Honda hydrogen car??

[mjncad]

There is also ususally a lot of government rules and regulations which prohibit or discourage new products and processes. All of these things must be overcome to be successful in the market place. There is also presently a lot of government support for oil and coal that is not in place for new systems.

I maintain that government at all levels is the biggest hindrance to entrepreneurship in America. How many good ideas and businesses never get off the ground because of onerous red tape that discourages talented people from "going for it?"

 

[patrick_g]

Bob could you elaborate further on your statement that Hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy storage system. I don’t see why you think that

Gemini, It is a valid view point. If you rip the hydrogen out of some water, store it, and just let the O2 go, then when you burn the hydrogen it combines with O2 and you get water. Nothing is created or destroyed, on average over time.

What happens is that the energy needed to rip the O2 out of water is recovered when the hydrogen is reunited with the O2 (burned as a FUEL.) (In actual practice not a 100% efficient operation.) Thus you have stored that energy in the form of hydrogen ripped out of water.

This isn't so different from charging a battery now and using it as a power source later. You put in electric current now and get some electric current back later. An advantage is that when H2 is burned you only get back water not noxious fumes and gasses (pollution.)

You could compress air into cylinders as a way to store energy and then use the equivalent of a big air tool as the motor for your vehicle.

Years ago there were some busses that had large horizontal flywheels under the floor. These were spun up to terrific speeds by powerful electric motors at the bus barn and the energy thus stored in the rotating mass powered the bus. When braking or going downhill the bus recovered energy and spun the flywheel faster. Periodically during the day the bus would stop by the bus barn to get spun up again. I haven't heard much about that experiment in recent years.

A heavy duty clockwork spring could be wound up and run your car. Regenerative braking would rewind the spring some.

There are numerous energy storage mechanisms that have a reversible process involved. The problem is to engineer a practical vehicle that will not cost too much to buy or operate while employing one of these mechanisms. People get all "ON FIRE WITH EVANGELICAL ZEAL" for some particular process like hydrogen or whatever like it was somehow special. Recycling H2 is a decent candidate energy storage method.

You need an energy storage density great enough to permit the storage mechanism to be small enough to be practical. If you have to have a tank of something as large as an 18 wheeler tank truck to power the family sedan it might meet some sales resistance. This is why high pressures and various other means of storing H2 are being explored. To be safe the tank has to resist rupture in an accident and when ruptured it should release the H2 slowly not all at once in a mini-BIG BANG.

Hydrogen is a good candidate for energy storage. Batteries in an all electric car are still inefficient and never give you back all the power you put in. Capacitors don't have the requisite energy density. Fast flywheels are also good theoretical candidates but strength of materials issues and the state of the practice in magnetic bearings pose a limitation (actual bearings like roller or ball are to high friction.)

There!!! I know you just asked for the time of day and I told you how to build a clock and gave some history of horology but oh well...

The advantage of hydrogen or other fully recyclable energy storage mechanism is that it, in theory, can be NON POLUTING and it doesn't necessarily consume fossil fuel (foreign oil.) Hydrogen extraction could be solar powered or wind powered, or hydro or... If you could recover all the frozen methane there is on the bottom of the ocean for free and used it for cheap fuel it would contribute to green house gasses and it is not a sustainable harvest.

Energy from the sun (includes wind and hydro as they are solar powered too) used to store energy in a safe convenient mechanism for portable consumption in a non-polluting manner is a worthy goal. Hydrogen is one way to store and transport that energy. Whether it will be the big winner or not and if yes then when, we really don't know. Even if cold fusion were perfected next week and next year we all had one in a small box, the best use for it other than generating our own electricity at home would be to produce hydrogen for motor fuel. This is a "best guess" based on reasonable predictions. Currently burning fossil fuel in electric plants to make electricity to ship to you over long runs of wire so you can make hydrogen at home is, at best, a bit of a slight of hand parlor trick which obfuscates the true costs and non-renewable fuel consumption. Of course if you have enough conviction and zeal you can justify the crusades.

Pat

 

[gemini5362]

Actually that was a very good explanation thank you. I see hydrogen as a fuel when burned in an internal combustion engine. Evidently the view of it as a storage medium is due to the fact that when you burn it all you do is recombine it back into the original substance (water) that you procured it from in the first place. Interesting way of viewing it.

 

[BobRip]

Bob could you elaborate further on your statement that Hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy storage system. I dont see why you think that

OK. I will try. To make hydrogen you must put in at least and most probably more energy than you will get out when you use it. This energy has to come from somewhere. This can be any energy source. In effect you are separating the hydrogen molecules from the oxygen molecules and this takes energy. When you burn or recombine the hydrogen with oxygen you get this energy back minus losses (no process is 100% efficient). Therfore all you are doing is storing energy in the hydrogen. Hydrogen is not a primary energy source. You cannot drill a hole in the ground and have a hydrogen well. You can get natural gas this way and it is partly hydrogen. You can burn natural gas in a car engine and this is very clean, but there is still some CO2 generated. But if you use methane to make hydrogen, then you will actually make even more CO2 because of losses. Methane is easier to store than hydrogen and is commonly used as an automotive fuel in many countries. If you have free energy then hydrogen makes some sense. Even then the high temperatures will generate nitrogen oxides (another pollutant) so it is not pollution free even with free energy. If you carry oxygen and hydrogen and don't use air than it would be pollution free, except for the thermal pollution.
By the way, hydrogen has to be compressed and transported. It will take even more energy. I hope this has helped. There was a very good article in Spectrum Magazine (Institute of ELectrical and Electronic Engineer publication) last year on this and they explained it much better than I can.

 

[BobRip]

Actually that was a very good explanation thank you. I see hydrogen as a fuel when burned in an internal combustion engine. Evidently the view of it as a storage medium is due to the fact that when you burn it all you do is recombine it back into the original substance (water) that you procured it from in the first place. Interesting way of viewing it.

Pat's points are well taken and well stated. I wrote my reply at the same time he did. I think that the very low energy density of hyrdogen energy storage then becomes the biggest issue. If you make it and use it at the same location or near the same this may not be too bad. Any significant use is many years away. I pray for fusion and a better battery. I have been praying this for 30 years. Oh well. A really good photocell would help and this looks promising. Capacitors should improve a lot in the next 5 years with nano-technology.

 

[DrainPondDesign]

Man this thread is getting long...

This may have been presented earlier but it sounds interesting so here it is anyway.

The University of Minnesota claims to have developed an efficent catalyst to produce hydrogen from ethanol. See link.

Unexpected Error

It may be possible to fuel the car with liquid ethanol to produce hydrogen on board as needed for the fuel cell or you could just burn the ethanol in an ICE or have a hybrid of both that run on the same fuel.

But if ethanol is produced from grain how long will it be before the world must choose between eating or driving. Hang in there farmers, you may become the new OPEC.

Now how do we explain the odor of ethanol at a police sobriety check?

 

[mjncad]

Now how do we explain the odor of ethanol at a police sobriety check?

Just tell the local Gendarme you are doing your patriotic duty to wean America off of foreign oil by driving a drunk car. Hopefully the cop will see the humor in that explanation.

I recall a story many years ago in which a British man was repeatedly arrested for drunk driving because he claimed his body chemistry naturally produced a high blood-alcohol content, and that he wasn't tanked from consuming mass quantities at the local pub. Sounds like a myth for the Mythbusters to tackle.

 

[Egon]

The organic byproducts of ethonal production are quite easily used for feed/food.

 

[patrick_g]

The organic byproducts of ethonal production are quite easily used for feed/food.

Ethanol byproducts as animal feed is most economical when the animals are colocated with or close to the ethanol producton facility and the byproducts are fed "wet" and not stored for an appreciable period of time. The added cost to dry and pelletize the ethanol byproducts makes the feed more expensive.

I feed my cattle corn gluten which is a byproduct of the wet milling process of whole corn. I intend to start mixing in 40% or so soy hulls to get a more well ballanced nutrition.

Although approximately 60% of the U.S. corn crop is destined for direct utilization by livestock, milling operations that refine corn into food and industrial products
represent a second growing, robust market. The refining process that removes the starch fraction from the parent grain results in numerous by-products, such as corn gluten feed (CGF.) The estimated yield of CGF from a 56-pound bushel of corn is about 6 pounds, or approximately
11% of the original corn weight.

Although the wet CGF is maybe better and is cheapeer since you don't have to pay to dry it and pelletize it the transportatiion costs if the feed has to be moved very far are so dominant that it is more economical to dry it and pelletize it. I buy it as dry pellets.

Ethanol production is highly subsidized and the Gov has tilted the playing field quite a bit. If you take all energy consumption into account including the petro chemical fertililzers and diesel fuel used in the corn farming then ethanol is NOT particularly economical and certainly is not envirofriendly nor sustainable due to the terrific petrochemical inputs into the corn production.

I would be more in favor of ethanol if the farmers farming corn ran their equipment on ethanol and the Gov let the playing field be more fairly leveled. Then we'd see just how many more acres would be put into corn production in a free market situation instead of a multifaceted Gov directed redistrubution scheme.

Yes, I have an economic interest in this. When the bushel price of corn goes up I pay more for cattle feed. If the Gov quit medling and let the free market control methanol I would get cheaper cattle feed and the methanol myth would wither away and we could get on with real sustainable fuel sources like recycling hydrogen.

Pat

 

[BobRip]

If the Gov quit medling and let the free market control methanol I would get cheaper cattle feed and the methanol myth would wither away and we could get on with real sustainable fuel sources like recycling hydrogen.

Pat

Pat, given all of the comments here, why do you think hydrogen is substainable? What primary energy source are you proposing that would make it so?