by "S65" (granthp)
Published 11/09/2017 at 17:07
by "S65" (granthp)
Published 11/09/2017 at 17:07
Tags: Hydrogen
; Toyota Mirai
STARS: 0
They’re neato but it seems much easier to make electric cars, and y’know there are only like 40 hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S. But the technology behind em is cool.
"AfromanGTO" (afromangto)
11/09/2017 at 17:12, STARS: 0
Put the hydrogen engine in a Pantera or Countach body, and I’m down.
"nermal" (nermal)
11/09/2017 at 17:15, STARS: 4
In theory, they are great - Zero emissions like an electric car, drive just like a gas powered one, and fill up just as fast as a gas powered one.
In practice, they face three yuuuuuuge hurdles that have yet to be overcome. First, fueling infrastructure. Second, actually “making” hydrogen in a method that is both cost and energy efficient. Third, electric cars have moved significantly ahead of them, due to longer range cars and more charging infrastructure as well as the convenience of at-home charging.
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
11/09/2017 at 17:18, STARS: 1
Its a well thought out part of a larger puzzle thats not even close to complete.
"S65" (granthp)
11/09/2017 at 17:19, STARS: 0
I was thinking more fuel cell vehicles like the Toyota Mirai or FCX Clarity. But Mazda did concepts with that, Hydrogen RE and Premacy RE Hybrid.
"Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now)" (bman76-4)
11/09/2017 at 17:20, STARS: 1
You pretty much nailed it. Neat tech, but it requires difficult infrastructure compared to electrics.
"Chan - Mid-engine with cabin fever" (superchan7)
11/09/2017 at 17:29, STARS: 1
I view them as one of two flavours of electric cars. Both power the car by electricity, but the storage is different.
1) BEV: Battery-type storage.
2) FCEV: Fuel-type storage.
I do not see the feasibility of a worldwide hydrogen infrastructure. It’s even worse to implement than a battery charging network.
"gin-san - shitpost specialist" (gin-san-)
11/09/2017 at 17:29, STARS: 0
I don’t think hydrogen will become viable, as much as I think that it’s cool tech.
Current methods are just energy intensive (at a net loss) or they just don’t produce on an industrial scale (like hydrogen producing bacteria).
Unless we find some sort of interesting catalyst to strip hydrogen from other widely available, cheap molecules I think it will come down to how quickly bio-engineering can R&D a bacteria that can produce H2 on an industrial scale.
There’s obviously other stuff to discuss like hydrogen storage (since it needs to be kept ridiculous cool, I believe, and your vehicle does vent the ever-expanding liquid/gas enough that your car will consistently run out even when it’s not being driven.
With the emergence of Tesla and more and more full electric solutions, it doesn’t seem likely that H2 will ever have a big share of the auto market.
"RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars" (rallydarkstrike)
11/09/2017 at 17:32, STARS: 1
I would actually prefer Hydrogen to pure electric - Hydrogen has a greater range than pure electric (as far as I know, maybe I am wrong) and takes almost as short a time to fill as a gasoline/diesel car.
"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
11/09/2017 at 17:52, STARS: 1
Well, electric motors are the closest we have come to absolute thermal efficiency in engines (the potential energy in the batter is almost completely conserved and turned into motion) but where the energy is stored is more important because lithium is very expensive and very scarce, also batteries made out of it are heavy and sort of unsafe under some circumstances.
From a purely environmental perspective, we need to see which type of drivetrain is less energy intensive.
While making a conventional gasoline ICE vehicle is not very costly in environmental terms, but running it on gasoline is very bad!
While making an EV is very expensive environmentally speaking, running it is very efficient because the thermal efficency of the motor is 90%+ and power plants are much more efficient than small ICE engines because of scale.
Additionally, the polution generated by electric vehicles is typically away from population centers, meaning less people get acid rain or cancer and respiratory diseases
A solution could be fuel cell powertrains, we make smaller batteries and we store energy as compressed hydrogen to be processed by a Fuel Cell and feed to an electric motor. but then we need to focus on the environmental impact of mining hydrogen, transporting it and compressing it. we also need to count in the impact of creating ever more resistant tanks for the hydrogen (this would have a larger impact than gasoline tanks)
right now we will have to choose which path to follow, electric and hydrogen infrastructure remains sparse compared to gasoline, and I think we should push for hydrogen rather than electric. This because we could potentially modify millions of gasoline cars into running hydrogen despite being ICE vehicles and that has a smaller environmental impact than just changing to EVs. Although they would have pathetic MPG because hydrogen has less potential energy than gasoline, and as an ICE vehicle, it would lose a lot of energy to heat.
"Kiltedpadre" (kiltedpadre)
11/09/2017 at 17:52, STARS: 1
I think the technology both in the cars and in the hydrogen generation are intriguing. However, unless we see massive improvements in terms of generation I don’t see them as viable vehicles.
Maybe with better hydrogen production they could be useful for replacing some of the fleet vehicles currently running on natural gas, but given how monumental creating the infrastructure for large scale adoption would be I just can’t see much use outside of fleet situations. At least then the issue of potentially only having one or two regional fueling stations wouldn’t be as big of a deal.
"ranwhenparked" (ranwhenparked)
11/09/2017 at 18:11, STARS: 2
Great in theory, but producing hydrogen is just too wasteful and costly.
I like that you could modify an ICE engine to burn hydrogen, which takes care of the “range anxiety” issue - if you’re too far away from a hydrogen station, just fill up with gasoline, but, at that point, you might as well just buy a natural gas fueled car.
"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
11/09/2017 at 18:16, STARS: 2
but then we need to focus on the environmental impact of mining hydrogen, transporting it and compressing it.
Mining hydrogen??
"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
11/09/2017 at 19:19, STARS: 0
Well, not mining strictly , but obtaining it is still a mess of separating it from other materials so that its pure and storing it is still quite space-intensive. All of this makes its environmental impact heavy. Additionally there is a process for atmospheric mining.
"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
11/09/2017 at 19:21, STARS: 0
Well its expensive because it doesn’t have the supply chain and corporate infrastructure that gasoline or electricity has. As many industries that are emerging, the key is jumping into the bandwagon soon, but not too soon.
"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
11/09/2017 at 19:29, STARS: 1
Forget about making electric cars that run on hydrogen for now. Let’s do what BMW did nearly twenty years ago and just burn the stuff in ICEs. Mind you, this doesn’t address the infrastructure problem, but it makes it cheap and easy to get hydrogen-powered cars out there. Right now its a chicken-and-egg problem, with nobody wanting to make half the commitment without the other half being there. If we can make the cars cheap and easy, and give all sorts of tax incentives to encourage the adoption of said cars, the fuel infrastructure and the technology to get the hydrogen economically will be developed. It’s a little bit of pain now to get a big payoff later. And with more fueling stations, more work will be done on fuel cells and we can finally get to that torquey and convenient electric future.
California pissed me off when BMW was denied the right to label their hydrogen-burning cars as zero emissions vehicles, saying that the engines burned a little oil in the combustion process and therefore weren’t zero emissions. Yeah, technically correct, but missing the bigger picture.
Those vehicles labeled as zero emissions vehicles are really just remote emission vehicles. I’m willing to bet that burning a little oil is preferably to burning massive amounts of coal somewhere far away. And you have to keep in mind that the idea of burning hydrogen to power cars is just a temporary solution and the burning of lubricating oil is something we can live with for a decade or two.
"bhtooefr" (bhtooefr)
11/09/2017 at 19:44, STARS: 1
The cars are expensive (true, the same charge can be leveled against similarly long range BEVs), the fueling infrastructure is hideously expensive (whereas it ranges from incredibly cheap to only moderately expensive for BEVs) and inefficient (as much as 20% additional energy is spent compressing the hydrogen to 700 bar, especially when you consider precooling and additional pressurization required to fill the car quickly), and fuel cells aren’t great on efficiency (I’m seeing numbers in the 50% ballpark, barely better than many ICEs).
And, you have to make the hydrogen, too. Two popular ways to do that, steam reforming of natural gas, and electrolysis.
With steam reforming of natural gas, first thing to point out is that it’s a fossil fuel that we’re talking about here. In any case, AFAIK, this is about 70% efficient or so. It is cheap, though... but let’s go ahead and stack our inefficiencies up, and note that you could convert plenty of ICEs to run on natural gas instead. 70% production efficiency * 80% compression efficiency * 50% fuel cell efficiency is 28% efficient, and there’s some ICE cars that can beat that average - CVT-equipped (whether true or simulated) hybrids, sure, but they exist. (And, I know I looked at this before from another direction, on sheer carbon footprint numbers, and found that the Prius won that way too.) Oh, and natural gas burns pretty damn cleanly in ICEs, too.
With electrolysis, you can use renewable energy to do the job... at 45-70% efficiency. And you’ve still got the other issues. And charging batteries is pretty damn efficient.
If you have to take the natural gas out of the ground, just burn it directly, don’t turn it into hydrogen. If you’re getting renewable electricity, charge batteries with it, don’t use it to make hydrogen.
"BaconSandwich is tasty." (baconsandwich)
11/09/2017 at 20:30, STARS: 0
Lithium ion batteries don’t actually contain that much lithium. To the tune of about 63 kg in a Tesla battery pack that weighs ~1,000 lbs. Despite it’s name, it’s not actually that rare. It’s more the cobalt in the batteries that are rare, and often not ethically sourced. You are right that batteries weigh a lot, but they aren’t really that unsafe - especially when you consider we already drive around in cars with tanks of flammable liquid. Hydrogen doesn’t really score any better there, as you’ve got highly compressed tanks of flammable liquid/gas.
The sourcing of hydrogen right now is a bit of a crap shoot. Most of it is coming from splitting natural gas, so it’s not really any better for the environment. By the time you take into account splitting water (or natural gas), compressing it, transporting it, then converting it back into electricity, the inefficiencies add up when compared to running a battery operated car. Yes, you lug around a heavier battery pack, and it takes longer to fill/charge, but it ends up being considerably more efficient to take that electricity, store it, then convert it to mechanical motion than to go through all the extra steps with hydrogen.
I used to really like the idea of a hydrogen powered car - even something like the GM Hy-wire (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Hy-wire
), but the more I dug into it, the less it makes sense. Especially since it allows oil and gas companies (which have shown to be less than ethical) maintain power over people filling up their cars.
Another issue that often isn’t mentioned is hydrogen embrittlement. Basically, the tanks and metal fittings eventually become brittle because of their constant contact with hydrogen. This means that tanks are only certified for a certain period of time. In the case of the Mirai, it’s only 10 years. Maybe by then things will be better, but because hydrogen is so dang tiny, it’s going to be a very difficult problem to overcome.
I think hydrogen has its place, but it’s unlikely that that place will be in regular passenger vehicles.
"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
11/09/2017 at 20:56, STARS: 0
All technologies have limitations in the respects of fatigue, gasoline tanks/pumps also succumb to fatigue, batteries are also certified for a finite time. Battery tech is also slowing down compared to material engineering. What we could look at here is that recycling fatigued hydrogen tanks is way easier than recycling complex batteries.
In the end the entire cycle of how we get energy is flawed, oil companies shouldn’t necessarily get control of the hydrogen market, I think governments could help independent businesses sort hydrogen from ethical and innovative sources with a few grants.
I think that the divergences come when we discuss short term improvements to the environment, where batteries I think win, or long term viability where I think hydrogen wins.
Yet lets agree that the ICE engine is, shamefully, on its deathbed. hundreds of components, thermal inefficiency, and need for servicing and lubricants have doomed it. Perhaps I think we should emphasize using both hydrogen and batteries to power cars, batteries can recover energy such as braking and suspension motions while hydrogen can provide a good storage option.
Lets have a small battery, lets say 10Kwh, and hook it up to a large fuel cell and tank, we can shape the tank and battery in such manner that the tank helps the battery stay cool, and increase efficiency.
"Spoon II" (Spoon_II)
11/09/2017 at 22:47, STARS: 1
I really like the idea! It’s easy to fuel, efficient to run, and I bet you can make them crazy fun!
"pip bip - choose Corrour" (hhgttg69)
11/10/2017 at 06:36, STARS: 0
i’d happily take a Mirai
"AfromanGTO" (afromangto)
11/10/2017 at 10:32, STARS: 1
I think new vehicles that use new tech should be stunning. I wish the designers would channel some art deco, pre WWII Bugattis, E type, Miura, and a little bit of a Pantera and Countach. I want to look at the vehicle and say wow. Not like today where the inspiration was a bar of soap or sex toy.