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Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

bmw.com

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Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#111

Post by Robotbeat »

kenOfYugen wrote: post #93
dale_glass wrote: post #38

Hydrogen almost certainly won't go anywhere, in my opinion. * The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous. * Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car. * Let's not forget that the cheapest way of…

I rarely see this mentioned, but you don't have to compress hydrogen that much for transportation/storage. Ongoing research on metal hydrides is promising [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...

You’re adding yet more weight and inefficiency.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#112

Post by Robotbeat »

larshen wrote: post #53
puchatek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this article is from bmw but afaik people are interested in hydrogen for other types of vehicles than cars. Ships, for instance. Forklifts. Trains. Planes will never work well due to hydrogens low energy-to-volume ratio, unfortunately.

Tell that to Airbus. It will work well on 500 miles trips with 50 passengers, which is most air transportation.

500 mile trips are easily doable with battery-electric aircraft.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#113

Post by aidenn0 »

theluketaylor wrote: post #89
jackthezipper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While inefficiency is indeed a problem, I feel like a lot of people overlook the one huge pro hydrogen has over batteries, namely charging time. Of course this might not be important for the daily commute, or 99% of the vehicles' use. But for that remaining 1% it _is_ a huge deal. And most people buy cars to fulfill a 100% of their needs, not 99%. Now I should say, I know basically nothing about battery tech. But unl…

For passenger vehicle road trips charging time is already into "doesn't matter" territory for a number of models. I have taken a 1000 km+ trip in a BEV that I used to take in gas vehicles. We didn't have to stop more often or stay any longer than we would have with gasoline. Really think about the time you spend stationary when stopping for fuel on a road trip. It's not just pumping fuel, you also go to the bathroom,…

It definitely takes longer west of the Mississippi river in the US. Mountains with 80MPH (130 km/h) speed limits mean the range is far shorter than typical freeway diving, which makes the fact that you need to stop more often, and for longer (gas cars have a typical 330 mile range, 1 l.6 longer than that Ionic), really add up.

[edit]

I will soon be diving 1600km. Google suggests the route will take 14h. I expect to make it in 15. Friends with Teslas suggest it would take nearly 20.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#114

Post by yholio »

k4lk wrote: post #78
yholio wrote: post #70

The train has left that station 10 years ago, and it's all electric. No point staying in the trenches like the apocryphal Japanese soldier, fighting for the resurgence of Hydrogen. It's less efficient, more expensive for vehicles and infrastructure and more expensive to fuel, has lower range, it's more dangerous. The range record for a Hydrogen vehicle is less than the range of mass-produced commercial cars available…

I don't think it has left the station per se. I agree we should get as driving battery EV as possible, but at some point the current grid will not sustain more charging stations at the mall through existing cabling. At that point it makes sense to look to hydrogen. It should be possible to drive it to existing gas stations for refueling, reusing existing infrastructure on that front.

> It should be possible to drive it to existing gas stations for refueling, reusing existing infrastructure on that front.

Building pipes instead of wires is already 3 times less efficient per unit of energy. Moving around huge bombs that weigh more than their load is ridiculously ineficient. It's just unfathomable for the same reasons we don't move around compressed methane gas in tanker trucks - and hydrogen is even less dense. Gasoline, diesel and propane are very special cases of compact hydrocarbon fuel, you cannot replicate that for Hydrogen.

We do liquify natural gas, but that's not an option for Hydrogen, and even for gas, it's only an economic option where there are no pipes and when the energy to do it (gas price) is basically free. As an energy storage solution, it's abysmal.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#115

Post by Black101 »

dale_glass wrote: post #38

Hydrogen almost certainly won't go anywhere, in my opinion. * The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous. * Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car. * Let's not forget that the cheapest way of…

> Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology

a lot like batteries and gas tanks

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#116

Post by jokoon »

Transrapid wrote: post #46
jokoon wrote: post #17

Hydrogen will always leak from any container. Clean hydrogen is difficult to make, giving an opportunity to the oil industry to easily make cheap hydrogen from refineries, which is not carbon neutral. I'm not sure there is enough platinum in the world to make all those cars. Mining platinum might cause additional carbon emissions. Hydrogen is very dangerous because it's highly explosive. Gas is safer in that regard.

> Hydrogen will always leak from any container. not anymore > Clean hydrogen is difficult to make, giving an opportunity to the oil industry to easily make cheap hydrogen from refineries, which is not carbon neutral. It's not and everybody is talking about GREEN hydrogen > I'm not sure there is enough platinum in the world to make all those cars. Mining platinum might cause additional carbon emissions. you don't need…

Yes, going to answer the same thing, you don't provide sources.

Green hydrogen is difficult to make because of low energy efficiency, which I agree, would be solved with nuclear since nuclear provides a lot of green energy.

Platinum is required for fuel cells, please do a research or provide sources or explain.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#117

Post by epistasis »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #86
epistasis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does that hydrogen get transformed from water? Alkaline or PEM electrolyzers, but at what environmental cost? And all the fuel cell materials? Why selectively evaluate only one side of the equation? That seems rather biased.

> Battery technology isn't very "green" … while Hydrogen can be generated from … methane. Methane steam reformation is now green?

You're right, it's not. And the only way to make it halfway palatable, the so-called "blue" hydrogen, is to do carbon capture and sequestration during steam methane reformation.

However, for more than a decade, fossil fuel companies have said carbon capture and sequestration will be easy, and then failed to execute on any of their industrial size projects. Plus, what is that captured carbon used for? Extracting more fossil fuels. Plus the sequestration requires transporting carbon long distances, and somehow making sure that the sequestration lasts on geological time scales.

So any mention of methane for hydrogen should raise huge red flags and discredit that path. There's only one path for hydrogen in the future, and that's electrolyzers, and making them go through exponential price drops over the next two decades.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#118

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

Robotbeat wrote: post #112
larshen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Airbus. It will work well on 500 miles trips with 50 passengers, which is most air transportation.

500 mile trips are easily doable with battery-electric aircraft.

No way, not even close. Maybe for single seat or double seaters, but not for commercial airliners with 50 or so seats.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#119

Post by Black101 »

sunstone wrote: post #29

Car maker's attraction for fuel cells is that they neatly replace the internal combustion engine with another large, heavy, hot mechanism that continues to require about the same amount of ongoing maintenance. So the automaker's balance sheet remains about the same but now it's green. As Musk pointed out some years ago, hydrogen is not so much a fuel as it is an energy storage medium. Right out of the gate creating t…

Because batteries are not a storage medium and they are not filled by using electricity... ? of course gasoline is better because you get it out of the ground, but I have a feeling that we will discover an efficient way to produce hydrogen ...

Re: Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

#120

Post by Tade0 »

threeseed wrote: post #54
dale_glass wrote: post #38

Hydrogen almost certainly won't go anywhere, in my opinion. * The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous. * Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car. * Let's not forget that the cheapest way of…

> cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels. > You need a large infrastructure to produce and distribute it But you can reuse gas stations as the delivery mechanism. Versus EVs which require all new infrastructure since the charging time is so much longer. > It's a huge chicken and egg problem No different from EVs right now. > What is more convenient,…

> But you can reuse gas stations as the delivery mechanism. Versus EVs which require all new infrastructure since the charging time is so much longer.

The site perhaps, but the hardware is completely different.

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