Why Hydrogen Vehicles Suck

[BrandonsZ]

Disclamer, this is not a dissertation, please do your own research to finish out the PhD, I did some here.

 

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http://www.clean-air.org/Hydrogen%20Cobra%20Story/Hydrogen%20Cobra.htm

 

"The tank has a water volume of 87 liters and is rated up to 3,600 psi. At 3,600 psi, the tank holds 590 SCF of hydrogen, which is equivalent to 1.4 gallons of gasoline. At 200 HP, this tank is emptied in about 5 minutes."

 

So a 22-gallon tank full of hydrogen only has the power of 1.4 gallons of gasoline.

 

Granted this is a car with an internal combustion engine ~ 20%-30% efficient. A fuel cell would be 40%+ if you don't count all the oosses in making Hydrogen "to a total efficiency of under 16%" 5 X more costly than using a purely electric vehicle.

Source: http://www.econogics.com/ev/fcevreal.htm

 

 

Given you could mine Hydrogen, and it cost the same per equivelent gallon of gasoline, then you'd only spend $5 on a tank of gas but have a range of 40 miles in a typical car.

 

Fine for a buss that drives 40 miles and then refuels, but not for cars. IMO.

[nienberg.11]

Might want to read the one I started...

 

http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=110447

[strotter]

I've been thinking about the fascination in the industry and government with hydrogen power. It's a bit of a quandery. The only plus I can come up with: it can be created from a variety of sources, in particular nuclear. That's it, the only thing. It isn't terribly efficient in use, and it has handling problems, and it's not viable in the near (or even mid) term. But it *is* easy to make and distribute if you have enough kilowatts flowing around, especially if oil (or its' equivalent) is $300/barrel or so. In those terms, it's not a bad way to go. Heck, you don't even have to synthesize it at any particular location, so long as you have some semi-decent high-temp superconductors coming out of the nuke and into your local fueling station. The ultimate source is with an existing industry, and, you can (fairly easily) modify existing I.C. engines to run it while you transition to more efficient technologies. A political win/win. Hm?

[AK-Z]

Does that include the Hydroride things that were mentiond in the other thread about converting to hydrogen? I thought the volume that it could hold would more than what a tank the same capacity could hold in in it gas form under max capable presure.

[Pop N Wood]

A good link on hydrogen storage densities

 

http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-1/p20.html

 

Says hydride systems can actually store more hydrogen in a smaller space than liquid hydrogen. But the weight of the storage tank is a major issue. It also looks like many of these systems have huge issues in how they will be recharged. It is not as simple as hooking up a hydrogen hose to your vehicle.

 

Looks like an effecitve storage method continues to be one of the unsolved engineering problems facing hydrogen vehicles.

 

Actually here is another link to a government agency that seems to have a lot of good info about renewable energy.

 

http://www.eere.energy.gov/

[BrandonsZ]

Might want to read the one I started...

 

http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=110447

 

Awsome thread. Sorry I should have searched

 

A more reasonable approach to me would be to have a solar cell on your roof to offset the cost of charging your purely electric car. It's already been proven that the cost of an electric car that gets charged at your expense is equivelent to the price of gasoline. (although this was proven when gas was $2.00/gal and electricity prices haven't gone up with gasoline yet. It might be worth looking into again. However like a pyrimid scheme if everyone did it energy costs for electric power would necessitate an increase due to decreasing supply (which is already critical, hence brownouts and blackouts). The truth of the matter is that the energy used to go one mile with pure electric power is equivelent if not slightly worse than the efficiency of a deisel. So you won't be seeing any electric big rigs any time soon.

[nienberg.11]

Electric is all well and good, but it's so much weight and upkeep. If the link I posted in my thread is legit, I'd make my Z a guinea pig for that system in a heartbeat.