Toyota's First Hydrogen Car to Cost $50,000

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]need4speeds[/nom]If you take hydrogen from other sources since splitting water is the hardest way to get hydrogen. You will be adding water to the planet, and still taking oxygen out of the air. Plants only take oxygen from co2, not water. So the pollution from hydrocarbons which are really dead plants is not as bad as taking oxygen out and forever trapping it with hydrogen to make water. If you thought that co2 was bad, this is even worse. At least the carbon in co2 will be used by plants eventually, and the oxygen again released, just like the fossil fuels were first made, in essence fossil fuels are trapped solar power. Whats warming the planet is the release of all this trapped solar power all at once not so much the co2. each car and coal plant and house burning natural gas for heat emits.. guess what?that's right heat. this is why cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside, this is why your car needs a rad and coolant also. Times this heat coming off your rad by millions of cars and trucks and houses, and you have a lot of heat. enough heat to melt glaciers and polar ice caps with ease. If you take all the oxygen from the air to make water we will slowly run out of oxygen. Any chemical can be pollution even water.[/citation]
If that was totally true in the last 4 billion years the Sun would have heated the Earth to 1 000 000+ Degrees. And you can feel it's not the case. So it seems that despite of all the incoming energy radiated by the Sun the Earth cools pretty well and even ice ages happen all the time.

 

[Parrdacc]

$50,000? A little hard to go "green" with these prices. I thought the idea was for everyone to use "greener" cars. Well at 50 grand there will not be enough people to afford one to really make a difference.

 

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]will_chellam[/nom]The main problem with fossil fuels (besides pollution) is sustainability, and by that I mean the rate of production is fundamentally limited by sedimentation and geology.The main advantage to hydrogen is that you can make it from water and electricity, and the electricity can be generated by sustainable means such as solar, wave, wind or hydro. Since it is very hard to store electricity efficiently and relatively easy to store hydrogen, all of the electrical capacity of a power network can be stored and used when needed or could even be generated locally.[/citation]

Theoretically they are sustainable but practically they are inefficient and expensive yet!
My be is: fusion (just as AMD claims that Fusion is future)

I think that instead wasting efforts on such inefficient ideas like waves, wind and solar... let's better tap the power of the atoms and subatomic particles. There is the real power and nuclear power is the first and best example! Nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, antimatter... superconductors. God knows what else. There is the true solution to our problems and not some totally not ecological landscape destroying wind mills and solar panels.

 

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]Parrdacc[/nom]$50,000? A little hard to go "green" with these prices. I thought the idea was for everyone to use "greener" cars. Well at 50 grand there will not be enough people to afford one to really make a difference.[/citation]

And the fuel. I bet it will eat lots of your green stuff too

 

[maestintaolius]

[citation][nom]Tonkyboy[/nom]TA152H o you remember the Hindenburg? >>Implying that there have been no safety improvements since 1937That doesn't really imply that does it. It just states the fact that Hydrogen is EXTREMELY dangerous and does actually burn. The original comment stated that the hydrogen would dissipate too quickly to burn. Tell that to the victims of the HIndenburg, and I think they would dispute that fact.[/citation]
Using the Hindenburg as an example as to why we should never ever use hydrogen is a bit silly. We can't expect to always get everything right on the first try, airplanes still crash from mechanical issues too (and a few helium blimps have burned and fallen as well). Comparing the dangers of storing hydrogen in a flammable fabric balloon to compressed or liquefied hydrogen in a reinforced tank really isn't a fair comparison. Hydrogen really isn't that energy dense, certainly less than gasoline, and we're content to drive around with that in our cars. I'm not saying any hydrogen storage is 100% safe, but neither is gasoline, that's the risk you take when you carry anything that's energy dense, batteries can explode too.

Honestly though, hydrogen isn't about producing energy, it's about developing another means of dense energy transport alternative to gasoline/diesel/kerosene. It's very difficult to come up with anything that has any where's near the energy density of gasoline and as such, anything that will work as well in a car. You want something that will propel the car effectively, but also not weigh so much that most of your energy is spent accelerating the mass of the fuel, nor do you want it taking up 90% of the space of your vehicle.

The hydrogen still has to be produced (at an energy loss) so you still have to get the power to make it somehow. Splitting water takes too much energy, it's just far too 'happy' of a molecule, hydrocarbons are much easier to split because they're higher energy states (which is also why they burn easily) and provide a cheaper source of H2, there's also been a lot of CH4 -> H2 catalyst development, mostly because syngas is pretty useful for making other chemicals. I wouldn't be surprised if the energy to split H2O into H2 ended up producing more CO2 in the end than splitting CH4 if I decided to crunch the numbers, you don't get something for nothing. Those dang 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics see to that (1st - You can't come out ahead, 2nd - You can't break even either). Splitting water at this point is just not that favorable.

CH4 to H2 is appealing because there's a TON of natural gas, particularly in methane clathrate's on the ocean floor (granted, we still haven't figured out how to effectively get them, maybe we'll need to build more SCVs to bring it back to the command center). As far as whether CNG vs compressed H2 is better, well CNG is more energy dense per volume where compressed H2 is more dense by mass. H2 contains about 3x the energy per unit mass where CH4 contains about 2x the energy per unit volume so I'm not sure at this point whether it's worth splitting or not. Considering gasoline's energy/mass ratio is similar to CH4 but at 3-4x the volumetric density, I'd lean towards it makes more sense to burn the CH4 directly rather than converting to H2. But, H2 has that 'feel good' factor because people think it only makes water and no CO2, even though it does as I stated above (hell, people still recycle paper even though it wastes energy and doesn't actually save any trees for that same 'feel good' factor).

Honestly, the only way we're ever going to get away from oil is to develop effective solar. The only problem (but it's a big one) with that, is our current solar power methods suck. Sure, we could go nuclear, but there's only so fissile material and cold fusion is probably our era's Holy Grail. Until we start harvesting Pandora for unobtainium for high temperature super conductors, I doubt fusion will ever be feasible (at least for the near future). The amount of energy in all the energy reserves on the planet is dwarfed by the absolutely ridiculous amount of energy the sun sends our way, it's just we animals suck at harvesting it. The solar cells are getting better, they're getting better at responding to more wavelengths and doing so with less surface area, but at 20-30c a KWh, they just can't compete with coal at 4-6c or even nuclear at 11-15c. Hydro and wind are pretty good at 4-12c, but there's only so many places where those sources are reliable enough to be worth the hardware investment (also a problem with solar).

 

[LLJones]

We already have fusion. Won't be feasible for a few decades.

http/www.ted.com/talks/steven_cowley_fusion_is_energy_s_future.html

 

[jellico]

[citation][nom]maestintaolius[/nom]The amount of energy in all the energy reserves on the planet is dwarfed by the absolutely ridiculous amount of energy the sun sends our way, it's just we animals suck at harvesting it. The solar cells are getting better, they're getting better at responding to more wavelengths and doing so with less surface area, but at 20-30c a KWh, they just can't compete with coal at 4-6c or even nuclear at 11-15c. Hydro and wind are pretty good at 4-12c, but there's only so many places where those sources are reliable enough to be worth the hardware investment (also a problem with solar).[/citation]

As I said before, solar and wind are a bust! While the total quantity of solar energy hitting the planet is, as you said, absolutely ridiculous, the majority of that energy is utilized by the planet itself. It powers the engine that runs our weather, heats our oceans, powers plant-life... is there energy to spare? Sure there is, problem is the energy density is relatively small. Consequently, we need a solar panel the size of your front door to charge a laptop. How many would it take to meet your energy needs?

My house is over 3000 sq ft, contains 8 computers (7 desktop and 1 laptop), networking equipment, LCD TVs, 2 refrigerators, a large chest freezer, various lighting. My house uses about 1800 KWHs of power per month. Now my heating and cooling costs are negligible because my house was designed with lots of skylights and the south-facing walls are all glazed pane glass, behind which is a wall of 1-foot thick adobe brick which regulates the temperature of the house year round. But as far as electrical power goes, I'd have to roof my house with solar panels, and then put additional panels all over my land to capture enough sun. It would look like shit, and would be friggin expensive!

Then there's the elephant in the room that nobody talks about with solar and wind (maybe they just don't realize)... the sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing. What happens then? The power grid ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES sources of power that are stable and steady. So, you would always have to have backup ready to go at a moments notice. Nuclear plants are stable and steady, but they can't change output on a dime. It takes quite some time to change the power output of a nuclear reactor. So your backup for wind and solar would have to be coal, gas and oil. So, really, we are right back to where we were. We really do need a revolutionary new technology to delivery us from our 20-million-barrel-a-day oil habit, not to mention our 2.7-million-tons-a-day coal habit (currently 49% of our electrical power comes from coal).

 

[gto127]

It sounds great but the rich will still find a way to make the average guy pay for it.(water)IT will probably require specially purified water that can only be purchased through the oil companies. I hope I'm wrong but were talking about ending the cash flow of the richest people on earth.

 

[maestintaolius]

@jellico (to avoid massive quote blocks)

Well, maybe you've missed a lot of what I said, but my main point was "effective solar", I also stated wind and hydro are too unreliable (they can be supplementary, but not a replacement). I also agree with you, as of right now, solar isn't a viable solution. But, I'm also not really thinking on scales of my lifetime. Currently, the solar panels, such as they are, aren't going to cut it. They're too selective in the wavelengths they respond to and their production costs are too high (and very environmentally unfriendly).

On average, the sun beats down with 600-700W/m2 on the sunlit side (obviously it varies highly, ranging from 1100W/m2 to almost nil depending upon latitude 300-350W/m2 is the average flux over the entire surface counting the night side), so even on a modestly sized 0.1 acre area, that's 250kW. Get 4 hours of usable sunlight and that's almost 1 MWhr a day, more than enough to power several homes. Obviously, 1MWhr is a stretch because it doesn't account for efficiency (that danged 2nd law) nor albedo or all the other losses which I will go further into, but, considering most places see more than 4hrs of light a day, I still think it makes my point.

Only about 25% of the sun's energy goes towards running the weather engine with another 30% loss to albedo. The rest of it goes towards heating the atmosphere and surface which is then re-irradiated directly back into space as IR (which is also why there's the concern of CO2 because it reabsorbs the emitted IR at wavenumbers 2300-2200 cm-1 and 667 cm-1 rather than letting it escape to space as quickly). This remaining 45% of the global energy budget is just purely wasted energy and free for the taking. Technically, the weather engine latent energy also gets eventually re-emitted as waste heat as well after it's been released from the weather engine.

But, relying on coal, oil, nuclear or the ilk, eventually they're going to run out or become too hard to reach. It may be 300 years or 1000, or maybe even more, but there's only a finite chemical (and nuclear) energy supply in the earth and you can't escape that (that danged 1st law again). The only source of nearly unlimited power that we have is the sun, the origin of the energy stored in coal and oil to begin with. Currently, we just really suck at harvesting solar power, plants do it pretty well, but they've had a few billion years to get it right. So, odds are, we'll continue to suck at it for at least a few hundred years more, but that's no reason to declare it 'a bust' now and stop working on it.

My real problem with burning oil, isn't really the whole environmental thing (I figure if we aren't burning it, someone else would) I just find it incredibly wasteful from my ChemE viewpoint. So many useful chemical products can be made from petroleum, it's filled with just an astonishing mixture of rings, alkenes/kyns/kanes and all kinds of other goodies. We use it for fertilizer synthesis, plastics, commodity chemical production, pharma, etc; it really is a marvelous substance. It just seems wasteful to me to be just burning so much of it when there are far less useful things to burn for energy (like natural gas and coal). You can, technically, make almost anything by converting methane to syngas, but it's a pain in the but to do and the separations process alone would cost a fortune to operate. It's kind of like (loosely) burning down an entire forest for heat, then one day being surprised you have no wood to build a house for your kids. And really, the main reason we burn it for fuel is the lack of an energy dense alternative for transportation purposes and other portable engine needs (e.g. a chainsaw), so I applaud the efforts to develop something else as a viable method for transporting and/or storing energy.

 

[Gin Fushicho]

I don't care that it costs 50k to buy one, the benefits are awesome. Just need to carry around a few gallons of water in the back when your traveling and your good.

 

[Silmarunya]

[citation][nom]Gin Fushicho[/nom]I don't care that it costs 50k to buy one, the benefits are awesome. Just need to carry around a few gallons of water in the back when your traveling and your good.[/citation]

That'd only be true if you could do the electrolysis of water in your car, which isn't going to happen. You need a significant electrical current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Unless we're all going to waste a huge amount of energy and drive monster trucks with industrial grade Hoffman voltameters, we're going to have to store hydrogen at gas stations.