“Chatter continues about a possible Apple auto, maybe as soon as 2020,” Yahoo Finance reports.
“For Yahoo Finance columnist Rick Newman ‘electric cars’ are not the cure for any auto industry ills,” Yahoo Finance reports. “Rather, hydrogen fuel cell technology is what he calls the ‘holy grail’ for automakers. While any number of them have been working on such vehicles no one has solved the problems associated with it.”
Yahoo Finance reports that Newman says, “‘Whoever can figure out how to, number one, get the cost of that hydrogen fuel… down to a tolerable level and then figure out how you fuel the thing because we don’t have hydrogen filling stations yet. That will transform the auto industry more than almost anything you can think of.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: See related articles below.
Related articles:
Apple working with Intelligent Energy on fuel cell technology for mobile devices, sources say – July 14, 2014
North Carolina regulators approve Apple’s 4.8-megawatt fuel cell facility at Maiden data center – May 23, 2012
New aerial images of Apple’s planned NC fuel cell, solar farms published – April 7, 2012
Apple’s massive fuel cell energy project to be largest in the U.S. – April 4, 2012
Apple patent application reveals next-gen fuel cell powered Macs and iOS devices – December 22, 2011
Apple patent app details highly-advanced hydrogen fuel cells to power portable devices – October 20, 2011
It will even have a parachute for floating back to Earth after the possible explosion.
I wrote a thesis for my Masters on hydrogen fuel cells – they’re actually a lot safer than gas vehicles. If a hydrogen storage tank punctures, the gas dissipates into the air, it doesn’t puddle on the ground where it can be ignited by another source.
There’s a manufacturer in Europe who makes a hydrogen purifier that takes water and breaks it down into hydrogen and oxygen. The unit is about the size of a refrigerator – it ends up producing H for fuel cells and O that can be purified further for Hospital use. The way their model was set up – a gas station could install 2 or 3 of these for fairly cheap, and sell the oxygen for more than the hydrogen. The problem was they consume a LOT of electricity to breakdown the water.
It’s all really interesting stuff, and sounds very “Apple-like”.
Four problems with your theory:
1. It’s not the gasoline that ignites, it’s gasoline vapor (which is why you can’t smoke while fueling your vehicle);
2. Hydrogen gas escaping into the atmosphere near a flame/spark is exceedingly dangerous; and
3. There is no infrastructure for refueling a hydrogen powered car, so you have nowhere to drive it except to the hydrogen refueling station and back home.
4. As you mention, the electrolysis for dividing water into H and O uses tremendous amounts of electricity, so much so that a gas station can’t make a profit selling the resulting products. Or, the hydrogen is so expensive that people won’t buy fuel cell cars.
Nailed it.
There is no “delivery system” for hydrogen like there is for liquid fuels and electricity. That is where the killer costs reside.
You can’t afford to to liquify hydrogen as that consumes too much power. Hence, hydrogen has to be delivered at modest pressures as a gas.
Hydrogen from natural gas is fairly cheap, but how do you get it to filing stations 500 miles away?
And electricity is already widely distributed.
Yep, the challenge is in the storage of that electrical energy in an efficient and portable form.
Swapping battery packs would probably be the most comparable alternative to fueling gas/diesel vehicles. It might take a very long while to develop a battery approach in which you can charge a big vehicle battery in just a few minutes. Until then, people will consider pure EVs to be too inconvenient for anything other than local driving.
Consider the Tesla SuperCharger system.
Stations are set up across the country and the system is expanding rapidly. In a 30 minute charging session you can charge the battery pack enough to drive 170 miles. That charge will take not quite 3 hours to use, if you are on a cross-country road trip. At the end of that time, you pull into another SuperCharger location, hook up the charger, have a potty break and grab a snack. After 30 min you are ready to go again. A little longer that adding gasoline to an ICE powered car, but not terrible.
And access to the SuperCharger system is free. Try that at a gas station.
Tesla has already designed and built a prototype battery swapping station.
Scale up well to handle the volume service stations – especially on long-haul highways – these methods won’t so much….
A couple of additional thoughts:
5. Hydrogen leaks easily. It is nearly impossible to keep it from those tiny molecules from leaking, especially at the high storage pressures that are required to get much range out of a fuel cell vehicle.
6. The value of the oxygen byproduct from the electrolysis process might end up being rather low because of supply-and-demand considerations. The production of large quantities of H2 for fuel cell vehicle would result in a lot of O2.
That said, fuel cell vehicles (probably a hybrid of fuel cell and batteries/supercapacitors) might eventually be the best answer. Batteries would be used for short trips and super capacitors for acceleration and regenerative braking. Fuel cells would be used to charge the batteries and extend range, much like ICEs are used in the current hybrids. So the advancement of battery technology is still very important.
#5 assumes that you are pressurizing the H possibly to a liquid state. I understand there is research on tech that bonds the hydrogen to a storage material and can be released with a modest amount of heat. This reduces the requirement for high pressure storage and would probably decrease leak rate.
The LH2 used as a fuel on some rocket stages (e.g., Shuttle external tank, Centaur upper stage) is only about 90 Kelvin above absolute zero. I do not believe that it is feasible to pressurize H2 to a liquid state at room temperature. However, it is possible to store a reasonable amount of GH2 at high pressure in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV).
It is possible to bind H2 in a metallic hydride. However, the weight is fairly high and the extraction of the hydrogen is not all that easy. Methane is actually. Great way to transport hydrogen — one carbon plus four hydrogen atoms. Methane can be fairly readily liquified at cryogenic temperatures and low pressure. It is much easier to liquefy and store methane than hydrogen.
Methane being natural gas/cow farts.
“Hydrogen gas escaping into the atmosphere near a flame/spark is exceedingly dangerous”
Not as dangerous as the same volume of gasoline vapor. At 1 ATM of pressure, H2 has much less energy density than a lot of more common fuels do.
-jcr
If you supply a car with water and electricity, you can make hydrogen. Maybe they have some sort of converter built into the car. Put solar cells on the roof of the car, and it could make gas when it’s parked out in the daylight.
You could also produce hydrogen at home, again, utilizing solar and/or wind, etc. There are all sorts of solutions and ideas you could implement to make this work.
For most of the time, all we need our cars for, is to get to and from work, which is on average under 20 miles.
Big oil is hell bent trying to impede development of alternative fuel technology. In the end, they’ll lose, at our detriment.
Dr. Emmett Brown approves. And at home you can just throw in your organic garbage… 😀
The “holy grail” of tech is not hydrogen fuel cells at all. There are already vehicles on the road powered by liquified natural gas or propane and entire huge buildings in silicon valley whose electricity needs come from a refrigerator sized fuel cell unit converting natural gas to electricity. But these still have the fire hazard of fuel and anyone who has witnessed a boiling liquid expanding vapor (BLEVY) explosion would really not consider having more of these vehicles on the road the ‘holy grail’ of anything. The lack of distribution centers alone renders them a non-starter. By far the best and true ‘holy grail’ of any kind would be ultra-capacitor technology. Charge in less than 10 minutes, run for 300 miles and we are done. EESTOR, a texas based company was recently purchased by ZENN to make barium titanate ultra-capacitors for their cars. They have over 2.5 times the range of current battery tech and charge in ten minutes. There are other ultra-capacotor technologies out there, each with their own problems. The first one to solve the problems completely will have win. Imagine nearly instantaneous charging and long life with no memory problems or ever a need to change the batteries. Solve that and you have a trillion dollar company over night.
Add a couple of more problems:
– Ordinary steel can’t be used for pressure storage because of hydrogen embrittlement.
– Hydrogen flames are invisible.
Hydrogen flames are invisible??? That’s awesome!
In other words, that European hydrogen purifier uses the same basic technology to split water that we used in high school chemistry. And something that requires as much energy at the front end to create potential energy (the combustible hydrogen) as will be created at the combustion point is no energy solution. Being able to sell the Oxygen might make for an economic proposition, but it makes no sense as an energy solution.
A wholly new means of generating hydrogen is thus called for. There were a few promising approaches being pursued at Israel’s Technion, but in a conversation I had with one of their energy researchers, the money for research in hydrogen extraction, which had been coming from the EU, was being wound down.
As my opinion as an engineer, hydrogen holds the most promise for eliminating the use of fossil fuels in transportation. We could build nuclear power plants to provide electricity during the day when demand is high and generate hydrogen at night when the excess energy is available. This creates jobs at home, reduces dependence on fossil fuels, emits no CO2 and is a clean source of energy.
If you believe that climate change is real and you don’t support nuclear energy, then you really don’t believe climate change is real.
B. S.
The problem with hydrogen is that you have no infrastructure to deliver and store it at refueling stations. That would take tremendous investment by gas stations, for a product which will take years to meet a break even point in terms of sales.
Every refueling station with running water and any energy source can potentially make hydrogen on premise.
Unlike fossil fuel, long supply chains are completely unnecessary with hydrogen fuel.
Total energy cost of H2 from electrolysis of water is totally uneconomical, baring a miracle invention.
The cost of electrolysis is not a fixed quantity:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovators/2014/05/140519-nocera-chemistry-artificial-leaf-solar-renewable-energy/
-jcr
Certainly the only hope for Hydrogen would be (predominantly) local production on site to compete with electrically powered vehicles. The same equivalent breakthrough that is required for batteries themselves, though the latter is certainly further along in terms of usability than the former especially when considered with the potential for shorter recharging times being more practical as things stand.
When automobiles first hit the market, there was no infrastructure to deliver and store it; it was very much catch as catch can.
It’s an engineering issue, and not a tricksy one.
“If you believe that climate change is real and you don’t support nuclear energy, then you really don’t believe climate change is real.”
No. No. That is beyond stupid. There is no use of logic under which you get to say these two things are tied just because you declare so. There are many ways to address climate change besides embracing the insane nuclear industry – which still has no really effective ways to deal with the horribly poisonous waste
One example — one of the foremost nuclear scientists in that industry turned against them a few decades ago. Just one little point in his book was his showing how insulation projects and mini-turbine projects on vents on existing building could conserve and generate enough power to shut down the whole nuclear industry. It all depends on will, choice and focus.
Since then, some European countries have switched massive amounts of their power generation to renewable resources — NOT including nuclear.
Those same European countries are now regretting their move to renewable sources at it is far too expensive and leaves them uncompetitive.
Green energy ruined Spain.
Germany embraced green energy and shut down some nuclear plants. Now, they have been forced to open more coal-powered plants to avoid blackouts.
Green energy is a bust. It only survives because it is a source of graft for politicians.
You are right, as a source of energy for the general “grid.” They (renewable sources) do not reliably supply “on demand” power, except for hydro, so traditional sources must be ready and able to meet the full demand when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing (or blowing too hard). If they are taken off-line because it’s “good politics,” the results are those “planned” blackouts.
However, those same “green” sources work much better the way Apple is doing it, to supply power for a limited and specific purpose. Combined with an on-site method to “save” excess energy, such as by creating hydrogen fuel (to be used later when needed), a specific energy need is permanently removed from the grid. THEN, those traditional polluting sources can reduced steadily.
“Hydrogen” cars are electric cars. So are “hybrids,” if the fossil fuel engine is not being used to provide direct propulsion. And so are pure “plug in to charge” cars.
They all have a motor that is powered by a main battery. The only difference is in how that battery is re-charged.
Therefore, what Apple needs to design is a “base” all-electric vehicle (in a small number of sizes and types). Allow the customer to configure it (like when buying a Mac), including selecting the vehicle’s “power supply.” The pure “plug-in” electric option has an additional battery to extend range, instead of an on-board means of producing electricity (such as small engine plus fuel tank, hydrogen fuel cell, “Mr. Fusion,” etc.). That would be TRUE innovation for the auto market.
When the base vehicle is electric, you can innovate in other ways. What if each of the four wheels on the vehicle had its own separate motor, all under the unified control of the car’s “brain”? That’s TRUE “all-wheel-drive.” And it eliminates the weight, bulk, and complexity of transmission, axles, and drivetrain.
Thank you for having the courage, honesty, and integrity to point this truth out. Unfortunately it will fall on the most exquisitely-brainwashed minds in the history of the human race, fine-tuned by decades of covert propaganda financed by US coal and oil interests, later joined by the Saudis.
Hydrocarbons, as fuel, will still be used for the next 40 to 60 years without becoming incredibly expensive.
Between now and then, we will have to find a reliable alternative. Electric batteries and nuclear power plants are the obvious answer but the Left leaning Chicken Littles will fuck that up.
Mass Transit will end up being the only alternatives the Left will allow us to use in their Orwellian Future.
Well George, not exactly.
Solar provides energy during the day and we already have surplus energy at night from existing plants (which still have some remaining lifecycle). The power industry itself has undertaken an number of interesting studies over the years on EV and hybrid vehicles. http://et.epri.com/ResearchAreas_Vehicles.html
Which in Japanese means ‘Hindenburg”!!
Silly title… Fuel cells ARE electric!
You’re silly. Everyone else understands what’s meant by “electric” – plug it in and wait forever for no range.
Yeah, like Tesla. No range at all.
/s
Yes, compared to my Benz, a Tesla has no range at all. Plus I can fill the tank back up in 5 minutes at any one of millions of stations worldwide. Drill, baby, drill!
Why not feed it water and convert on the fly to hydrogen for fuel!
Because Physics.
If you mean drive around while the hydrogen is being produced to use it, that would be inefficient. Rather you should use the power (assuming something like solar panels on the car) directly to run the car. If you are thinking while the car is at rest (once again with solar panels), I’m not sure how much mileage you’ll get for a given time out in the sun since energy storage/conversion is a lossy process..
This really is perfect.
Battery technology won’t get us where we need to go with automobiles any time soon. Hydrogen’s only problem is the chicken & egg (no one will buy a hydrogen car until there are filling stations in each city).
If Apple could build an Apple Store / filling station in every US city, they’d be killing two birds with one stone.
I think with a Tesla and their free supercharging stations you can get anywhere you want to go. In the U.S. Anyway.
Specifically the 48 contiguous States.. Good luck driving from any of them to Hawaii. 😀
Driving from Alaska through The Yukon, British Columbia and/or Alberta into the 48 contiguous States is a blast
Yeah, the article confuses the energy source for the method of locomotion. Not to mention infrastructure for electricity distribution and creation already exists, whereas hydrogen stations are… where now? I think they only recently figured out how to even CHARGE for hydrogen (by weight, as it turns out), whereas everyone knows what a kilowatt hour is. 😛
It’s also mooted by the fact that Apple has been collecting battery specialists like they were going out of style. While I personally think an “apple car” is a long shot, battery tech has application across every single Apple product (yes, even the desktops!).
As Horace would say, it depends on the job to be done. If you design a vehicle for a private owner who will frequently drive hundreds of miles then you need fossil fuel or hydrogen. If you drive just a few miles to the store a few times a week then an electric vehicle is fine. Charge the battery with solar panels on the roof.
Maybe you could say that the owner only rents the battery and doesn’t own it. Then you could swap the battery at filling stations setup for the purpose.
If the vehicles are only sold to fleet operators then more possibilities open up. Maybe they could use reloadable batteries like aluminum/ air batteries. Difficult for consumers,but easy for a fleet to manage.
Most electric vehicles do not have batteries in locations where they could be swapped out easily. Designing a system like that means serious compromises to cargo or passenger space and utility. And the “battery” is not one unit, but a series of batteries wired together. This would not be a fast process, and with the quick charging capabilities of a car like the Tesla, it would be faster to charge the car than swap the batteries. Tesla is building a nationwide network of Supercharger facilities, usually with solar power, to help its customers. I think they can provide 170 miles in 30 minutes. Full charge in 75 minutes. 386 stations open now, and looking to about double that number this year and the next. They are located near shops, restaurants, etc. so you can take a little break and charge your car.
There are a few electric cars which have solar panels built into the roof, but they’re too small to be effective at charging. In fact one car (Nissan Leaf?) uses its solar panel to power a small fan which removes hot air from the parked car so that a/c doesn’t have to work so hard and drain the battery once you are driving again. I think Tesla has a plan/dream to someday essentially have the car’s paint be a solar panel, but that’s years or decades away.
The best bet is to improve battery efficiency and electric motor efficiency. There is zero infrastructure for hydrogen, and fleet sales alone are far too small to make building fuel cell cars profitable (most are natural gas conversions from existing combustion engine vehicles).
Tesla already designed this into their cars. I’m sure apple (or Tesla) could propose a an industry standard system to any electric car could benefit from the same battery changing stations.
http://www.teslamotors.com/videos/battery-swap-event
Sorry, I meant that you would have solar panels on the roof of your home, office, or parking lot. Useless for long trips but great if all you do is five or ten miles a day.
The average car in the US is driven just under 50 mi per day. That means charging a 200 mi range car 2 or 3 times a week, or every night, so you leave home every morning with a full charge. There are tasks that need to be done for apartment dwellers, but they are doable.
For road trips, own a Tesla and drive free.
Ridiculous. Very smart people have been working on fuel cells for decades, and Apple is going to swoop in and have a car on the market by 2020? That’s the dumbest thing anyone has said yet about the fictitious Car. The regulatory approval for mass fuel cell vehicle sales alone would take 5 years.
I can’t tell if this if you are being satirical or serious. If the latter, welcome to the forum, Ed Colligan.
The Hydrogen fuel cell company was Ballard Systems of Vancouver BC . Everybody bought in to their technology including major car companies . The BC government even bought a fleet of hydrogen buses just in time for the Olympics when Arnie Schwarzenegger as gov of California was talking about the Hydrogen Highway
5 years later they got rid of the buses and we are having a referendum on a tax increase to pay for the morons running our transit system
Yeah, well. It’s all down to efficiency. It actually requires electricity to generate the H2 from H2O. So what’s more efficient in this situation? You still have to generate electricity. I don’t personally know the auto efficiency from using current batteries versus using H2 fuel cells. But have to be ‘charged’ via electricity…
To
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To
Investigate
Help
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In any case, H2 fuel cells ARE going to be an excellent energy storage medium on into the future.
Fuel cells take a storage medium and convert it to power, they are not storage mediums in themselves. I agree that Hydrogen as a major fuel source is the future even if it may not be the immediate 10-20 year future.
IOW I believe you mean that the ‘fuel cell’ holds the fuel. The storage medium/fuel is hydrogen. Hydrogen from the fuel cell is burned resulting in H2O.
Umm. I think we have differing definitions.. “Fuel cell” is a device that takes some fuel (or storage medium like sugars, hydrogen, etc) and produces power. I was just trying to clarify that “H2 fuel cells” are devices that produce power from the combination of Hydrogen and Oxygen that may be stored in tanks or other containers and that they are not storage in themselves.
I now understand. The use of the term ‘cell’ to describe the entire burning machine is contrary to the source meaning of ‘cell’. But we’ll skip the semantics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
I of course was attempting to call the container holding the fuel the ‘fuel cell’ and what burns the fuel would be the engine.
I’ve seen ‘fuel cells’ described as both the full device OR as the holding container. So now I need a name for the H2 holding container. I’ve seen it called a ‘tank’ of H2. But it is NOT simply a tank as a tank of H2 is explosive. The H2 has to be segregated into smaller spaces in order to prevent full on combustion.
Consider both me and what I’m reading to be incomplete and confused.
There’s no fuel like an old fuel…
The oil industry new motto.
Viewed from the POV of automakers in, say, the 1940’s, building a nationwide system of multi-lane limited-access highways was as many here are saying “totally uneconomical.”
So society (which qualifies as a if not THE miracle invention) invested in the infrastructure to “make it so.” I-80, baby.
And I’ve argued the “but, but, the cost” issue with those who turn a blind eye to hydrogen. I find y’all way short-sighted.
Hydrogen is everywhere and solar (or an other sustainable option) is available in most places. So even though the upfront costs would be ginormous, if shared by society, once localized fuel production stations are built, their cost of consumables drops to the maintenance of the physical plant and attendants.
Note: this is one option – regional production solutions could be rolled out as well, e.g., as long we’re adding the capacity to the grid to cover the producing the H2 for the vehicles (and other uses) with non-polluting tech, you don’t need a big solar farm at every H2 dispensing facility to start to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
I.e., the entire cost would be amortized over time and then become a net profit rather than a cost. It simply takes a long-term view of both the economics…. …and of the ecological benefits (if done, or ecological consequences if GH emissions aren’t substantially reduced – a far larger social and planetary cost than creating a hydrogen infrastructure).
Won’t argue the left/right approaches either. The nuts and bolts of rolling it out will involve both business and gov’t – and various balances between the two can be imagined.
So a pox on self-limiting old paradigms – let’s get on with this….
Another issue is that building the cars requires a material restricted by the US government.
Yes, hemp farming too. A great, less resource-intensive source for many car parts! 😀
(Lotus uses hemp body parts. Seat and dash materials are viable as well. And the water and pesticide load of (non-intoxicating) hemp is a fraction of nearly all alternatives.)
Jus’ sayin’…..
Finally, a plausible explanation for why Apple would enter the car business.
At Apple’s solar electric plants, they make extensive use of hydrogen fuel cells for energy storage. It’s a relatively new technological frontier: so I bet by working on this frontier, Apple has made several technological breakthroughs with hydrogen fuel (and patented it!) The next question – how can Apple use its unique fuel cell innovations to build a quality product, that customers will love, and copycats cannot easily steal? By making hydrogen fuel cars, that’s how! Brilliant, Apple.
If you are thinking of the Apple Data Center in Maiden, NC, those are not hydrogen fuel cells. Their fuel is biogas, mostly methane. It is harvested from landfills and hog farms in North Carolina.
Also, the fuel cells are a turnkey installation from Bloom Energy. Apple doesn’t own any of the associated IP.
Yes Hydrogen cars could work in Japan. In the US, well different story… Too big.
there is that great thing about charging your electric car from your own solar panels and not having to pay the hydrogen man. with hydrogen there still seems to be a gas station owner and a pump – with electric cars we can get away from this.
Hydrogen has its issues – just imagine a Beijing street full of hydrogen vehicles belching steam – pedestrian sauna al-fresco?
Steam can be condensed, but hydrogen leaks are extremely dangerous…
I’d rather have hydrogen leaks than the equivalent volume of battery fluid leaks any day. 😛
Every time an electric car is in an accident, they have to call out the hazmat team.
Toyota’s current market cap is about 18.1 billion USD. Apple has about 175B in cash or highly liquid securities, most of which is outside the USA.
If Apple wanted to get into the hydrogen fuel cell business, the biggest hurdle would be regulatory clearance.
-jcr
Apple doesn’t need to buy Toyota. Very admirably, Toyota have said anyone can use their fuel cell patents without charge. The Toyota Mirai is already available to buy, and the Japanese Prime Minister has already bought one.
Mira! A Mirai!
“Currently the dominant technology (95%) for direct production is steam reforming from hydrocarbons.” 2006 was 11 million ton worth and nearly half was consumed for oil production . Am sure someone else has accurate 2014 figures . There’s 7-8 other methods to produces hydrogen without using hydrocarbons but yada yada . To have fuel cell cars today is kinda bait and switch ?
Hydrogen production , that is .
The problem with hydrogen is that it is not an easily transportable fuel. It would make more sense to use as a fuel powering stationary generating plants to supply electricity for electric cars without the CO2 downside. I think better batteries capable of fast charging in minutes are not far off from practical use.
Another solution is swapping out battery packs at recharge centers, which can be done in a few minutes with a properly designed battery packs and recharge facilities. This solution is quite feasible, requiring no missing technology yet to be developed. It is all a matter of motivation and determination to do it.
On the other hand Hydrogen does not required the huge transportation infrastructure required for other fuels since it can be produced practically on-site. Toyota is promoting Fuel-cell technology by releasing their tech royalty free to any vehicle manufacturer and potential fueling station companies. Apple could use that as is or as a starting point for their own tech. Their current fueling speed is 5 minutes per fill-up for about 200mile range which is comparable to the inconvenience of current petrol based refueling systems.
Hmm. The vid above must be more recent.. Seems refueling is less than 5 min (avg. 3min) and range per tank is 300 miles. Seems more convenient than electric cars for those that don’t have home charging points..
I ran this vehicle as an oxy-hydrogen hybrid for 7 years. On demand, no storage and ran off the vehicle battery. The first internal combustion engine ran on hydrogen. The first patent was back in 1806 – yes really. Oxy-hydrogen helped win the war in WWII against the Germans in the Africa campaign by extending the range of the tanks between refueling using “little black boxes” on the military tanks that held the oxy-hydrogen systems.
Go to peswiki.com and search on” Report: Robert Pritchett” to get to – http://peswiki.com/index.php/Report:Robert_Pritchett%27s_Mileage_Results_from_Hydroxy_Boost_Addition
It is time you got educated on what is real instead of repeating untruths about the technology. It is real. It works and it works well enough to do the job safely and efficiently and it has worked well for at least two centuries! No need for storage. No need for distribution.
No matter what you use for an energy source and a storage source and power train, everything comes down to total amortized cost per mile for a system that is safe & quick to use over the life of the vehicle. Plug in ALL your numbers for solar, battery, hydrogen, fuel cell, etc. systems and you can see which is lowest cost. Currently natural gas, gasoline & diesel fuel are the only fuels that work economically for a vehicle that is driven 100-150 miles a day.
Drive a lot & you need a large quick energy source. Drive a little and you can tolerate a lot of things, including a bicycle.
Want to charge your car off your own solar cells each day for 100 miles/day, then I hope you have a very large area for the solar cells plus the cash to pay for solar cells and possibly the batteries to store the power until you come home if you don’t want your utility company issues.
It this issue of low cost vehicle power were easy to solve, outside of internal combustion engines (which can run on hydrogen), it would have been done a long time ago.
My personal guess as an engineer is there will have to be multiple new major innovations in energy production, storage & delivery to make a major change happen. This has been analyzed to death in auto companies, colleges, utilities & the gas industry. Making a practical low cost, easy to use new energy system for vehicles is really really hard and not in the cards until new innovations make it economical.
When it comes down to it, hydrogen is just a storage of energy – much like batteries. You still need energy to come from stoneware in order to produce it since you can’t pump it out of the ground like oil.
Hydrogen is just a storage, not a producer of energy.
Always been a great supporter of Hydrogen fuelled cars but even if the cells themselves are of an acceptable quality for the job the introduction of the infrastructure to match petrol/gas is just mind boggling and simply won’t happen till the latter is on its last legs. Equally though the commonest element to extract it is difficult and costly, the main process currently is from hydrocarbons which has an irony in itself if it is to replace that substance. So other methods will be needed which probably won’t be more green or efficient than the production of electricity to fuel our vehicles though at least that option is superior to using hydrocarbons to fuel them. So for the immediate and foreseeable future electric or hybrid seems to be the best option.
Interesting, sitting here reading all this looking out the window at my vehicle, which is paid for and even though its 10 years old, it puts out approximately 1 percent of the pollution compared to when emissions regulations started, gets triple the fuel mileage of a comparable vehicle of 20 years ago, will get me through snow at 0 degrees with no issues at all, virtually no repair costs, fuels in 5 minutes.
Oh the horror!!
Isn’t there something that requires less infrastructure? Like Thorium?
Finally!
The article I have been waiting for since the late 1990s.
Had the good fortune to test drive a $1.5 million all hydrogen SUV. Super quiet, responsive and only emits water.
HYDROGEN: FUEL OF THE FUTURE!