Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Hydrogen fuel cells were once touted as the path to zero-emission motoring, but advances in battery technology made hybrids and battery-powered electric vehicles more practical. Still Honda, which has built two fuel cell vehicles in the past, isn’t giving up on the universe’s most abundant element. It will launch a new fuel cell car in 2015. “This new fuel cell vehicle will showcase further technological advancement and significant cost reduction that Honda has accomplished,” Honda CEO and president Takanobu Ito said at his mid-year speech in Japan. Ito said the new fuel cell vehicle will be sold in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Development at North American Honda’s Research & Development Center in Liberty, Ohio is ongoing. Honda has already put two fuel cell vehicles, the FCX and FCX Clarity (pictured) into limited production. These cars constituted a “pilot program,” similar to what Honda and other companies such as BMW and Audi are using to develop battery-powered electric vehicles. The data gleaned from the FCX models will help Honda’s engineers design a mass-market fuel cell vehicle. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...34DwBQ&usg=AFQjCNHNwLF9BWB9-9Jpo4wC6jMmbOT8QQ
That car will be completely useless without an infrastructure to support it. Can you supply information on that infrastructure? How available will it be for the average car buyer?
i drive a 1990s era shopping cart, with external recycling bags, 202 liter soliciting bucket, 2 square meter begging sign, half a recycled tent, and that bike i;m going to fix real soon.
billvon Er...dude...hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe. Each molecule of water contains 2 atoms of hydrogen and all you need is a little electricity to separate them. Use solar or wind power to provide intermittant electrical current and you have virtually free fuel, forever. GrumpyPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The oil companies aren't letting any hydrogen generation start up companies onto the playing field. If we were allowed to manufacture hydrogen using atomic energy we could make enough hydrogen to power everyone in the world. Atomic energy is but one way to make hydrorgen, there are others as well, like chemical and solar which was already stated. It is up to us to ask for hydrogen but few seem to support it due to the power of the oil companies owning everything today.
Well, oil is just a few hydrogen atoms and a few carbon atoms. Run a little electricity through water, break down some CO2 and you've got oil. So we have free oil as well! (As long as you don't count the energy required to make it.) The problem remains that we don't have any hydrogen here. We have to make it. Thus it is not a source of fuel; it's just another way to store energy. If you have the electricity, better to use it to charge up your Tesla instead of converting water to hydrogen, storing the hydrogen, compressing it into a car's tanks, then reconverting it to electricity in a fuel cell and using the electricity to run the car's electric motor. The Tesla is far simpler, far cheaper and much longer lasting. I have "free" fuel now. Solar on my roof and an electric car.
Hydrogen is: 1) energy intensive to make 2) very hard to store 3) one of the most dangerous fuels around 4) a limited range fuel due to its very low density If you want to use nuclear energy then use nuclear energy to make electricity - and then take all the natural gas you saved and use THAT to run your car. Such cars exist now and they are a lot safer than hydrogen cars.
Yesterday at 13th Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, a team of scientists announced that they developed a way to store hydrogen in carbonized chicken feathers. At present, the major hold-up with making cars powered by fuel cells, is that no one has come up with a way to inexpensively and effectively produce and store all that hydrogen. Researchers Erman Şenöz and Richard P. Wool found that when they heated up quill fibers to extremely high temperatures, carbon nanotubes with nanoporous walls formed, allowing the substances to absorb and store hydrogen. While the development is certainly exciting, don’t expect to see cheap, hydrogen-powered vehicles rolling down the block anytime soon. The technology is nowhere near commercialization yet. Because of hydrogen’s extremely low density, cars using Şenöz and Wool’s system would need about a 75-gallon tank to go 300 miles, so researchers must first figure out how to optimize the technology. Still, cars equipped with high-tech gear that originated from mere chicken feathers is a seriously resourceful concept. Read more: Chicken Feathers May Fuel Hydrogen Cars in the Future | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building- See more at: http://inhabitat.com/chicken-feathers-may-fuel-hydrogen-cars-in-the-future/#sthash.Rl3MRDmI.dpuf http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...wA3XjP8MJxQbEEy2BZaGS4Q&bvm=bv.43148975,d.eWU
billvon Hydrogen is very easy and cheap to make. With solar and wind energy being intermittent, using it to produce hydrogen can be a method of providing continuous power from an intermittent source of energy. The equipment needed to convert water to hydrogen would fit in a cabinet, cost about what a refrigerator would and could be used in your car, your house or your greenhouse. Yes, we still need improvements in storage, but we have already been working on that for decades and several principles have been proven in the lab. The main beauty of a hydrogen energy system is that the oil companies don't and can't control it or extract obscene profits from it. Living beside a stream, I could create hydrogen continuously with a water wheel. And while I can't power my car with a water wheel I can power it with the hydrogen it created and compressed. And, given the efficiencies of fuel cells and electric drives, little of that energy would be wasted and I would give not one thin dime to any oil company. While hydrogen filling stations would be nice on long trips, for local use they are not necessary at all. GrumpyPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Easy to make? Yes. Easy to store? No. Cheap? No. It takes an incredible amount of energy to make hydrogen from water; around 70kwhr to make one kg! Then you have to either compress it to very high pressures (which takes a lot of energy) or liquefy it (which takes even more.) And you don't get that energy back; it is wasted. Or you could just feed the power into the grid and burn less natural gas in powerplants - then use the natural gas you save in cars for fuel. Natural gas is safer, cheaper, easier to store, denser and can be made from trash. (And as an added benefit it just comes out of the ground.) They could control it as easily as they control the oil supply if they chose to do so. The threat that "homemade" hydrogen poses to them is even less than the threat that used deep-fryer oil poses to them. Or you could generate electricity with a microhydro turbine and charge a Tesla. Those cars/components are available right now - and are far cheaper, safer and more reliable than electrolyzers, compressors, tanks, filling systems and fuel cells. And you wouldn't be wasting any energy running a compressor. Hydrogen is a great idea, but it will be a long time before it's useful as an energy storage medium. There's just too many problems with it.
GM killed off the diesel market in the USA back in the early 1980s. They saw the rising popularity of diesel sedans by Mercedes, Peugeot and other European makers and had to stop it, before they'd be sucked into the huge capital outlay needed to start manufacturing diesels. So they mickey-moused "diesel engines" which were nothing more than their existing gasoline burners with diesel heads grafted on, Frankenstein-style. You can imagine what the high compression did to the bearings and the rest of it. They wouldn't even run 100,000 miles. Americans decided that diesel engines were ridiculous. Hardly worth putting up with the smell, the smoke, the noise, the glares from neighbors and other drivers, the reduced power, and the yucky mess of filling the tank in an era when all gas stations were converting to self-service--if you could find one with a diesel pump! Americans are a forgetful people. A mere fifty years after we watched Prohibition almost destroy the country, we launched the War on Drugs. But these same people still remember those diesel Oldsmobiles. I'm not sure you'll ever get Americans to try out diesel-engine cars again. We still have the 1978 Mercedes 240D that we bought new. It runs like new.
The diesel in this case is the premium version. I think people are looking for SUVs with a lower operating cost and the greater torque can't hurt. Many buyers won't even consider a V8 anymore.
