The problem with E85, hydrogen, etc. is that it requires a radical change in fueling infrastructure. Even if that infrastructure is built in your town, you risk not being able to fuel your vehicle on long trips. Nobody really wants to give up the universal availability of fuel that they enjoy now. I'm not saying this is a show-stopper, as it can be overcome with time, but it is the reason that alternative fuels don't gain acceptance very quickly.

Biodiesel has the huge advantage of being thoroughly interchangeable with normal diesel fuel. So you run biodiesel at home, say, but then you go on a long trip and there aren't many biodiesel stations around... no problem, just fill up with normal diesel.

Obviously not everyone drives a diesel, and soybeans alone can't possibly replace the nation's current usage of diesel... but every little bit helps, and it's a painless and noncommittal transition (as long as you drive a diesel.) I think this is why hybrids are so popular, as compared to electric-only cars: no changes needed in fueling infrastructure. I think a biodiesel-fuelled hybrid would be the ultimate, but oddly nobody even makes a diesel hybrid, or as near as I can tell is working towards making one! I think that's because in the rest of the world they already use diesel for fuel efficiency and don't have as critical a need for hybrid technology. Only in the US, with its diesel-phobia, was some other solution to mileage needed.

Duncan

 

i saw a tv ad for the lexus last night so that is a fact toyota has the techno so its just make it bigger for the suv.
as to fuels i think the convertor cell is not that far away. water in the tank with the cell making hydrgen for the motor and having a o2 out put. 0 emmissions out the tail pipe. our diesels will be burning a soy bio . time will tell and many of us will have watched it all happen.

 

Chebby already has a hybrid Silverado out... alas, as the truck is so big and the required batteries so heavy, it doesn't get much better gas mileage than it's conventional counterpart.

 

I'd like to see a SuperDuty with a hybrid setup like the Dodge Contractor Special. I use a portable generator for power outages and camping. It would be sweet to plug the camper into a 20kva battery bank when I'm at the races rather than listen to the generator. Of course, I'd hate giving up the pulling power of the 7.3 too.

 

Most of the hybrids i have looked at get worse milage than the regular counterparts (ie.. honda) The acord only gets 24 mpg highway and not near that city. My dads 00 honda acord gets 32 highway and about 24 city. Not very efficent in my book and the price tag hits hard too. I will just keep watching to see if they can aprove it. It think bio-D is the way to go.

 

The water in the tank to produce H2 is not feasible. There is no magical catalyst that can do this without first making steam and then reacting with methane. Needs mucho energy even then (steam reforming is done now, but it's not free- requires fuel and electricty). If you are thinking electrolysis then the energy demands are even higher. If you are thinking solar to provide the electric power for electrolysis then you'll need solar panels and batteries equivalent to an 18 wheeler towed behind you. Like someone said above the hybrid infrastructure is here and can be done now. On the otherhand, I do not see why you can't have a diesel hybrid.

Maybe what we need is a mini-nuclear power plant under the hood. Or a windmill (turbine) on top of the car generating electricity to soop up the SD's!???!?!?! Then 0 to 60 under 2 seconds!!!

 

Anything is possable. The sun radiates an enormous amout of energy. We recieve it here on the earth at a rate of 1.4KW per sq. meter. Making a vehicle run solely on hydrogen gas is still far in the future. By that time there will have been more research and development on harnessing all this power from the sun that we are absorbing. For example, if we wanted to create a 500 Megawatt power plant from only solar power, and we were only able to harness 1KW per sq. meter, that would equate to 500,000 sq meters or roughly 124 acres. Now, lets say we could harnes 1.388 KW per sq. meter, we would need about 360,000 sq. meters, or just under 89 acres for the same plant. The better the technology we get, the less space we would need, and the more power we could output.

This has not been done yet since our technology is not this far advanced, and therefore cost of something like this would be outrageous!! But just to prove my point, several solar plants like this could be used to generate electricity used to extract hydrogen from water through electrolosys.

Keep in mind this is only solar power i am talking about, there is still wind, gravity (using hydro power) nuclear (both fusion and fission), and many more. Given the technology this is possable at a "large-scale."

 

Howardlj-

The hydrogen (H2 gas) would be stored in a tank on the vehicle. As needed it will come from that tank. We would refil at a Hydrogen station, not a gas station.

Mini nuke's in the car's would be way dangerous. Two things, accidents and terrorists.

 

I had a crowm victoria that ran on natural gas and loved it, however there was only one place I could get fuel within 20 mi of my house. Hydrogen will have the same problem. Another " problem " with vehicles that run on cng, propane, or hydrogen is that the engine will not wear out. after 5000 mi my crown vic's oil looked like it was just changed. Detroit doesn't want the 100k mi and its dead concept to die. Imagine 400k mi and its dead. Fleet buyers would keep their vehicles much longer. Corporate America makes things that break on purpose and the oil companies will fight alternative fuel sources. Did you know that the first lightbulb ever made is still burning? Why do you think we are changing lightbulbs today? Don't count on an affordable hybrid or any alt. fuel vehicle that is actually worth your time or money. The oil companies and car makers are going to make sure that your car will break down and you will use oil based fuel.

 

You're absolutely right. The engine oil turning black in a gasoline, or even moreso in a diesel is due to the carbon buildup from combustion. The carbon works its way past the rings and ends up in the engine oil. This is also why used engine oil in cancerous and new oil isn't. The hydrogen has no carbon, and methane, propane, etc still have propane, but not as much and therefore they burn cleaner.

Right on with the theory in detroit. There wouldn't be as much demand for newer vehicles if people didn't get feed up with the problems of their old ones.

 

You're missing the point: hydrogen takes more energy to isolate than it releases when burned, whether it's done in the car or at a power plant. Unless there is some complete breakthrough in hydrogen production, it's a dead-end.

The only feasible "alternate fuel" is nuke. Under-hood is silly, but a nuke plant producing (cheap, abundant, clean) electricity to power an electric car is an obviously workable solution. All you need are good, compact batteries and a public that isn't afraid of nuclear reactors.

Robert

 

I have to disagree again. First off, nukes are not a clean source of power. We, well politicians, are debating as to where nuclear wastes should be deposited/stored from many different sources of radioactive waste, one being power plants. Now imagine all the waste produced if everyone owned their own reactor. Also, keep in mind that fuel rods used in reactors could essentially be used to brew up a bomb, one reason security is so tight at plants. Here at least we both agree that giving everyone a nuke is not such a good idea.

Electric powered vehicles, in order to produce the same power as a current vehicle, will need large arrays of batteries which will always need recharging. I don't see this happening. Vehicles can go anywhere from 200-400+ miles per tank. Electric vehicles will most likely only go about 100 with many batteries, not to mention the vehicle must be much smaller, no more Vans SUVs or Trucks here. Another thing is the time required to recharge. Massive racks of batteries will require several hours to recharge, not very convienient when you have to stop for hours at a time after only going 100 miles!

You say hydrogen takes more energy to split it from the H2O molecule than gives off when burned. You are absolutely correct, however, if you want to look at efficienct, a internal combustion engine with gasoline is only about 15% efficient. At $2/gal, that's $1.70 in wasted energy. Hydrogen has more BTU's than gasoline and will actually produce more useable power over gasoline. Yet the problem is with the extraction of H2 gas, and as i stated before, clean solar power can do the job, along with electrolosys. It doesn't really matter how much energy it requires to extract the H2 since it can be done through this process. All we need are a few dedicated solar power generating plants, and some plants near sources of water which will use this power and perform electrolosys. Once the systems are built, there is virtually no maintanence or operating costs of the solar generating plant, and the electrolosys plant will only need to replace electrodes. From there the gas will be trucked to stations much like gasoline is.

Again, electric cars require often recharges, and the batteries will need constant attention. They lack power and acceleration compared to combustion engines on a similar size vehicle. For this reason they are usually in smaller vehicles, which will only be able to tansport one or two people.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, is completely renewable and pollution free if produced in the manner which I discribed. Given the proper technology though, anything is possable

Just a note- I may be biased on my view since i prefer the roar of a internal combustion engine over the humm of an electric motor anyday!!

 

Wow, where to begin...

You are comparing the energy-efficiency of fuel extraction to the energy-efficiency of the engine that uses the fuel. Two totally different things.

What he said was that generating hydrogen is currently a NET LOSING PROPOSITION. You spend more energy to extract the hydrogen than you can get back from the hydrogen (regardless of how efficently you use the hydrogen in an engine.) Like I alluded to before, this is simply moving the pollution and energy consumption problem into someone else's back yard. So you can say "it's clean, it's efficient, only water comes out of the tailpipe!" but you also have to say "pay no attention to that hydrogen generation plant behind the curtain!"

Your view of the big hydrogen plant where free sunshine beams down and powers the whole thing is simply not realistic at the scale we'd be talking about. Like I said, if they had the technology to do that, we'd already be using it to generate electricity for direct consumption as electricity.

As an aside, biodiesel production is a net gain in energy - you get several times the energy out of the biodiesel as you put in to producing it. (The seemingly free energy is actually provided by mother nature and your beloved solar power, to create the plants whose oil gets extracted.)

Hydrogen does *not* have more BTUs than gasoline if you are looking at BTUs/volume. Of course you could always compress the hydrogen more and more (unlike liquid gasoline) but that gets more dangerous. For instance, the Ford experimental hydrogen powered pickup that was running around had the entire bed filled with tanks and gear and had about 150 mile cruising range. Whee.

And not that it was germane to the discussion, but I believe modern gas engine vehicles are more like 25% efficient, not 15%. And guess what? Diesels are more like 40% efficient (score another one for biodiesel.) I have no idea how efficient a hydrogen vehicle would be. And you said you liked the roar of an internal combustion engine as opposed to wimpy electric cars, but aren't all the plans for hydrogen as a fuel based on using fuel cells? Which generate electricity to power motors to make the car go?

And the #1 reason why it's going to be hard to convince everyone to switch to hydrogen fuels: Hindenburg.

Duncan

 

Please explain for the 8th time how solar power and electrolosys creates pollution? What are you not understanding? The sun shines, the heat and light energy converted into electrical current, this currend is feed through water, hydrogen and oxygen gas is obtained, which I forgot to mention. We will also be extracting oxygen which can also be compressed and used for thousands of applications. I said anything is possable with enough technology.

Talk about pollution, what about all the pools of chemicals needed to produce bio-diesel? Not to mention it is still a hydrocarbon and will emit CO2, CO and some other substances.

I never said hydrogen is the only way to go, I was actually very interested in bio-diesel several years ago. It's a great fuel, but I ask, how many vehicles can we actually power on it? Can we produce enough of it so that every vehicle can run on it? From what I've heard and read, cooking oil and corn are the two main sources. A large percentage of what we eat has some type of corn based product in it, and I wonder how many more acres of corn will need to be planted and harvested every year to fuel our vehicles. Also, how many can run on all the used cooking oil that is available?

As far as fuel cells, yes that is one way to use hydrogen power. Combinine H2 gas and Oxygen will result in water and electrical current when combined in a fuel cell. However, you can also burn hydrogen as a fuel. Therefore, it can be used in an internal combustion engine as well.

Interesting you bring up the Hindenburg. Several theories exist, one of which puts the hull's coating at blame. The Germans used a layer of iron oxide and several coats of cellulose butyrate acetate mixed with powdered aluminum as a paint. This is similar to solid rocket fuel. Static electricity then caused the initial spark, not uncommon since the Hindenburg would have no way to discharge any built up charge as it is floating in the air. The hindenburg burned slowly and with a colorful flame. Hydrogen burns almost immediately and with a colorless flame. Had only the hydrogen ignited, it would have been a large pop and ended in a matter of seconds. Hydrogen is much lighter than air, and would escape upwards and away from people. Interestingly, the Graf Zeppelin II, which was built after the disaster, used a fire resistant coating on the hull.

 

Current methods for producing hydrogen basically depend on existing electrical generation technologies, which produce pollution. Our need for gasoline goes down, while our need for fuel for electrical plants goes up. Your solar-powered hydrogen farm is currently in the wishful-thinking stage, at least in terms of something on the scale to produce enough hydrogen for a massive conversion to that as our normal vehicle fuel. Yes, someday we may get there but I don't see it happening anytime soon, just like I don't see the US electrical grid in general switching to solar power anytime soon. Heck, if we can bank on wishful thinking technologies then I'll propose large-scale thermal depolymerization of our trash and sewage as a way to provide biodiesel, instead of soybeans and such which, as you rightly point out, we can't possibly grow enough of to completely convert all our cars to B100. It sounds miraculous on paper but they have yet to get their medium-scale plant going and aren't saying why. (They have stock prices to worry about, of course.)


Pools of chemicals? Methanol, lye, oil. Stir, decant, recapture a lot of the methanol vapor and re-use for the next batch.

The pollutants emitted by biodiesel (other than Nox) are far, far less than with standard diesel or gasoline. So yeah, we shouldn't stop with biodiesel - by 50 years from now we should have come up with something else entirely. But biodiesel is an immediately usable, net-gain fuel that requires no change in the majority of the fuel delivery infrastructure or vehicles. (Other than needing to own an existing diesel vehicle to use it.) Just to put the pollutants in perspective: biodiesel is often used in enclosed poorly-ventilated areas, much as LPG often is, to prevent sickening the workers in those areas.


Oh, I don't think I've seen any recent reference to future vehicles using hydrogen in any fashion other than fuel cells, because of the efficiency. (Which matters all the more because of the reduced power density of hydrogen compared to existing fuels.) Now that I think of it, that 150-mile-range Ford pickup was using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. No, I think if hydrogen takes over as our vehicle fuel it's going to be in electric cars.

...and who is eager to find the next new undiscovered way that hydrogen explodes when used large-scale in new ways? You can throw all the scientific evidence out that you want, but you simply can't erase the public's association between hydrogen and the Hindenburg. Gasoline is hugely volatile and explosive and I'm sure people die fiery deaths because of it all too often. (Note the recent refinery explosion in TX as one example.) But all it will take is *one* big fiery disaster with hydrogen to slam the door on its future, given its infamous past.

Duncan