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Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

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Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#271

Post by nicpottier »

serial_dev wrote: post #233
beachy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. I don't know that people's cultural attraction to fueling at the gas station is high at all. After we got an EV I realised how much I had actually disliked filling the car. Smelly, every time an in your face reminder of the fossil fuels you are burning. Having to go in an queue. Having…

Isn't the long charging time an issue? After a quick search, Tesla needs 30 minutes to charge to 80% with superchargers and this is good for 300 kms. Assuming 120 kmh, this means that about every 2.5 hrs, I need to take a 30 min break. With the old system, I fuel in 2 minutes and I can travel 600 kms on it or approx 6 hrs (assuming 50 litres fuel tank and 7.5 litres per 100 km, and 120 km/h). (I don't have a car, and…

They aren't as good at long distances, you have that part right. Your numbers could be debated but are close enough. Most people don't drive long distances on the regular though.

They are MUCH better for day to day if you can charge at your home. You always start the day with a full battery. I only use a supercharger on long trips. Note that I actually drive farther than most for various reasons but that route has a supercharger at a grocery store. I tend to come back at the end of the weekend and do my shopping at the same time, so in reality I don't spend any time refueling.

So total yearly time where you are actively "fueling" your vehicle in a supervised manner favors EVs for the vast majority of people.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#272

Post by elsonrodriguez »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #110
gmane wrote: post #5

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…

Batteries go bad over a rather short period of time and are incredibly expensive too. They’re basically currently infeasible as a mode of transport without _a lot_ of trade offs. Compare that to a tank for fuel, which is comparatively minuscule in cost and basically never goes bad. I don’t think electrical is as scalable as liquid fuel and I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by…

Liquid fuel is inherently unscalable, it is a finite resource.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#273

Post by giardini »

duskwuff wrote: post #149
parker_mountain wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires. Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.

> Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable. Really, it's a wonder these things were ever allowed. :)

duskwuff says: >"And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable"

1. Off by an order of magnitude: ~4-6 quarts of oil in the motor, about the same for the transmission yielding for a large motor about 2 gallons total.

2. duskwuff says >"they're still quite flammable." Nonsense. Engine oil is so hard to burn that it is not classified as flammable by OSHA:

https://firefighterinsider.com/is-motor-oil-flammable-you-ma...

Furthermore these oils are encased in heavy metal (the engine block, the transmission block and the differential casing).

Starting batteries (the 6- and 12-volt kind) cause more fires than do engine and/or transmission oils.

To paraphrase Charlton Heston: "I'll give you my gasoline car when you can pry it from my cold, greasy, dead hands."

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#274

Post by beachy »

serial_dev wrote: post #233
beachy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. I don't know that people's cultural attraction to fueling at the gas station is high at all. After we got an EV I realised how much I had actually disliked filling the car. Smelly, every time an in your face reminder of the fossil fuels you are burning. Having to go in an queue. Having…

Isn't the long charging time an issue? After a quick search, Tesla needs 30 minutes to charge to 80% with superchargers and this is good for 300 kms. Assuming 120 kmh, this means that about every 2.5 hrs, I need to take a 30 min break. With the old system, I fuel in 2 minutes and I can travel 600 kms on it or approx 6 hrs (assuming 50 litres fuel tank and 7.5 litres per 100 km, and 120 km/h). (I don't have a car, and…

It's an entirely different paradigm.

With an ICE, you can only fuel up at a gas station, but it is fast (not always though, queues, etc.).

With an EV you charge overnight at home, and only charge on the road as required, and it can be slow (not all that slow though, not a big problem for us). Depending on your usage and vehicle range, you may never need to charge on the road at all.

I wouldn't personally want to own an EV if we couldn't charge at home.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#275

Post by elihu »

rootusrootus wrote: post #80
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.

> Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium Maybe cut back on the hyperbole a bit. Two tons is the entire car. The lithium content of the battery is 15-20 pounds. And it's not straight lithium metal that becomes flammable in the presence of water. It's the electrolytes that are flammable. And most EVs in the world use LFP, which doesn't have that flammability problem.

LFPs are flammable too, they just don't tend to ignite as easily. I suspect they're probably easier to put out, but I don't know for sure.

(I'd be curious what the real-life vehicle fire statistics actually are so far for regular lithium ion versus LFP. LFP is promoted as being safer, but at this point there should be enough vehicle fire statistics to be able to quantify how much safer they are. The Tesla Model 3 might be a good model to compare because it's available in both versions, though maybe there just aren't enough model 3 fires to be statistically significant.)

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#276

Post by ben_w »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #269
ben_w wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Green hydrogen production is minuscule and relatively inefficient and costly. Most uses of hydrogen today are neither green nor sustainable. Or carbon free. And that's going to stay like this for a while. Your other points hold, but I don't think this one is necessarily so (depending what you mean by "a while"): electrolysis is so incredibly trivial that I suspect it'll become green as fast as the grid in general,…

We'd need a lot of renewables for this to work though. Like a lot more than we currently have or that is currently planned/under construction. Orders of magnitude more. At the cost of a few trillion $. The math just isn't great for this. Just doing the simple math of the twh needed to produce the fuel for a major airport on a daily basis is kind of eye watering. Just a little back of the envelope math makes it really…

> Orders of magnitude more

Yes. 30% per year compound growth does that very quickly.

(Exponentials will turn into s-curves of course, no guarantees, but growth here doesn't have to be asymptotic to the current market).

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#277

Post by ninkendo »

nithril wrote: post #207
ninkendo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The weight efficiency can only improve from here I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the r…

Is range really an issue if you can easily find charging spot and recharge in less than 15min?

It is in the mind of consumers, yes (I have not offered my personal opinion and don’t want to, as it’s irrelevant to the point.) There has been a lot of consumer studies on this and range anxiety is a very real thing.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#278

Post by jacquesm »

robertjpayne wrote: post #155
jacquesm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's a good point. But: the grid can be expanded and probably will be expanded. I don't have a BEV but I've run the numbers and it would work very well for me today, it's just that I have an old, non-connected and fairly recently rebuilt car that I'll drive into the ground. But if I were younger and still in the market for a new vehicle I would definitely consider an electric one, though I'd make sure it had L…

This 100%, we're not done with batteries yet as a society and it's probably one of the most heavily funded industries because the opportunity to strike "gold" with good battery tech is too large to ignore. Lithium wont be used forever and and downsides to batteries will slowly be eroded until we wonder why we ever used petrol in the first place. As far as the grid goes, in my eyes rooftop solar is going to provide a…

I could already supply an EV with all the power required for my trips inside the country. 7700 KWh surplus from solar this year and we're not done yet. That's a multiple of what an EV would use for my current mileage (which is a fraction of what it was pre-COVID, and to be fair I also use my (e-)bikes a lot more than before).

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#279

Post by ninkendo »

rootusrootus wrote: post #214
ninkendo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The weight efficiency can only improve from here I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the r…

> They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons The difference in wear between a 3600 pound RAV4 and a 4400 pound Model Y is so minor that it'll disappear in the noise. Nobody will notice. The only time it'll even come close to mattering is on resi…

I mean, if we’re picking models to support our points, I’d counter with the Hummer EV which is 9,630 lbs. Road wear goes up with the 4th power of weight, so doubling the weight increases road wear 16x… it’s not something we should just ignore.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#280

Post by DriverDaily »

Reason077 wrote: post #167
DriverDaily wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who needs to run 24/7 and/or can't count on an electric grid could use hydrogen power: A logistics network, an army, public transportation, utility companies, forestry or mining...

Not really, because if you don't have access to electricity then you very likely don't have access to hydrogen either. Hydrogen is much more difficult to transport and store compared to natural gas, gasoline, diesel, etc.

Getting electricity out of hydrogen works the same way as getting electricity out of all the sources you mentioned, except your generator now produces zero emissions.
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