Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

carbuzz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 520 posts

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#231

Post by bobthepanda »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #182
nandomrumber wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen: Bind it to various length carbon chains. When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth. Environmentalists will love it! And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.

Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which makes the world warmer on average. It also lowers the PH levels of the oceans. If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.

The major problem with hydrocarbons today is that we are releasing carbon dioxide stored hundreds of millions of years ago.

If, theoretically, you could produce hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere, then it could be a substantial reduction in net carbon dioxide being added; and it would be compatible with the fuel infrastructure of today.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#232

Post by dmix »

aunty_helen wrote: post #225
dmix wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.

Politicians are conduits. Someone wanted this to happen. But yea, subsidies. I've been on many a call where "there's govt funding available if we shape this like x" is one of the major selling points.

Politics has a habit of being very insular once elections are finished.

There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks. When the money dries up the public tends to go back to "what's practical and affordable?".

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#233

Post by scraptor »

belorn wrote: post #203
aunty_helen wrote: post #60

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter. The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas…

The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#234

Post by WalterBright »

jeffbee wrote: post #207
WalterBright wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.

Its the time shift. Burning a plant releases CO2 and it is still considered to be carbon neutral.

Sorry, that's just verbal sleight of hand. There's no such thing as "green" CO2.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#235

Post by api »

dehrmann wrote: post #120
aunty_helen wrote: post #60

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

Biofuel makes more sense for airplanes. No conversion even necessary. You could fuel up a 737 with properly formulated biofuel and fly it now, though a lot of validation would be needed to be generally allowed especially for passenger flights.

If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.

Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.

Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.

LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#236

Post by WalterBright »

giobox wrote: post #226
WalterBright wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement. The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x. Batteries don't get lighter when they discharge.

Not to mention that jet planes routinely take off heavier than their max safe landing weight today too, relying on the weight reduction of consuming the fuel to return the plane to a safe landing weight again while enjoying the extra range afforded. This trick doesn't work well with batteries either.

There isn't any battery technology on the horizon that would lead to practical airliners.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#238

Post by nandomrumber »

jeffbee wrote: post #211
robertjpayne wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending. Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.

Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance. "As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual v…

Thanks for linking that document, I’ll have a read.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#239

Post by WalterBright »

nandomrumber wrote: post #209
robertjpayne wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending. Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.

Yes, and it doesn’t fit the narrative. We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable. You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that . > burn petrol. Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (resid…

Natural resources are not required to make a country an economic powerhouse. See Japan, for example. Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea.

What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#240

Post by aunty_helen »

thrownthatway wrote: post #230
aunty_helen wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was fully green, you can’t run an electrolysis system from home. So you have to buy it, so there’s a market and an expensive solution. Electricity comes out the wall.

What do you mean? You can run electrolysis from a cup.

I know, I have one of those weird H shaped flasks with the plat electrodes.

I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.

Post reply on HN