Only a foolish person transports compressed or liquid
hydrogen on a truck. Sadly, there are some fools
who want to do just that. The reality is, hydrnol
is an organic hydrogen containing compound that is
meant for shipping and it ships nicely. Another option
for shipping hydrogen is to contain it in Magnesium
Hydride Slurry. Yet another option to transport hydrogen
is to build hydrogen pipelines. Hydrogen pipelines run
about $500k a mile. Another option is to do distributed
production of hydrogen on demand. With improving
technology to produce hydrogen, the distributed model
for hydrogen production has a lot of potential.

The development being done on fuel cell cars now
isn’t aimed at making them safe. It is aimed at improving
the range and making them: cheaper, more reliable, and
more powerful. The goal is to go from 100s produced to
1000s produced to millions of fuel cell vehicles on the
road being driven.

We simply aren’t trying hard enough to make fuel cell cars
work. A little effort would go a long ways. Only cars fueled
by hydrogen can totally displace fossil fuel use. The gas
electric volt hybrid cannot free us from foreign oil
dependency. In fact, no hybrid can solve our problems.
Sadly, only California and a few other states take fuel cell
car development seriously.

Toyota is talking about commercializing fuel cell cars in 2015,
not 2019 or later. Chrysler intends to commercialize a fuel cell
car sooner than later also.

In the meantime, replacing the 10% ethanol requirement with a
10% hydrogen requirement would make a lot of sense.

Using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine is not efficient,
but perhaps cars should be hydrogen combustion ready. It would
buy some time to get fuel cell cars commercialized.

Hydrogen via reformation on demand is not as complex as some
want to believe it is. To reform Magnesium Hydride Slurry, you
need a pump, some water, and possibly a modest amount of heat.
Hydrogen containing compounds that are designed to be a hydrogen source are meant to release hydrogen with a modest
amount of energy input. For many hydrogen carriers, the release
of hydrogen is an exothermic reaction where the heat can be
recycled to improve the efficiency. Many of the hydrogen injection
systems that “boost” gas mileage actually do work. Many don’t,
but then scammers are never left out when there is a new
technology.

No matter what is done, the electrical grid needs to be updated.
That means: more nuclear power, more wind, more solar, more geothermal, more natural gas, and less dirty coal. The current
electrical grid is not ready for plug-in vehicles, especially during
peak power usage hours. One of the major advantage of a fuel
cell car is that you don’t plug it in which reduces strain on the
electrical grid (the Volt hydrogen is an exception).

Put enough solar collectors alone in the world’s deserts, all of
the hydrogen needs of the entire world can be satisfied easily. There is a lot of desert land in the world. The problem with renewable energy is the intermittent nature of it. Stationary
fuel cells fueled by hydrogen can address that problem. If
we start producing more hydrogen now and start using it,
we won’t be driving hydrogen fueled internal combustion
vehicles for long.

While Toyota buys back a whole line of trucks that have frames completely rusting out after just 7 years … Buick secures the No.1 spot in the J.D.Powers long term reliability stats. And with owning 4 Buicks I can say they all are as reliable as anything on the road.

Not that current pre-production cars are costing around a million dollars, which is what i would expect

So yes, they can make a 90kw fuel cell vehicle. Expect the fuel cell by itself to be $270,000. With high volume it’s expected the cost might drop to half that, so.. what…$135 000. That’s still completely infeasible cost wise. This still isn’t taking account the cost of the hydrogen storage solution. That’s why i was playing with the idea of a small fuel cell. at 20kw fuel cell would cost a much more practical $30,000 if produced in volume.

I’m not saying it’s not technically possible. I’m saying that, as commercial technology exists now, it’s not practical. Discussing untested research is pointless. Nuclear Fission reactors were supposed to make electricity to cheap to meter. Remember that? How’d that work out? Besides, if we’re gonna do that, I call EEstor. If they can pull it off, they’ll completely invalidate all fuel cell research ever. I think if the EEstor EESU works as claimed, it because practical to have electric planes…

The problem with storing hydrogen at 10k PSI, is that even though hydrogen itself isn’t as much as a flamability risk as gasoline, and that risk can be mimimized, transporting gases at those kinds of presures is a huge safety risk. That to can be minimized, but the costs it adds to the container start adding up quickly. You start having to do things like, can it withstand a transport truck hitting it with a margin of safety. You also run into huge inefficiencies. The energy required to store gas at 10k PSI is enormous. I can’t remember the exact stats, but it’s something like more then 50% of the energy stored in the hydrogen was required to compress it, or something ridiculous.

The problem with a reformation system, is that it adds yet another layer of energy conversion in there, reducing the efficiency. Truthfully, we’re closer to running hydrogen internal combustion engines then we are to running fuel cells.

I do think that eventually down the road that this is where we are heading. However, at the present, a battery based solution is a technically, and practically superior solution that we can, and are implementing now. If this carbon nano-tube electrode technology matures on schedule, then maby we can see it in 10 years.

-Steve