What’s good for General Motors is …
March 4, 2006 - 1:03 pm
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Hydrogen is a bad idea. The infrastructure required won’t be built in time for GMs cars and the hydrogen itself costs a lot of energy to create with significant loss in the process. There is also the safety issue if they use liquid hydrogen.
A better solution is electric cars using the Toshiba battery that can recharge to 80% capacity in a minute.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr2901.htm
Mix that in with a hybrid engine designed to use more power and less gas than current hyrbids and you’d have a real solution (bonus green points if you biodiesel in the hybrid).
I like the GM designs though, I just hope they can adapt them since I think hydrogen cars are dead already.
From where do you get the hydrogen?
Electrolytic separation of water? – requires electricity from, …
Separation of hydrocarbons? – reuires hydrocarbons in the form of, …
Fuel cells? – requires a feedstock such as, …
Until we go to all electric from nuclear (or one of the minor alternatives such as wind), we will be using oil, gas, coal.
By the way, conversion to hydrogen however you do it, almost certainly lowers the throughput efficiency, creating a greater need for, …
Wayne:
You might be right. However there was an article in last week’s New Scientist about using algae to generate hydrogen from sunlight via photosynthesis. Apparently there are some major problems to be worked out but it sounds promising.
I don’t know how much progress has been make in other kinds of solar panels.
Another possibility is fusion.
You have a much better grasp of things, however, that the writer of the article who says: “Another big challenge is reducing the cost of obtaining hydrogen itself, which has to be extracted from fossil fuels, such as carbon, or from water.”
A more practical solution that can be started right now would mandating all new cars sold in the US be capable of running on either pure ethanol, methanol or any blend of the two as well as gasoline and any combination of gasoline and one or both of the alcohols. Except for the methanol, which would be a tweak of the technology, Brazil is already doing that. And GM, Ford and the other major players are doing just that in Brazil. Couple that with hybrid technology and we would be rid of the Middle Eastern extortionist in less than 15 years as the overwhelming part of the US auto fleet is turned over to the combo fuel technology with hybrid technology. While we will never be completely self sufficient in liquid combustible fuels, we can determine who will be our suppliers. It would far better for us to rely on Central American and Caribbean countries for ethanol than any Islamic State or emerging communist state like Venezuela for oil. And a great side benefit for us is that it would reduce a great deal of illegal immigration and provide great export markets for the US.
Hydrogen has been bandied about since 1973. It’s still nowhere and for reasons stated here and elsewhere will continue to go nowhere for decades more. 20 or 30 years from now, if and a rather big if at that, fusion technology becomes workable let alone practical, we can start contemplating splitting water in to hydrogen and the related problems of safe practical storage solutions for hydrogen fuel tanks for automobiles.
Ethanol is insane. Current ethanol production wastes a ton of natural gas. And we are running out of natural gas a hell of a lot faster than oil. So much for corn as “renewable” energy.
It makes no economic sense either, but the government either mandates it for oxygenated “winterfuel” as an anti-smog additive, or subsidizes the hell out of it.
Ethanol would not exist economically without heavy government intervention. That ought to tell you everything you need to know about how much sense it makes.
OK, this might be a dumb question, but where do we get the water to seperate the hydrogen???
Aren’t enough places having a drought?
Though the hydrogen then turns back into water vapor during its use in the vehicle, you would still need to store a certain capacity of hydrogen for transportation needs.
And what about all the extra water vapor hitting our climate? Any ideas what that would cause?
Ethanol is, essentially, moonshine—alchohol produced from corn or agricultural waste products. It needs to “cook” to be made, and the cooking needs to be powered by an energy source. Does the energy yielded by the process exceed the energy the process itself consumes? Not yet, that’s why it needs government subsidy. Can it ever? Opinions differ, but if the energy required to produce ethanol exceeding the energy yielded by the final product turns out to be something like a thermodynamic given, then ethanol can never be a net energy source.
Same with hydrogen. It takes more energy to produce it than it yields. Hydrogen is essentially an energy storage medium, taking energy produced by, say, coal, gas or nukes, storing it in the form of hydrogen (minus the conversion “tax” imposed by the laws of thermodynamics) and allowing the clean hydrogen to be burned in LA or wherever, while relegating the coal pollution generated by the process of making the hydrogen fuel to some outlying area. It becomes a pollution displacement medium, possibly relevant to localized pollution allocation policy, but contributing nothing to the net pollution problem or energy usage problem (actually, it makes things worse to the extent it takes more fossil fuels to make the hydrogen to power vehicles than the vehicles themselves would use on their own.) Hydrogen is not an energy source. To the extent it can be produced by nukes or coal, it would help to lessen demand on foreign oil, but it isn’t the clean energy magic bullet it is touted to be, and it never will be if it always takes more energy to produce than it will yield.