Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first commercial production of a zero-emission, hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle. The four-seater, called FCX Clarity, runs on electricity produced by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and emits water vapour. Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, petrol-powered car.
One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of wider adoption of fuel-cell vehicles is the lack of hydrogen fuelling stations.
Critics also point out that hydrogen is costly to produce and the most common way to produce hydrogen is still from fossil fuels. Analysis of the environmental impact of different fuel technologies has shown that the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.
It is being built on the world's first dedicated production line for fuel-cell vehicles in Japan.
The paragraph about critics pointing out the problems with producing hydrogen is interesting. I have zero knowledge on the subject and am not inclined to research it using this work computer... but does anyone know much about it? Is this a -real- development; or are we simply fooling ourselves by making sure we don't see the true cost in fossil fuels of driving the car?
Well, you produce hydrogen by cracking plain old H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. That requires electricity. So, you need the power plants to produce more electricity, which may increase pollution if you're talking about coal fired power plants, etc.
The thing is, if you use nuclear power plants, you can produce all the extra power necessary without the noxious fumes into the atmosphere. But that would involve actually building the plants. I believe Japan has been pretty good about developing and building more nuke plants, so they should be fine in this case.
Hopefully, as Japan transitions to a hydrogen-based fuel source, the rest of the world will take notice and try doing it too. Maybe France, since they have a lot of power-generating capability.
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edit: well, I just read the actual article, and it says that the cars are being produced for use in California. The point still stands though, but I wonder as to the state of hydrogen powered cars in Japan.
Vendetta wrote:Richard Gatling was a pioneer in US national healthcare. On discovering that most soldiers during the American Civil War were dying of disease rather than gunshots, he turned his mind to, rather than providing better sanitary conditions and medical care for troops, creating a machine to make sure they got shot faster.
It takes electricity to produce the gases; but doesn't it also produce electricity to produce traditional fossil fuels? Does it take more or less?
If you assume that the process for fossil fuels and gases are roughly similar, then this is an obvious step forward. Criticizing the hydrogen process for using electricity would be silly. In economics, we talk a lot about Marginal Cost and Marginal Benefits. Under the above assumption, there is a low Marginal Cost (ignoring infrastructure changes like new "Gas" Stations), and a huge Marginal Benefit of cars not burning any fossil fuels. Since the electricity spent to produce the fuel is constant, we ignore it.
However, if the energy required to prepare the fuel is grossly skewed in favor of fossil fuels, then this changes everything about the above paragraph. Hence, my question.
Hydrogen powered systems are using a fuel that is a energy carrier, not an energy source, unlike conventional fossil fuels.
In other words, it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it ends up providing in the end product. This means it's quite correct that, currently, a hydrogen powered vehicle would technically be a source of greater pollution, since our conventional sources of energy (fossil fuels) are being used to produce hydrogen at a greater efficiency loss.
However, if people and goverments would get their fucking act together and start using our current sources of energy to redesign our infrastructures to be self sustaining and dependent upon other sources of power like nuclear, dam, wind, solar, wave (etc for any I missed), we might actually be going somewhere positive.
But nope, people are just too fucking dense, uneducated and worried about living the high life at the expense of the future to try and address the problem or even acknowledge it exists.
Red wrote:Another question from an uninformed board member:
It takes electricity to produce the gases; but doesn't it also produce electricity to produce traditional fossil fuels? Does it take more or less?
Yes, you have to spend energy to turn crude oil into petroleum and the like. However, if you invest 1 unit of energy into extracting and refining oil into petroleum, you'll get something like 5 or 10 units of energy back burning the petroleum. It works because petroleum is the fuel, the end result of burning it is a lot of heat, light, and CO2 and H2O. However, H2O is the end result of burning hydrogen. You can't use hydrogen as an energy source, because you're going in the opposite direction of thermodynamics (i.e., instead of going from fuel + oxidizer --> combustion products + energy, you're going from combustion products + energy --> fuel + oxidizer.)
This is why one needs to think of hydrogen as a battery, rather than an energy source. You're storing up energy into the bonds between hydrogen atoms, so you can release it again by combining the hydrogen with oxygen.
Isn't the energy output from a large scale power plant more efficient than the energy output from an internal combustion engine?
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It also should be mentioned that even if you still use fossil fuels to produce the hydrogen, it's at a centralized location where the pollutants could be captured instead of being released from many thousands of smaller sources.
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Hawkwings wrote:
The thing is, if you use nuclear power plants, you can produce all the extra power necessary without the noxious fumes into the atmosphere. But that would involve actually building the plants. I believe Japan has been pretty good about developing and building more nuke plants, so they should be fine in this case.
With the proper type of nuclear reactor, you can directly crack hydrogen using the intense heat of the coolant, bypassing the rather large inefficiency of running steam turbines to make electricity only to turn it into hydrogen. However no one on earth has even made preliminary moves towards building that kind of plant and they wont until oil is totally unaffordable and significant demand for hydrogen fuel exists.
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This would work well in Iceland, where they have lots of cheap (and clean) energy from water and geothermal sources. Elsewhere, better start working on building more nuke plants.
This isn't really related, but the ad below is cracking me up. "How to cut your gas costs by 60% by converting your car to burn water."
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Sea Skimmer wrote:With the proper type of nuclear reactor, you can directly crack hydrogen using the intense heat of the coolant, bypassing the rather large inefficiency of running steam turbines to make electricity only to turn it into hydrogen. However no one on earth has even made preliminary moves towards building that kind of plant and they wont until oil is totally unaffordable and significant demand for hydrogen fuel exists.
... essentially utilizing the heat of the coolant that's already there? Do modern plants do anything remotely like this, to capture that energy?
Red wrote:
... essentially utilizing the heat of the coolant that's already there? Do modern plants do anything remotely like this, to capture that energy?
Umm, yeah nuclear reactor coolant has lots of heat, which normally makes steam and spins turbines. To crack hydrogen the coolant has to be an exceptional high temperature, significantly higher then the coolant temperature of most existing nuclear power reactors.
This is not some means to recycle waste heat; you have to chose between making hydrogen or powering a steam turbine, you cant do one and then the other with any worthwhile efficiency in the same loop, and you have to build the plant from the ground up to be able to run at a sufficient high temperature, 850 degree C minimal as I recall. That’s why this kind of plant is not going to happen for a while yet, if ever. It may well be that by the time a nuclear powered hydrogen plant is economical we will have come up with better ideas.
It’s so cool to think though, that this technology could let us have defacto nuclear powered cars without insane safety problems.
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Honda claims the FCX Clarity will help cut pollution and fuel wastage
Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first commercial production of a zero-emission, hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle.
The four-seater, called FCX Clarity, runs on electricity produced by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and emits water vapour.
Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, petrol-powered car.
Honda plans to produce 200 of the cars over the next three years.
One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of wider adoption of fuel-cell vehicles is the lack of hydrogen fuelling stations.
This is an important day in the history of fuel-cell vehicle technology
John Mendel, executive vice president of American Honda
Critics also point out that hydrogen is costly to produce and the most common way to produce hydrogen is still from fossil fuels.
Analysis of the environmental impact of different fuel technologies has shown that the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.
'Monumental step'
The first five customers are all based in southern California because of the proximity of hydrogen fuelling stations, Honda said.
Honda's hydrogen fuel-cell powered car on the road
US actress Jamie Lee Curtis will be among the first to take delivery of the vehicle, the firm added.
The car will initially be available for lease rather than purchase in California, starting in July, and then in Japan later this year.
It is being built on the world's first dedicated production line for fuel-cell vehicles in Japan.
"This is an important day in the history of fuel-cell vehicle technology and a monumental step closer to the day when fuel-cell cars will be part of the mainstream," said John Mendel, executive vice president of American Honda.
How the technology works
Honda says it expects to lease a few dozen units in the US and Japan in 2008, and about 200 units within three years.
It said the cost of the car, on a three-year lease, would be $600 (£300) a month.
The FCX Clarity is based on Honda's first-generation hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle, the FCX concept car. Honda delivered around 34 of these cars, mainly in the US, of which 10 remain in use.
Booming demand
Many car makers are developing cleaner, more economical vehicles because of high fuel prices and as consumers become more concerned with the environment.
Toyota said it was struggling to keep up with booming demand for its hybrid vehicles because it was unable to make enough batteries.
Hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota's top-selling Prius, switch between a petrol engine and electric motor.
Toyota Motor Corp's executive vice president, Takeshi Uchiyamada, told the Associated Press that new battery production lines could not be added until next year.
"Hybrids are selling so well we are doing all we can to increase production," he said. "We need new lines."
Volkswagen, Europe's biggest car maker said on Monday it wanted to produce a Golf which consumed three to four litres of petrol per 100 kilometres compared with 4.3 litres currently for the most fuel-efficient model.
"In the next few years, we are not going to do without petrol and diesel motors, but the future belongs to the electric car," VW chairman Martin Winterkorn told German newspaper Bild-Zeitung.
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Two-hundred lease cars by 2011. This isn't good. Not good at all. The hydrogen economy is a total non-starter, but anyone thinking about replacing their jalopy with a brand new fuel-cell stack powered vehicle is in for a shock. Like the BMW Hydrogen 7, this is nothing more than a PR stunt funded by rich celebrities.
People are missing the point here with the phrase "the most common way to produce hydrogen is still from fossil fuels." They aren't talking about using electricity from Power Plants using Oil to use electrolysis to crack H2O into Hydrogen. They are talking about how hydrocarbons, usually Natural Gas, are processed with Steam Reforming to produce hydrogen gas.
As others have pointed out, you can use electrolysis if you have economic sources of electricity from Nuclear or Solar or etc..
Sea Skimmer wrote:With the proper type of nuclear reactor, you can directly crack hydrogen using the intense heat of the coolant, bypassing the rather large inefficiency of running steam turbines to make electricity only to turn it into hydrogen. However no one on earth has even made preliminary moves towards building that kind of plant and they wont until oil is totally unaffordable and significant demand for hydrogen fuel exists.
Wouldn't you, then, have to transport the hydrogen from the reactor, though? That seems to do nothing but replace one inefficiency (electricity-->electrolysis-->chemical energy in hydrogen) to another (storing and transporting hydrogen). Obviously, I don't know what sorts of costs are involved, but frankly that doesn't strike me as being overly appealing.
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