Fuel cells do not burn hydrogen at all.
They produce electricity. That electricity then runs an ev. The issues are: how to produce the hydrogen which can be by electrolysis of water (and solar could be used to do that), or a variety of other methods, some established, some very cutting edge experimental; how to transport it; and how to store it.
Hydrogen is an energy storage medium for powering an ev by way of a fuel cell.
True, but fuel cells are expensive and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
The production’s really the easy part, it’s the storage and the transportation of it that’s the hard part. That can be done, even using relatively inexpensive methods, but getting everyone to agree to do it the same way is the hard part. Automakers are too wedded to do things their own way, IMHO.
As is evey other fuel source, if you think about it.
Sorry, you’re right, it is compressed, my scientific language sucks, sorry, so I’m not the best at explaining these things. But I do believe hydrogen must be extracted from the water in some way then it must be “compressed”, which must be done by freezing it in some way, into the correct form to be used as fuel, am I right?
I reallized that advantage, that’s not my issue with hydrogen, again, I realize that “the hydrogen is clean and renewable itself” like I said before.
Yeah, we can keep making more hydrogen “as long as we have a power source”. That’s my issue, there needs to be a power source, to both extract and compress the hydrogen that is clean and efficient or else the energy’s clean and renewable advantages are pointless because they take polution to be produced.
Not necessarily. Even the dirtiest plant in the US is cleaner than a gasolene powered car, so even using plain ol’ coal to produce the hydrogen is better than refining oil to make gas and burning it in a car. The problem is, however, it is not clean enough to counteract the damage that’s being done. Both the developed world and the developing world are going to have to embark on crash environmentally friendly power generation programs in the next couple of years or we’re all going to be FUBARed.
Thanks! you just told me the answer to my problem with making the hydrogen feul. dow :smack: !!! Why didn’t I reallize that the solar power I was talking about the whole time?
Well, I don’t know about the transportation and storage itself being so hard, that would be like how gasoline is shipped on a truck or a plane, right? Now getting everyone to agree on transporting and expanding hydrogen as a marketing product…good luck on that one. You’ve got to get the U.S. to agree (impossible!!!), then China and India. You’ve got to somehow shatter the obsticle of the beserk multi-billion dollar oil companies who’ll probably be hostile to the idea. Just how do we do that has me puzzled.
Liquid hydrogen is pretty difficult to confine. Some of the liquid storage tanks have an outer tank filled with liquid helium (Or is it nitrogen? I forget.) to keep the hydrogen from escaping. It also attacks most metals, so you have to use stainless steel or composites to hold it, and the amount you can get in one of those tanks pales in comparison to gasoline in terms of BTU. Keeping it freakin’ cold so it’ll remain compressed has it’s own challenges as well.
However, there are ways to store it relatively safely and easily. There are a couple of different ways of doing it, one of them is a hybride (think that’s what it’s called), another is carrying it in the form of water and splitting it on an as needed basis using aluminum, aluminum alloy, or other metal alloy. (Google “hydrogen on demand” for examples of how this would work.)
Never mind my problem, I think DSeid solved the problem with producing hydrogen not being clean enough. As he said “solar could be used to do that”.
Well, Tuckerfan, I never said Hydrogen won’t be expensive, because of production, storing, and shipping complications. That’s basically the bottom line from what you were saying about these complications. I realize that it’s going to be a price burdon, but I just wanted to see if it was possible for there to be an almost 100% clean renewable source of energy, which now I’m not quite sure but I think hydrogen is now that I’ve just learned a bit more about it.
I gotta sleep now
Responding to my stating “Hydrogen is an energy storage medium for powering an ev by way of a fuel cell”:
No, not if you think about it.
It seems that there are some very basic confusions about fuel cells and other electric vehicles (EVs) out there. I was initially struck by this confusion when smiling bandit insisted that an EV would be having to “into a tiny little cockpit of deathtrap and get on the road at 70 MPH” while a fuel cell vehicle would allow him to have a “a hefty armored shell” if he wants.
Fuel cell vehicles are just EVs that produce the electricity in the vehicle using hydrogen. smiling bandit’s belief that fuel cell vehicles could be armored tanks if you wanted is just as true for any other EV. Vehicles that burn things to propel a vehicle are not EVs. Transferring power, say in the form of gasoline, to explode it in the vehicle and propel the car forward is not also a way of powering an EV. Fuel cells and other EVs, like fully battery EVs (BEVs) and Extended Range EVs (EREVs) and Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs) share some advantages over ICEs including the one that BG alluded to: electric motors are inherently more efficient than ICEs; while using electricity there are no significant emissions at the vehicle and a variety of sources can be used to produce the energy in the first place. For either it is theoretically possible to produce that energy with solar, wind, tidal, geothermic, or any of a variety of other clean and domestic options, but even using “dirty coal” to produce the electricity is overall much cleaner than using an ICE as a primary motive source while also reducing our dependence of foreign energy sources. The issues between fuel cell vehicles and other EVs are the differences between using hydrogen with a fuel cell as the transport/delivery/production system of the electricity vs using power lines and higher capacity batteries.
Please elucidate, then, as there’s nothing in your post about why it isn’t.
I think what he was saying is that because fuel-cell vehicles can typically carry much more energy, they are not dependent on building light, flimsy vehicles to achieve a reasonable range and acceleration. It would be very hard with today’s technology to build an all-electric, battery powered 5000 lb SUV with any kind of reasonable range. Fuel cells scale better.
Still, by the time we have all the development and distribution bugs figured out for hydrogen power, batteries may be much, much better and it will be irrelevant.
Sam, you mean something like this? Or maybe something a bit more meaty, like this? Cost for more batteries is a factor, but weight of the batteries become less so in a larger vehicle. Easy to keep the same performance and double Phoenix’s range, just costly. Anyway, I have not been arguing that pure BEVs are ready for mass consumption (even though I suspect they are closer than are fuel cell vehicles) mainly because the cost of providing more range than that needed for the majority of daily commutes would be too high. My contention is that EREVs and PHEVs are ready and would deliver most of the benefits, and those can be any size you want. In fact for EREVs and PHEVs the biggest initial benefit would come from vehicles like PHEV SUVs like Ford Escapes which are fairly mildly EV - basically giving about 30 miles of “all electric” per typical commuting day - but that still means that most commuters in these vehicles will end up using fairly little gas - and displacing the majority of the gas used by the SUV segment will have more of an impact than improving upon what people can now get in a Prius.
TF How is gasoline, for example, also an “energy storage medium for powering an ev by way of a fuel cell”? It isn’t. It is a means for powering an ICE vehicle by way of controlled explosions.
100 miles per charge and a six-hour charging time? That needs work.
They also have a model with a 250 mile range and their Altair Nanosafe batteries are capable of a ten minute fast charge … with the right charger. Those batteries also last longer than any vehicle does. The problem is cost. To get a pure BEV with a range to go cross country suffers the same cost constraints and only somewhat smaller infrastructure issues as do fuel cells. Which again is why I think that EREVs and PHEVs will take off first. Neither of those isues are deal breakers there. Unlimited range with current infrastructure and competitive cost. But seriously, most driving is daily commuting. Very very few people drive more than 100 miles in a day. 78% of Americans’ commuting needs would be covered with a 40 mile range. And many of them have the capacity to rent a car for the occasional cross country car trip, have another family car to use for that, or fly when they go cross country. There is fairly big niche even today for a BEV that can seat five and go even less than 100 miles between charges. I’d buy one if it was priced competitively and I trusted the manufacturer.
BTW, just to correct (or possibly not) something here…you CAN burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine (of sorts). You don’t HAVE to use a fuel cell. DSeid is quite correct that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is basically an EV that uses hydrogen instead of large capacity batteries, but you actually can simply burn the hydrogen in a similar way to burning hydrocarbon based fuels.
As for ways to create hydrogen (I don’t remember who said it up thread, but they were correct…hydrogen is a carrier fuel, i.e. you need to transfer energy from one form to another to create it), I would say our best bet would be nuclear power or maybe using methane (gives off CO2 so you’d have to solve that problem obviously). Methane itself is a GHG also…but it is vastly abundant so it has possibilities. Shell is working on methods of using solar power to run it’s proposed hydrogen fueling stations, but I think this is still impracticable. As someone else pointed to up thread even if you used dirty coal to generate a straight electrolysis method you’d save CO2 generation over the current carbon spewing gas powered vehicles we have now. I doubt this is going to be good enough however, so IF we are going the hydrogen route better methods of producing hydrogen in massive quantities would need to be found.
Just like if we go the battery powered EV route then cheaper, lighter, faster charging, longer lasting batteries need to be developed. My personal opinion is that neither method is ready for prime time…yet. But that battery powered EV’s are closer to being ready for a mass market than hydrogen powered alternatives. However, in the long run I think it will be hydrogen (WITH efficient/light/cheap battery technology) that is going to be the real next generation. I am, however, unwilling to bet my own fortune on this gut feeling.
-XT
Actually, I think those vehicles make my point. The Phoenix is far from a 5000lb SUV. In fact, it looks like a Prius with a bed on the back. It can only go 95mph, takes 10 seconds to go from 0-60 empty, and only has a range of 100 miles. It has a curb weight of 3800 lbs, which is about the weight of a mid-size to large sedan. But a good chunk of that weight is in the batteries, meaning the actual structure is probably equivalent to a small car in weight and strength.
It’s hard to tell about the Smith vehicles, since they are short on specifics, and provide performance figures with very wide ranges, without explaining what the tradeoffs and costs are to get to the upper end of the ranges.
I never disputed that you could make an electric vehicle like a Ford Escape, which weighs maybe 3500 lbs and can only tow 1500 lbs. Try making an electric Suburban, which weighs closer to 3 tons and is used to haul 5000 lb trailers over distances of several hundred miles at a time. Today’s battery technology is just difficult to scale to those kinds of needs without the battery adding significant weight and reducing storage capacity by a large amount.
I tend to agree with your overall point, and I’m somewhat skeptical of fuel cell vehicles. But it’s certainly true that with today’s battery technology, fuel cells have the ability to generate more power for a longer period of time. The new Honda FCX has a range of several hundred miles, acceleration comparable to other vehicles in its class (136 HP and 189 lb/ft of torque), and is about the same size and weight as a Honda Accord.
The big issues with hydrogen are going to be embrittlement of steel that it comes in contact with and other delivery issues. Also, I’d be worried about the amount of energy in that 5000 PSI tank in a collision. I’ve seen what happens when SCUBA tanks rupture, and they only hold a fraction of the energy of the hydrogen tank in the FCX.
Also, we still can’t make fuel cells inexpensively. The FCX is being made available in very limited quantities for a lease of $600/mo, but there’s no doubt that Honda is massively underwriting the cost to get the technology out into real world trials.
You do know that fuel cells have been made which run on gasoline, right? And that you can burn gasoline in a steam engine (no explosions). Gasoline, like hydrogen, is not energy, it can be used to create energy by means of combustion.
TF, you are right and I deserve that. 
Still. I find thinking of any fuel as a means of powering an ev by way of a fuel cell to be a bit much of a statement.
Sam. Meh. A good chunk of an ICE car is its engine and trans. An EV is simpler inside. Still, true 'nuff that a Suburban would require lots of batteries and good aero, or low speed only. And range would be smaller than with a hydrogen tank. Better to go with the new improved diesels for that armored truck segment. You will be seeing EV shuttle buses and garbage trucks featured at the Olympics however. (Defined routes, frequent charges, no high speeds required.) And from mid-sized SUVs down, PHEV and EREV is a reasonable option that could make a sizable impact, on that I think we agree.
Funny enough, I just ran into this (behind a free registration screen - sorry)
So despite Bush’s pushing fuel cells and heavily funding them, EREVs and PHEVs are closer today than they are … and around these parts isn’t the fact that Bush likes something enough of a reason to be against it! 
The problem with fuel cells is their high cost. They are, AFAIK, the most efficient means of powering a vehicle. Everyone’s hoping for the day when they figure out how to make a fuel cell without using exotic rare earth metals. Seems to me that the best solution would be to give up on trying to make them out of cheaper materials (as that may not actually be possible) and find away to make the materials cheaper. I’d be willing to bet that some where near the Earth is an asteroid which has a ginormous amount of rare earths on it. You bring that to Earth, and the price of rare earth metals will crash to the point where it’s impossible for you to recoup your investment in getting the asteroid (so, naturally, it’ll need to be a multi-national project), but it will make fuel cells exceedingly cheap to build.