The Hydrogen Car Will Arrive Even if it Takes Time

Its cheap and abundant...so what are we waiting for?
http://carwithwater.googlepages.com/fuel_cell_cars

 

Practical fuel cell technology?

Hmmm. Imagine the dewpoint in American cities with hundreds of
thousands of pounds of water vapor being poured into the air each day.
And don't forget that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. Imagine
driving on highways in January in Minneapolis at -30F with cars spewing
water vapor onto the roads, coating them in black ice.

Hydrogen is a no-workable technology on many fronts. "Harmless water
vapor" is a great sound bite but rife with practical problems.

 

Hi Tim,

How does Minneapolis cope at -30F with the current generation of
gasoline-burning vehicles "spewing water vapor onto the roads"?
After all, gasoline is a HYDROcarbon. On being burned, the hydrogen part is
converted to water, exactly the same as when pure hydrogen is burned or
converted in a fuel cell.

Andy I.



: In article
: <>,
:
: > Its cheap and abundant...so what are we waiting for?
: > http://carwithwater.googlepages.com/fuel_cell_cars
:
: Practical fuel cell technology?
:
: Hmmm. Imagine the dewpoint in American cities with hundreds of
: thousands of pounds of water vapor being poured into the air each day.
: And don't forget that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. Imagine
: driving on highways in January in Minneapolis at -30F with cars spewing
: water vapor onto the roads, coating them in black ice.
:
: Hydrogen is a no-workable technology on many fronts. "Harmless water
: vapor" is a great sound bite but rife with practical problems.

 

Did you know-

1. The amount of electricity required to produce Hydrogen?

2. How dangerous hydrogen is?

3. When did you last purchase a cylinder of hydrogen? It's not exactly
cheap!

It may only throw out water from the tail pipe but it requires a vast
amount of time and effort and power to produce, store and distribute.

Steve H

 

The water vapor in gasoline exhaust is fractionally water vapor, not
wholly water vapor.

 

True, Tim. The exhaust is only fractionally water vapor, but it's a very
large fraction..............
Gasoline contains more hydrogen than carbon.

Andy I.


: In article <OSWsk.40860$hx.30526@pd7urf3no>,
:
: > How does Minneapolis cope at -30F with the current generation of
: > gasoline-burning vehicles "spewing water vapor onto the roads"? After
: > all, gasoline is a HYDROcarbon. On being burned, the hydrogen part
: > is converted to water, exactly the same as when pure hydrogen is
: > burned or converted in a fuel cell.
:
: The water vapor in gasoline exhaust is fractionally water vapor, not
: wholly water vapor.

 

Well in Australia, Perth the capital city of Western Australia they ran
buses on hydrogen as a trial and it seems to have been a worthwhile trial.
Check out the website
www.dpi.wa.gov.au/greentransport/19524.asp

So I guess it can be done. And I can't for the life of me see how water
vapour at -30F which is almost the same as -30c would be too much of an
issue on the roads, it would only be the amount of water that would normally
condense on the exhaust system that would come out that way, the rest would
be as already stated vapour and with it's big temperature difference can
only go one way and that is up, just the same as it does now, but with less
pollutants, probably a lot higher faster.
Jeff

 

You know that hydrogen is just an energy storage medium, not a source
of energy, right? That is, we don't mine or pump hydrogen, we use
other energy sources to generate hydrogen, then store it for re-use.

This means we need a source of initial energy, and since no energy
conversion is 100% efficient, it takes more energy to create the
stored hydrogen than you would get back out of it.

I'd be interested in seeing the carbon footprint and energy costs of
manufacturing the conversion and storage facilities, as well as the
fuel cells. You'd have to run some numbers on that to determine if
it's really cost effective and ecologically effective.

As for Perth, it's like people in Berkeley running their cars on used
cooking oil. That works fine for the fraction of a percent that do
it, but if you tried to run all of northern California on cooking oil,
you'd find out the disadvantages of the system pretty quickly.

Again, I'd be interested in seeing the numbers on ramping up the
hydrogen infrastructure to meet, say, 20% of America's gasoline usage.
I bet they'd be enlightening.

 

I really don't see the big interest in Hydrogen, yes it burns nicely
without CO2 output. The problem is they want it to replace hyrocarbon
fuels, when really what we need to do first is replace internal
combusion engines as our drive mechanisim for cars. Electric motors do
the job much better, and the power source can be a steam engine,
hydrogen engine, or even a petrol engine, suplimented with solar cells
and perhaps top up on the mains.

A poperly designed car can do 100mpg+ even just using petrol as the
power source. That is where the real leaps in efficieny lie. It will
be a long time before we can convert our energy infrastructure away from
fossil, so we have to think about efficiency. It may actually be
greener to run a pertrol (plugin) powered, pure electric drive car than
one that runs solely on batteries or the mains, as the transmission
losses may ruin the plugin cars efficiency. However eventually the
mains will be fully green (hopefully), the single biggest thing we can
do is change to electric drive cars and disconnect the IC engine from
the wheels.

It all seem to be a conspiracy to keep us addicted to IC engines (not
unexpected for them to be from the same bunch as the ones trying to keep
us addicted to oil), an engine use for charging can be much simpler and
more efficent and alot smaller. We lug around these 1,2, 3litre engines
and only use a significant part of the power output about 2% of the
time. Then we lug around extra petrol just to keep the thing running
when we are not using it.

Having said that they do sound good and the noise also protects people
and animals.