hydrogen updateFollow

aerovironment is developing a UAV for the defense department that can stay aloft for up to a week at a time. it will be powered by hydrogen powered fuel cells recharging bateries to run electrict motors. the same system japans hydro-electric car usses. they have a working model.

envbike has developed a ENV (emmissions neutral vehical) motorcycle. again, it usses the hydrogen-electric fuel cell system. their bike has a removable power core that powers the electric motor that can also be used, once removed, as a generator for your home. it is for sale right now for around 6000 dollars.

innovative hydrogen solutions in canada is making a hydrogen fuel cell product called the H2N-Gen. it is an after market add on for gas powered automobiles roughly the size of a cable box that they claim will cut fuel consumption by up to 40 percent and emmissions up to 50 percent of a typical gas powered engine. it creates hydrogen through electrolisis using the cars battery through a resovor of potassium hydroxide solution. the hydrogen is then pumped into the engines intale manifold.

this system can be used on any gas powered engine. they have a working model. they expect to retail it for around 1000 dollars us in 2006. in a suv, it could mean the differance between 15 mpg to 20 plus mpg. not worth bragging about. but apply it to a honda civic and you go from 40 mpg to 50 plus mpg. that is compatable to current hybrids without the batteries or sacrificing driving distance.

i think gbaji should revisit his republican pro oil misinformation and call these people up and explain to them how their technology is not possible. it seems they didnt read his rants on hydrogens unfesability as a alternative fuel.

meanwhile.......

american companies are still trying to find ways to include oil in solving our energy problems. hybrids, taking hydrogen from natural gas instead of water, using oil powered powerplants to make hydrogen instead of nuclear or hydroelecric or wind or solar. bio-desiel, ethanol, anything to get that money making mainstay included in anything new. maintaining the status quo at all costs, including the costs of thousands of innocent human beings in the middle east.

and for those of you at home who like to experiment, kitusa.us has a toy vehical you build at home that runs on water. it usses a solar panel to make hydrogen to power a small remote controlled car. just fill it up in your sink.

but remember, i cant be done, so none of this is actually real, just left wing propaganda from the wimpy liberals.

Deuterium is a great source for power.

+1 ogame

We need a single term for this most elusive of beasts. Moral majority, silent majority, idiots - any one term will do - there is no need to add another.

The biggest reason for continued dependance on oil is because of infrastructure issues. You can't roll out hydrogen stations overnight. Even if you could, there isn't a market impetus to do so - people continue to buy gasoline, even in the face of ever-rising fuel costs. (Exxon didn't post record profits during hurricane season without the public gleefully wearing the yoke.)

Of course, a big part of the reason people keep buying oil products is that same existing infrastructure - our vehicles run on it, we heat our homes with it, we either don't have alternatives or can't be bothered to spend the time to acquire them. It is more convenient for the average American to work a little overtime to pay their heating bill this winter than it is for them to retool their homes and their lives around a new kind of fuel.


Huge infrastructure issues + consumer apathy = no change.

On a related note, we kept using copper wire phone tech for a damn long time before fiber gained any real market penetration. The phone companies are still in the process of ripping up old lines and retooling for fiber, and likely will be for the next five to ten years. Around the time they finish, something new will probably come along. It will take us another twenty years to start using it, as the phone companies will want to make their money back on their big infrastructure investment. So we'll sit on the new tech for some time, until market pressures are too great, and then slowly retool for the new tech, quite a few years behind the curve.

Repeat. Forever.

Hey! I'm the only ankle biter allowed in our allaince!

Short Version:

Companies are making too much money to give a **** about anything else.

If you ask me the Gov should be obligated to supply every home with everything that it needs for Electricity, Internet, Water, and Gas, ect.....

and naturally, in the the most environmentally friendly way possible.

Globally, we as humans have the physical resources to provide everyone on the planet with everything that they need. We just don't have the mental resources.

evil, greedy Marylander.

why do you hate humanity?

Woot! +1 searchability for me!

Um. Earth to Shadow... Earth to Shadow...

If you'd paid attention the zillion times the subject of future alternative fuels have come up, you'd know I'm firmly on the side of building them and getting them working.

What I'm not doing is naively assuming that we have a "magic bullet" that will solve all our energy problems and end our reliance on fossil fuels. I have never argued that companies should not spend the time and resources developing this stuff. My concerns in terms of hydrogen had nothing to do with whether it would work. My primary concern was one of infrastructure. As Wing said, it'll likely be a decade or more *after* reliable and safe hydrogen power cells come along before we'll see significant numbers of hydrogen refuelling stations. And until we see *that*, there wont be a whole lot of people running out to buy them.


My other primary point the last time we talked about this was that hydrogen power is not "power generation", so much as "power transfer". You take electrical power in one location, use it to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen in another, then store it in a container and use the hydrogen to power a motor of some kind. You have to *start* with an electrical generator of some kind. You can certainly utilize a car's motor to do this, but then you have to also burn something else (as in the hybrid motor you talked about). You can't ever end reliance on oil that way. You only reduce it. Even a "pure" hydrogen powered vehicle has problems. You have to generate the electricity somewhere to create the hydrogen. All engineering systems have a loss of energy at every stage of transferance, so you *never* get as much power out the far end as you start. So burning coal or oil in a power plant to generate electricity, to create hydrogen, to then burn in a car will not be as efficient as just burning the oil in the car directly. That's a rule of physics. Can't really get around it. Course, that depends on the details of what weight of oil you're using where and such, so depending on the utilization of a barrel of crude nationwide it *could* generate a savings. Or might not...


And in any case, we're *still* consuming some sort of non-renewable source of energy in order to generate that hydrogen. It's not just the emissions from your tailpipe that matter. Most polution is generated by industry, not cars. Power generation is one of the biggies. One way or the other, we're still consuming fossil fuels and we're still polluting the environment. You're just not doing it *directly* out of your tailpipe.


Also. No one (to my knowledge, I could certainly be wrong on this) has really done a detailed long term environmental impact study on the effect of mass electolisys genereation of hydrogen on a global scale. Remember. You're tampering with some basic elements here. Taking water and breaking it into oxygen and hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen for power. Um... Unless my math is wrong, this means you're adding extra free oxygen molecules into the atmosphere over time. What effect does that have over decades of use? Normally, oxygen and hydrogen and their combined form of water are balanced. They continually break apart and reform as part of the earths natural ecological system. Doing it artificially on a global scale could have some serious unforseen effects. I'm not sufficiently versed in that level of chemical interaction to be sure exactly *what* effects, but I think it's naive to assume it's totally harmless.


My final point was about the danger of the "pure" hydrogen systems. Using a smaller cell that generate small amounts and injects them into an existing engine is one thing. Having a vehicle that runs entirely on hydrogen presents other challenges. I'm not implying at all that these are things that are impossible to overcome, just that they *are* issues. Right now, the danger factor of a vehicle running on pure hydrogen is significantly higher then one running on gas or any sort of hybrid fuel. How much of a factor that plays into the rate of implementation of the technology is anyone's guess, but again, I think it's naive to pretend that because we can build a usable hydrogen engine, we'll be rolling them out into mass production to the general public right away.


We're still years if not decades away from seeing a significant number of privately owned vehicles utilizing this technology. That's not some sort of pro-oil position. It's just the realities of both the physical aspects of the technology and the market challenges involved in getting it to the public.

Two words: Nuclear Power.

That, of course, has its own host of issues but oil consumption wouldn't be one of them. We'd still be using petrochemicals in manufacturing various plastics but at a far reduced rate than we're currently blowing them out our tailpipes and smokestacks.

Not necessarily. First off, it's a question of what the energy is needed to run the electrolysis to run a hydrogen powered car one mile versus what we're doing now. I find it hard to believe that the increased electricty output is more wasteful then the current output of today's internal combustion engine, plus the increased refining needed to make the gasoline plus the assorted transport costs of hauling it across the ocean, to the refinery and then to each of America's gas stations. Which, of course, uses more petroleum.

Secondly, having a car that uses electricity in whatever fashion to run means that we are powering cars with coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, solar, geothermic and wind power versus a 100% reliance on oil to run our cars. Environment aside, we have a hell of a lot more coal than we do oil. We have a lot more natural gas reserves than we have petroleum reserves. Regardless of the net gain or loss in driving power per unit of energy, a switch to some form of electric car would be a huge reduction in dependance on foreign oil which is, simply, a good thing.

I personally have little issue with nuclear power. Then again, Illinois is one of the nation's largest producers and consumers of nuclear generated power so I guess it's not as much of a boogyman here as it is in some states. But I don't see a lack of current nuclear production as cause to hold up creating electricly powered vehicles. We can start the roll-over now and the created infrastructure of "fueling stations", powerlines and vehicles will work just as well no matter what's creating the juice at the starting point.

Edited to remove some information I wasn't sure on after additional research

Edited, Mon Nov 28 21:56:04 2005 by Jophiel

Yeah. Here's the problem though. Of those listed methods for generating electric power, which of those will most likely be used to cover the increase in power generation needed to provide electricity to power people's cars (regardless of specific method used at the end point)?

The "clean" methods of generating power are somewhat limited in terms of how much we can increase their output. You can't put a geothermal power plant just anywhere. Same with hydroelectric. Same with solar and wind for that matter. That leaves us with coal, natural gas, and nuclear to cover that increase. Currently, Coal produces about half of the total electric power generated in the US, with natural gas hitting about 20% (nuclear is another 20%). Point being that those three non-renewable sources represent 90% of the entire power generation in the US. No way can we cover an increase like that which would be needed to convert to electric vehicles without increasing the power generation by those three.

I'm not sure on the infrastructure in terms of natural gas. To read about it, it's much more efficient and clean then coal burning, but I'd have to assume there's an availability issue preventing it from scaling more in terms of use. Maybe that'll change. Maybe not. My guess is that most of the increase would simply be covered via coal burning. While it's not terribly efficient, and it's incredibly dirty, it's the most readily available source, and that means we'd just be replacing the burning of gas in cars with the burning of coal in power plants.

Unless we utilized nuclear power of course. Again. I'm all for that. I think we *should* be doing that. But the US has not brought a new nuclear power plant online in something like 25 years. Almost entirely due to negative public perception by eco-groups who seem to connect anything with the word "nuclear" in it to atomic weapons. Go figure!

Ok. There's some legitimate environmental issues with nuclear power. But it's generally so drowned out by the rhetoric that most people aren't aware of anything more then "nuclear power==bad". Which is too bad...


I'd like to think that we could just build the alternative techs and push the market that way. And that's probably how we *will* do it (cause it's the only way it's going to happen, right?). I'm not as optimistic as you are about how that'll affect things though. Yeah. It's something we need to do. It's something we *are* doing, but I think that the gains in terms of the environment and impact on non-renewable sources is far less then most people think. The only way to generate a truely significant environmental gain is to utilize nuclear power to generate the electricity to run all these new fuel cells, hydrogen cells, and other nifty methods for running cars and such. But the way things look like they're going, we'll most likely just shift that "cost" on to burning of coal and natural gas (not sure what the limits of that is either and it's hard to find them).


As far as ending reliance on oil, that's really a far more complex topic as well. It's not just about gas in your car (although lots of people think that). I know that you know this, but most people don't. Each barrel of crude is refined into different weights of petrolium, which in turn provide different things. We get everything from jet fuel, to gasoline, to diesel fuel, to plastics from the refinery of oil. The percentages of each of those weights is set based on the crude used (with a pretty standard range of values obtained). The point being that for every X pounds of plastics we generate and use, we *also* refine Y gallons of jet fuel, and Z gallons of gasoline. We don't have a choice. It's part of the refining process and there isn't a whole lot you can do to change it (ok, there are, but they get progressively more expensive.

You can't just look at the numbers of gallons of gas we use in our cars each year, figure out how many barrels of crude oil that equates to, and say that if we can remove our need to run gas in our cars that we'll reduce our crude oil consumption by that much. It just doesn't work that way. What we'll do is reduce it by some amount (don't know the value and don't feel like looking it up), until we hit the next highest demand weight, and then that will be the amount of crude we have to consume. We'll also have to contend with the fact that we'll have generated a surplus of gasoline in the process (so we're going to just sell it somewhere else that needs it I suppose. Not exactly the goal the eco-folks had, right?). Also, a side effect is that other petrolium product will increase in price. Since I believe that gasoline is the current driver in terms of barrels of crude refined in the US, we can assume that right now, we have a surplus of the other products that result from the refinement of enough crude to supply our gasoline needs. Higher supply versus demand means lower prices. Decreasing that supply will raise prices. That may not be a significant factor at all, but it is something to point out. Hardest hit would be the next highest demand product on the list of things we use refined petrolium for. I have *no* clue what that is though...