water and hydrocarbons, but it is barely present in our atmosphere, which contains just 0.00005%. This is why, to obtain hydrogen in the gaseous form, it must be produced through extraction from the molecules that contain it and it must be stored.}
nice_lady,
Jun 25, 5:06am
So, it can't just be pumped out of the air - so ? Worse ? How ? There must be some potential or else the countries/industries looking into and building Hydrogen powered vehicles wouldn't be doing it right ?
bill-robinson,
Jun 25, 5:52am
have a look at electrolosis this is how hydrogen is obtained from water, then see if you can work it out.
tygertung,
Jun 25, 5:54am
You can get it from water for example, which is quite abundant, but the atoms really like to stick together in that compound, so a lot of energy has to be used to break it up.
ronaldo8,
Jun 25, 5:58am
The vast majority, over 90% of hydrogen production isn't from electrolysis of water, that's too expensive, its from cracking methane, and the byproduct ?
CO2.
ronaldo8,
Jun 25, 6:01am
There are countries, or should I say politicians, who are looking into building solar roads. That's a shit standard of competence by any measure.
ronaldo8,
Jun 25, 6:07am
And not just any old stored either but stored below its boiling point -253 degrees. Twenty degrees above absolute zero, were matter and energy stop working as you'd hope. So that's storage with continuous massive energy input just to do nothing with it.
bubbles9,
Jun 25, 6:27am
Hydrogen can be stored as a liquid when mixed with chlorophyll, can then be used in the same way as petrol. It used to be more expensive to produce than petrol, but would be cost efficient now, and could be produced without having to import any.
intrade,
Jun 25, 6:39am
petrol already has hydrogen in it what do you think rusts out the exhaust pipes the water that turned from hydrogen in the fuel. The real problem is the emense cost to make hydrogen and store it it is why the mercedes necar was never built in 2004 was the launch of the fuelcell hydrogen car with tanks in the floor of the A class= now a hollow floor if you look under a old A class and why the fell over with engine up to high after abandoned hydrogen car in the elch -moose test. google mercedes necar the 1 was inside a mb100 van
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