A new study might put another road block in front of the prospect of a near term commercial hydrogen vehicle release, while giving the plug-in vehicle movement a nice boost. The study was authored by Ryan McCarthy at the University of California, Davis and published in the Journal of Power Sources. The ground-breaking study, entitled “Determining marginal electricity for near-term plug-in and fuel cell vehicle demands in California: Impacts on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions”, examines the emissions impact of hydrogen and plug-in vehicles versus their gas counterparts.
Lowering carbon emissions to fight warming, along with high fuel prices and global-political instability, has been a key driving factor for the adoption of hybrids and alternative fuels. The new study, though, judged hydrogen vehicles to be an utter failure at that objective, in their current state. The study concluded, “All of the pathways except for [fuel cell vehicles] using hydrogen from electrolysis reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions compared to ICEs and [hybrid electric vehicles].”
It doesn’t dissuade further research into hydrogen vehicles; it simply indicates they are unlikely to be ready for showtime anytime soon.
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Hydrogen is a crappy power source anyways. It takes more energy to get hydrogen out of water than the burning of hydrogen could possibly produce. This, along with “zero point energy” are a waste of time to pursue because they will never succeed.
Electric cars are far more energy efficient anyways, and they are not experimental — the tech is available now.
Drill baby, drill.
I go with #1. There is no natural source of free hydrogen. It is best considered a battery that is very expensive energy wise to charge. Many sources have a very large carbon footprint. If the state of California was willing to cover their arid lands with solar cells maybe the could do it but they don’t want to do that either even if they could afford it and as a more less bankrupt entity they can’t even afford to keep on doing what they once did.
California is a classic example of a once ultra prosperous state that was taken over by liberals who ruined the local economy and is now sliding into economic collapse due to local governmental polices liberals put in place in their effort to create paradise.
If you ruin the private sector there is no paradise. There is poverty.
Nuclear power is a significant part of the answer. No C02 No imported oil. Estimates are it would take about 350 new Nuclear power plants to provide enough electricity to replace all oil burning cars with electric cars.
Note: Hydrogen cars are electric cars they just use fuel cells instead of batteries to provide the electricity.
It takes about 5 years to build a Nuclear power plant. So if we started building 50 new Nuclear power plants a year for the next 7 years in 13 years we would have enough power to have completely converted to electric cars either plug in or Hydrogen.
Want to “save” the planet and our economy build Nuclear Power plants and electric cars.
Of course we will instead pursue bullshit ideas that can never solve the problem (like cap and trade).
Hydrogen and electric vehicles are using a power made somewhere else. The are just “currencies” storing the work done at the power source. If you are using “brown” sources to create hydrogen and electricity, you are still running on hydrocarbons.
Currently hydrogen is a quagmire. The only way it makes sense is if you could use it to store off demand energy (or tidal and wind that have max generation peaks outside of our control) for use in places where batteries DO NOT work.
I am not sure that a battery will ever work in the North East or in any area that gets a real winter. I assume that fuel cells are not as temperature dependent. I heard that recent tests of the Volt left no range on the battery.
But then again, why not just use the most efficient old burning technology in the areas that batteries fail, which would be diesel/electric.
Who knows, maybe one day we will have a magical ultra efficient two way fuel cell.
JCD has also pointed out some of the immense problems and hazards when it comes to storing hydrogen under pressure. Just another major hurdle to make it efficient or even on par to gasoline as far as energy density.
Darn it, we’re back to the Republican energy strategy of digging for more dino juice.
The only rationale I can see for hydrogen, versus batteries, is weight. Which is a major problem with batteries at the moment, but not an insoluble one. Even if we had direct hydrogen production from solar rays, that hydrogen is not in a form usable in vehicles – it needs to be cooled to near absolute zero, a process that also takes energy.
I remember when a jerk made up a figure pegging the total pollution contribution of a Prius as being greater than a Hummer. CNW Marketing picked it up as truth. It has roundly been rejected as junk.
Sure Hydrogen pollutes more than gas. Sunlight is black and nitrogen can be forged into bulletproof vests.
Ain’t technology wonderful?
“California is a classic example of a once ultra prosperous state that was taken over by liberals who ruined the local economy and is now sliding into economic collapse due to local governmental polices liberals put in place in their effort to create paradise.”
Umm, deowll, California has a GOP Governor and a GOP majority in the legislature.
There is plenty of blame to go around in California’s mess, it is not a liberal or a conservative problem actually. I’d blame the corrupt lobbying system that spent the California surplus on handouts to businesses who could afford lobbyists and big contributions. Pretty much the same thing that is happening at the national level.
I like the way #1 dismisses the idea because energy conversion uses up some energy.
What’s the energy conversion from crude oil to gasoline? Zero? Not hardly.
What’s the energy conversion under your hood? Zero? Not hardly.
What’s the ACTUAL comparison of the ideas?
Or maybe we can circle the world using solar.
Wow, what a crappy article. Can someone help me out?
Does the study say that hydrogen fuel vehicles have higher emissions because:
1. The cars themselves produce for CO2 than their counterparts?
2. The lifecycle to create the fuel + the vehicles produce more CO2?
I know this will come as a shock but the title of this post is misleading. The article doesn’t say that “hydrogen cars are worse than gas powered cars.” It says that generating hydrogen from electrolysis doesn’t reduce greenhouse gas emission compared to internal combustion engines. The next sentence in the paper says “Fuel cell vehicles using hydrogen from [natural
gas steam-methane reformation] and [batteryelectric vehicle] recharging according to the load-level profile reduce emissions the most, by more than 25% compared to [hybrid electric vehicles].” So hydrogen obtained through other methods is the best.
jccalhoun,
True story for you. 4 years ago I invested in a company that did power and industrial plant stack scrubbing which means that it removed emissions after processing but before release into the environment. The researchers had developed an amazing approach which removed +90% of pollutants where current approaches remove 40-60%. Great for coal fired plants, etc.
Problem: how to pay for retrofitting a plant? Answer, the process produced tons and tons of pure hydrogen (and other constituent parts) so the plan was to sell the fuel. Win, win we thought.
We needed $40-50 million to continue development and install in 2-3 plants for testing. Even Gov. Arnie was on-board. Could we find investors? Nyet. Our finance guy knew all the players and investment bankers. Friends from Wharton and Stanford tried to help. Friends from the big VC’s like Sequoia tried to help. We were told repeatedly that if it wasn’t anything to do with oil then forget it because that’s where the money is.
We eventually cashed out and took our losses. We also did the right thing and gave all the IP back to the researchers. They sold the technology to the Chinese last year and retired. They’ll develop the technology then lend money to Americans to buy the technology back from them. Win, win, win.
You know, this country would be in much better shape if people would READ THE FRIGGIN STUDY before posting claims they infer from the abstract.
What the study actually says is that NEAR TERM expected methodology for producing Hydrogen fuel is worse than gasoline from “Well to Tank.” But, the due to the significantly lower vehicle emissions, the “Well to Wheel” emissions are better. So hydrogen is still better than gasoline (although probably not by as big a margin as some people think).
I think the main thing to gain from the study is that we must focus on producing cleaner electricity in the long run.
Chris
#11 “What’s the ACTUAL comparison of the ideas?”
Well you are using SUBTRACTION, which is wrong!!
The answer is DIVISION, or more specifically the “energy returned over the energy invested”, or what us energy people like to call EROEI. An EROEI of less than one is a completely useless source of energy.
Do a google search of “eroei hydrogen” and you will find dozens of links explaining why hydrogen based energy is a bad idea.
@ArianeB (#10),
The legislature in California is NOT a Republican majority, both houses are a significant Dem majority:
Senate – http://tinyurl.com/yb9usud
Assembly – http://tinyurl.com/yapsca4
And the worst part of the hydrogen fuel cell talk is that available hydrogen today is almost entirely derived from methane, not a “green” source – http://tinyurl.com/ybu287v
All these studies, oh yes in case you didn’t know this is NOT the first study of this type, arrive at the same conclusion. Key phrase is always ‘using current hydrogen extraction technologies’ – where hydrogen is extracted from hydrocarbons. Now if plans were to go ahead with offshore fields of wind generators that use their electricity to separate hydrogen from seawater… But somebody’s got to pay for the investigation, so of course in the USA it can’t be done. There they’re only willing to spend money on studies to prove that things can’t be done. That won’t keep it from being done in Europe or China or some other world technological leader. The US is gonna be a pretty crappy place when everybody’s got alternative energy infrastructures but them.
From: Obamaforever
To: All
If you are like me you had a difficult time deciphering what the article was trying to get across. To get an excellent understanding of hydrogen you need to go to the following site.
title: The Truth About Hydrogen
Read “HURDLE 1: Production” to get a better understanding of the posted article.
Here is my two cents on the good/bad on how hydrogen is made. You can make hydrogen by three methods:
1. steam methane reformation
This process uses natural gas so it is a huge no-no. The energy ratio is less than 1 (i.e pedro, this not good).
2. electrolysis
This process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. You can use fossil fuel in this process. The energy ratio is less than 1.
You can use renewable resources for the energy source. The energy ratio should be one or greater than one (i.e. pedro, this is good). I believe the posted article was talking about using renewable resources as the source of energy for the electrolysis when it said electrolysis was the method to beat out ICEs and hybrid electric cars concerning ‘lowering carbon emissions’.
The posted article is very obtuse. I doing a S.W.A.G. here when I am deciphering the intent of the posted article.
3. nuclear power
If you read the Popular Mechanics (PM) article it will tell you about the future prospects to use nuclear power to make hydrogen. The PM article will also tell you that it will take 2000-600 megawatt reactors to make 150 million tons of hydrogen annually. Note: We now have 103 nuclear power plants. The 150 million tons of hydrogen is what it will take to replace fossil fuels in passenger cars by 2040.
If you read the entire PM article you will see that hydrogen has a long ways to go to replace fossil fuels or batteries (EV) or hybrid/ blug-in technology in passenger cars. I am thinking at least 30 years for hydrogen to replace the current technology.
The PM article does not say a lot about the safety aspect of hydrogen. I will make this short-hydrogen is SAFE. Please do not use the Hindenburg disaster as proof that hydrogen is not safe. The Mythbusters did this and their show was a disaster!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
wired has an interesting story on using thorium for nuclear power. might be a source for the future.
Vehicle research is going the wrong direction. If you can’t power a vehicle the size and power of a Suburban don’t even try. Also, The Suburban sized vehicle has to be refillable/rechargeable, whatever quickly enough that you can easily do 800 mi. in one day with a full load. Oh, and it can’t cost more to produce and operate than today’s Suburban.
Remember, in a desirable civilized world, a Suburban is just one step above mid-sized.
#1,
did you know that they found an alternative to WATER that requires LESS then 25% of the power??
URINE
Another, concept we are looking at is that We need to EXPLODE FUEL to make it work.
Thats like saying we need a Hurricane to make wind power.
More cargo cult science to go with the global warming bull.
A couple of commenters seem to understand that a hydrogen fuel cell is a battery. While it has efficiency and safety questions that must be answered, it has one extremely good feature in that its USE is zero pollution and its output components are the same as its input, water and energy.
If we want our energy able to move we need some form of storage. Maybe a “Back to the Future” style Mr Fusion reactor we can power our cars with will come around some day, but until then production of the energy needs to happen elsewhere.
In pollution terms hydrogen is a better method than petrol which releases a number of unhealthy chemicals into the air, and than batteries which have some pretty nasty chemicals in their makeup, and a generally short life.
People that say that Hydrogen is not an easy answer are correct. Given that there are no easy answers to questions like this, if that’s what your benchmark for success is you may as well remove yourself from the discussion as you have nothing valuable to add.
From: Obamaforever
To: LOWER CASE SCREEN NAME (aka Damn’it, my shift key is stuck.) per #24
I bet you wished your brain was as big as a Suburban and not the size of a Cracker Jack toy car.
# 13 deowll said, on January 2nd, 2010 at 9:47 am
#4 The same people that don’t like carbon don’t like nuclear.
Nor do they like windmills off of Martha’s Vineyard.
And they practically sh-t themselves when cold fusion was announced.
Odd bunch.
But good people. Just ask them.
#28- I just know what’s most important.
I couldn’t help but notice the wing nuts are holding true to form while our more progressive readers actually have intelligent ideas to bring to the party.
I have serious problems with the article. I read nothing about Hydrogen contributing to CO2. Nor was there anything even remotely suggesting Hydrogen is worse than gasoline. Something totally worthy of a Cherman/pedro post.