Car Tech forum: What do you think of hydrogen fuel cell cars?

you are correct. it was really the full-out production that supported the troops in WWII. we might not always have had the better weapons, but we sure as hell had more of them and their support all the time. true we had the manhatten project, but we are now well beyond that and the standardized production of nuclear powered electricity production should do the trick. as an aside, one of the original ideas used to promote nuclear power was that all that waste heat could be used to provide pure water. that is also something we could use a lot more of.

Did you know that General Motors once had a working fuel cell that worked on gasoline? Apparently there were some technical challenges with the impurities in gasoline but they had them worked out. The webpages that discussed this have since disappeared.

Do you want to know why we don't have a gasoline powered fuel cell automobile, which, based on fuel cell efficiencies would essentially double fuel mileage (none of that nasty waste heat from the combustion engine)? Because the California Air Quality Board said No. Because it didn't eliminate CO2 which they consider to be a pollutant.

Ask yourself. Where would we be right now if GM was hitting the marketplace with a Gasoline Fuel cell car. No excess weight from hauling all those batteries. No new fuel delivery infrastructure. No dependence on foriegn oil because frankly, this sort of fuel could be generated domestically. No need for new electricity.

How the state of California gets to dictate science makes me crazy. Electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Therefore electric cars are run on fossil fuels. Hydrogen is made by reforming Natural Gas (which is a fossil fuel, and also hard to come by) therefore hydrogen cars are fossil fuel cars.

So use less gasoline or .. well don't use less.

Great choice there. Ultimately it would be nice but until solar cells can convert sunlight to electricity at the rates only seen in science fiction, and we can store it for days at a time, solar is a joke when it comes to solving this problem. The same with wind. If you want electric cars I suggest you start building Nuclear reactors.
And there are some interesting designs out there for those. Safe and cheap to build and run. Its time to drag ourselves back into the 21st century and take the lead on this. Hydrogen, solar and wind are last centuries ideas. I would spend money on lots of different technologies, particularly those aimed at increasing the efficiencies of solar cells, electric motors, and LED's. The name of the game is using electricity without making waste heat.

Bill F.

One major misunderstanding that people have when comparing gasoline to hydrogen is that it is believed they are both "flammable". This is simply not the case. Gasoline is flammable. Hydrogen is EXPLOSIVE. Whereas a stable liquid, like gasoline, can be safely stored in a thin-walled metal or plastic fuel tank, the fear of an explosion requires hydrogen to be stored in thick, heavy containers, such as was mentioned in the article (kevlar). Furthermore, gasoline is a nice dense liquid at ambient temperatures, providing lots of energy per unit volume, while hydrogen is a gas at ambient conditions, with very little energy per unit volume necessitating that it is compressed, again increasing the risk of explosion if the tank fails. And to get hydrogen to a liquid state requires cooling it to extremely low temperatures (-423F) adding cost, energy input, and other potential issues.

I am not advocating we stick with gasoline, but there are many other alternatives to hydrogen out there with far lesser issues to resolve. For instance, batteries already exist that would allow electric vehicles to travel over 300 miles (Li-ion), and they are far less expensive than the millions of dollars that go into making a fuel cell car.

You are missing the fact that "they" do not have to do anything to keep gasoline cars on the road.

The whole entire point of this thread from start to finish is... gasonline IS the BEST fuel to use in a car! That's the point! That's why we made cars to run on petrol, it's the best choice!

That's why there are people looking for alternitives, because the other options we have suck. Ethanol is way too expensive and has less energy. Biodiesel is promising but still requires a long of money to make, and requires us to divert food stock to fuel production. Hydrogen is way too difficult to store, too hard to make, and requires way more energy in production than it returns when you use it. Electricity has limited range and requires large heavy battery packs.

So they don't have to "manage" to keep using oil, it's the best default choice.

and responded with different reasons why it's wrong. It least i didn't contradict myself... I hope lol

Despite geothermal, hydroelectric, and clean nuclear, the bottom line is that electrical generating plants are, by and large, still dirty and polluting. The amount of electricity in, is, as pointed out, greater than the yield from the fuel cell. Unless you drive only short hops, the current technology (no pun intended) does not permit the range needed. Here in greater Phoenix, the trend is to buy a house in the suburbs, and commute 40 to 50 miles to work! No, to hydro fuel cell, but YES: electric cars are a practical alternative, and everyone has missed the boat on the recharging issue. You do not recharge the darn thing on the road, you pull into a "Station" where ,for a fee, your battery pack is pulled out, and replaced with a fully charged one. The "Station" is a bay of charging battery packs (three uniform configurations for small, med. and large cars) It is the same as getting your bottled water...you don't wait for the driver to full your 5 gal bottle, you EXCHANGE them! The Station makes money on a fee that generates a profit after cost (electrical fees) This would require the automakers to standardize a roll-in, roll-out battery tray, but it would WORK! Remember the only free lunch is SOLAR POWER, which, while we have been told is impractical for some thirty years,
Israel has utilized for a vast array of needs. In fact, they have bought up a lot of the "useless" Solar Energy Patents. That is because
they are smart enough to recognize that SOLAR can WORK!
-Arshnar-
'

Is there a system as such that has been tested? One question I have is, how do they make sure that the battery pack you get is at 90%+ of max charge? That is... how do I know that the battery I'm getting isn't worn out and no longer get me my rated range?

Before you answer, let me clairify. Like a PDA battery that has been used for a long time, that battery will no longer get the rated 10 hours of service, but the charger will not know the difference.

So let us say that my electric car is rated at 100 miles a charge. If I go to the station and swap out my battery one day, the battery I get back, might be worn out. I might only get 60 miles out of it, and there's no way of knowing that at station. I do not know of a way to test for that, and the station would only know that the charger said it was charged up. I can see that as being a drawback.

Other than that, by all means. If there's a market for this electric car, then feel free to sell them. I have no interest, but if others do, go for it.

Your last comment was rather dippy. You clearly are not smart enough to realize that the situation in Israel is way different than here. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE knows solar can work. How many haven't used or seen a solar powered calculator? No one thinks solar can not work.

Knowing something isn't pratical is way differnet than knowing it can work. First, Israel uses 6.5 GigaWatts... that's for the whole fr**kin country. The US consumes 425 GW of power. Point being, solar energy has a very real ability of making a difference in Israel, whereas it's not every a fraction of a drop in the bucket to the US.

Further, Israel has very little if any natural resources of it's own. The cost of power and all forms of energy is high because they have to import everything. This makes solar energy more practical, because the conventional forms of power are expensive. Just ask people in California who purchased solar panels. If it wasn't for the State subsidizing (aka taxing money from the poor to pay for solar panels for the middle and upper class) they would have never bought them.

Finely maybe you haven't been to Israel, but it's a bit sunny there. Just a tad bright and hot ya know? Sorta like being in a desert. Yes I'm being humorous. It's a hot dry sunny place. When you have that much sun, you can make a pretty goodly amount of power from a solar array. But most of us in the US have days we can define as "cloudy" and that doesn't work well when your power is dependent on "sunny".

My point here is, Solar energy is in fact impratical for much of the US. I do not have 1 sq/mile of desert around my house with sun shine 355 days a year to power my home. Israelis do. Now in the situations that solar power makes sense in the US, we are using it.

But for me, I'm not retro-fitting my home with solar panels. The cheapest panel makes about 926 Watts an hour. The sun would hit it roughly 5 hours a day summer time, and 3 in the winter, averaged to about 4 hours a day yearly. That's 3.7 KWh a day. Then about half of those days are rainy or cloudy in Ohio. We almost never have a sunny winter day, and spring is the rainy season, so mid summer and fall are about it. That's 673 KWh a year, and I'm being generous.

At 9.6 Cents, the standard rate here, that's $65 dollars saved a year.
And the cost of the system? $9,000. That NINE THOUSAND. If I install it today, 139 years from now, it'll pay for itself. I'd be a complete idiot to do that. Even if I assume it's sunny year round, it still would only save about $130 a year, meaning it would take 70 years to pay off. People only live 70 years on average. Now if that doesn't define what "impractical" means, I don't know what does. But if you want a solar panel, there are places that sell them, by all means blow your money. I don't have 9 grand laying around to buy a system that I'll be dead before it pays for itself.

Now if I was in Israel, and electricity costs a ton more (which it does) and if I had 355 sunny days a year (which they do), then yeah a solar pannel makes good sense.

If H2 was as available as Propane say, propane would still be better. H2 is too difficult to generate, collect, compress, and store. And H2 has crappy available energy to volume or mass ratio. A 20lb tank of propane has more energy than 100 lbs of H2. Except that the H2 costs more to create/collect, compress, store, transfer/distribute, and use. Appropriate for spacecraft - inappropriate for cars.

Face it - almost impossible to beat a gallon of gasoline from ANY standpoint. Easy to get, easy to transport, and huge energy per volume and mass.

Propane can be pumped easy and is cost effective. Hydrogen will cost millions of dollars we don't have, to make from water. Hydrogen is a ton lighter, because it's way smaller and will escape from your tank before you get a chance to use it. I 30 lb tank will boil off a quart of hydrogen a day. If you go on vacation, your hydrogen car will likely be out of fuel before you get back.

The problem is where do you get the hydrogen? If you use electricity to produce it, most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels, coal, oil or gas. If there is a nuclear plant devoted to making hydrogen, that might be the answer.

The trouble with biodiesel is that you burn fuel to farm the corn or other feedstock; then more to transport it, to heat the fermentation process, then to transport the fuel to your local gas station. Then you are still burning oil, just a different kind of oil, in the end. Someone has to do the math very carefully on this one!

You correctly stated that Critics point out that it takes more electricity to create the hydrogen then it will generate in a fuel cell." However your rebuttal it also takes energy to create a gallon of gasoline leaves out the fact that it takes LESS energy to produce that gallon than the gallon generates. The reverse of hydrogen. Your article is misleading.

You correctly point out that one expense in the fuel cell is the platinum that covers the nodes implying its a trivial thing that could be replaced. You failed to state that platinum is a critical part of the process and scientists have not come up with an alternative. Until they do, the platinum will keep hydrogen fuel cells off the market for the vast majority of the population.

Your article says that hydrogen destroys ozone in the same way that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) do. And we stopped using it for that reason. Science has subsequently discovered that CFCs do not harm the ozone layer. Did you not know that or are you still pushing the CFC agenda? Excess hydrogen will not affect the ozone layer. Economics, however, will keep hydrogen from becoming the driving force in fuels.

If we are not just using Hydrogen directly from natural sources - but are instead using energy (steam, etc) to extract the energy from water (or whatever) - don't we get back far less energy in powering the car than we used to extract it? (remember "conservation of energy from chemistry class?)
That is - you don't get something for nothing!
So - I repeat - isn't that just like "storing the energy" in "hydrogen" just like we "store the electricity in a battery"? My belief is that we should focus more on finding better battery technologies! For example, how about having "battery stations" who have batteries packs - fully charged waiting for you. When you need a "refill" - you pull into the "battery station" - and in minutes, they dismount your discharged batteries, mount the fully charged ones - and away you go! (analogous to the way we all buy propane for our grills - we turn in our empty propane tanks at the 7-11)

How about if my battery is 1/2 charged when I pull into the "battery station"? I suggest that the station give you an instant credit for the "watts" you are turning in.
This scheme doesn't require an entirely new transmission/storagescheme like Hydrogen does. It doesn't cause ozone depletion. It doesn't blow up in an accident like Hydrogen. It doesn't require heavy tanks to be put into the auto.

Hydrogen just seems impractical, and a convenient way to avoid doing anything significant while serious money is siphoned into R&D. I'm not advocating abandoning hydrogen research, just reallocating our resources to find a near term solution and let hydrogen development proceed at it's own pace, rather than pouring vast resources into making the marketing dogma of hydrogen power into a tangible - however impractical - product.
We're a resourceful species. Let's choose to be pragmatic before circumstances force us to.

You may have missed something in your well written article about the quest for the best alternative fuel. A company, ECOTALITY, has been developing HYDRATUS. Hydratus produces Hydrogen on board removing the need for storage tanks. It uses sea water and magnesium to produce the hydrogen. I would like to recommend that you look at www. ecotality.com for more on this amazing project.

Yes I agree that there are efficiency issues but by centralising the production of H2 you open up the possibility of sequestration of the carbon generated by the processes. At least you don't have a gazillion generators of other gasses as well as CO2 making it impossible to capture the emissions. So we need to think of the full production cunsumption and emission cycles other wise all we will see are the individual steps and lose potential solutions. There will never be a simple single silver bullet to solve the issue. Same thing vis a vie ethanol from corn. I fyou also use the cellulose and capture emissions it will make a difference. Our role as the public is to ensure that lobbyists and politicians implement the full solutions in their complexity.