Sorry, fuel cells don't last forever, and PEM fuel cells have notoriously short lifespans - the membrane erodes and develops leaks. Of course they will be recycled, just like batteries are, when they no longer function.

Producing H2 from aluminum takes even more electricity making aluminum than direct electrolysis of water would use, and raises the cost accordingly. While there are many ways to make H2, all are expensive and most are inefficient.

We have a report above of an actual H2 vehicle user, bobtompos, that paid $10 per Kg for H2 fuel. Considering that 1Kg is roughly the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline, that is an expensive fuel, even considering the efficiency of fuel cells. That would make the fuel cost of the Honda FCX Clarity about 15 cents per mile. My fuel cost to drive a Prius is about 6 cents per mile, less than half that. Those lucky enough to be driving electric have a "fuel cost" of 1 to 3 cents per mile!

As for "replacing gasoline with electric", consider that oil refineries use electricity to operate, and the amount needed to produce one gallon would drive an electric car almost as far as that gallon of gas! Moreover, most car recharging will be done late at night when electrical demand is lowest. Electricity supply is not a serious problem. The future is electric.

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This guy is right. The hydrogen economy has never made any sense. It's mostly PR and intellectual masturbation by politicians and engineers. The money spent on this should have been funneled into battery and ultracapacitor research.

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couldn't be more correct; and, although i've raised my family by making a living for over 30 yrs manufacturing gasoline, i can't wait for our species to graduate away from it - i just can't imagine how that might ever happen via a hydrogen economy, until/unless we learn how to use the sun's energy a little further upstream than via the zillion-year process of waiting for it to make us more fossil fuels, fuels that have so many drawbacks - their attendant carbon and slow production time just to name a couple

and not only is the energy efficiency of the adored hydrogen economy not there, every time we want some hydrogen at a refinery, we just tear it off of the carbon backbone of one of the refinery streams' hydrocarbons; while that may be just because hydrocarbons are handily available to refiners (and they're all just evil planet-destroying, short-sighted, greedy capitalists who don't care), don't most non-refinery hydrogen sources do something similar? - or burn a hydrocarbon somewhere else to generate the electric current to split hydrogen from water?

or from another vantage point, isn't water just burnt hydrogen? can you imagine anyone believing we could pay the energy price to "unburn" a fuel for a net energy gain? then maybe we could get some folks to believe we could re-assemble their fireplace ashes and chimney effluents to energy-reasonbly make some logs; if so, after i sell then the brooklyn bridge a couple times, i'd like to know if they'd be interested in a perpetual motion machine!

so great, a hydrogen car emits only lovely, benign, right-up-there-with-mom-and-apple-pie, good ol' H2O - at the vehicle! then, like in the wizard of oz, please pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, who almost invariably (with granted exception for the minor fraction of hydrogen manufacture whose energy source isn't fossil fuel), please pay no attention to that man behind the curtain who's burning off the remaining carbon backbone - or whole hydrocarbon - and pumping out the same CO2, multiplied four times over (80/(100-80) if i'm doing the math correctly) if the adjacent post's 80% efficiency loss is correct, 'cause that man behind the curtain is hard to see from the tailpipe of the infallible hydrogenmobile!

we need to keep thinking and working, and we increasing seem finally to be doing that, of how to capture that 98% (or whatever the exact number is) of solar energy presented to our planet, from gettting away from us by reflection, or getting wasted b/c we haven't yet gotten efficient at concentrating it without waiting for those zillion-year fossil fuels; a lot of encouraging paths are progressing, i for one, just don't see the hydrogen economy as a worthwhile use of our limited applied resources; and regardless of your opinion of when, most will grant that eventually time will become the most limited resource, and some will opine it already has

anyway, there are some of my opinions, i grant they're just that, and welcome others, esp those that don't agree, we just have to all cooperate to discern the sometimes wide gaps between opinions and facts; good luck to us all

tim

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Hooray for common sense. The nuclear industry's stealthy ploy to greenwash itself via hydrogen is becoming ever more obvious.

However, just because I'll never drive a hydrogen-powered car doesn't necessarily imply that I ever will drive a pure BEV. In spite of all the hard work on battery chemistries, we are still a long, long way from an economically viable solution once you take depreciation into account.

For the volume market the near-term focus in terms of electrification is idle stop, vehicle/engine peripherals plus load leveling of the downsized and boosted ICE. That may entail the adoption of a new industry-standard grid voltage in the 36-48V range in the next decade.

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If we are all going to drive electric cars in the future, I'm afraid we'll have to count on the nuclear industry.

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Haven't read Nelder's piece but I'd like to add one more reason why hydrogen will never work: Water vapor. It's fine on a sunny day. But what about in the dead of winter, when what's coming out of the tailpipe is frost that settles on roadways making them slick as ... ice? I can see the class action lawyers lining up like hungry wolves for this one. I can't believe the engineers haven't at least thought about it. The water has to be either contained and released at a more opportune time, which is inconvenient for the driver, and the system has to be engineered so that the water is always liquid. Or the water has to be recycled, which implies the hydrogen would be genereated by (ta da!) electricity in the car, most likely when it's getting a drink from the grid. This is yet another engineering miracle that has to happen for hydrogen to be a viable fuel. Glad to see people are starting to get the drift.

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Sebastian is 110% correct, it's not going to happen with hydrogen. Give us a Th!nk City with a 100 mile battery, good for 90% of the U.S. population. Thanks FORD for selling Th!nk to people who might bring us the revolution to the U.K. and here to America.

Phil from Chapel Hill

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What was really interesting was reading some of the comments posted. Some accused Chris Nelder of working for the "oily" companies - totally silly, as the oil companies are the main supporters of the H2 economy, and they are the ones planning to supply and sell this pricy new fuel.

Others had grandiose but totally unrealistic plans to provide H2, often showing their own ignorance on the subject.

There was only two flaws I could find in Chris Nelder article:
1) He said that "in the right applications hydrogen can be a useful storage system" and described a stationary H2 energy storage application. However, H2 doesn't make sense even for stationary energy storage, considering the electrolyzer/fuel cell efficiency (30% or less) compared with batteries and charger (85% effficient), and the much higher cost, and the space required for bulky H2 storage.

2) He said "Since it doesn't pay to have an energy regime with an EROI of less than one, hydrogen cars seems a permanent improbability." Energy Returned On Investment is a way of judging efficiency, a EROI of 1 or less cannot be an energy source, but can be a useful energy carrier - electricity is a good example. Of course, this is a minor quibble, as H2 is a poor energy carrier, compared to electricity.

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I can speculate too just as Chris Nelder and the many posters here at this site. Hydrogen can be made via a myriad of different ways that are still clean and green. Examples? Wind, Wave, Nuclear, Hydro-electric. To accomplish this, we would need to build more wind turbines, wave energy generators, Nuclear plants, and Hydro-electric dams. Nobody said it would be cheap, but as I see it, all of the above can be done, (with today's technology). What is all so difficult about this? Why can't people rap their heads around the idea of hydrogen cars?

Here's another problem I have...I can't comprehend why almost all of the major automotive players, including GM and Ford (who don't have money to lose), are spending serious time and dough on a propulsion system some say will never come to fruition? Someone explain that to me. I can see Honda and Toyota have tons of money to blow on any idea that comes down the pike, but GM and Ford? C'mon! They have to be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel with Hydrogen, or they wouldn't be even fooling around with it. As big as these companies are, they are not the government where they can spend millions and billions of dollars on research and never have to be accountable for it. I challenge the readers to reconcile this for me.

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Good morning Schmeltz (commenter 8); your first paragraph - surely hydrogen works and can be clean at source as well as at vehicle. What makes it hard for me to see the hydrogen car as a viable long-term player in our set of solutions is the low efficiency of the complete system compared to some of the other current/developing choices. But I come here mostly to learn, throwing out my novice opinions more to stimulate discussion than to foolishly cling to them. Perhaps you are suggesting that, though still somewhat inefficient and expensive, hydrogen cars are the best carbon-free system that we've proven so far? Anyone else please jump in here.

As to your second idea, why would the more cash-strapped domestic auto manufacturers fiddle with hydrogen if it's likely to be a dead end? First, I'm not impressed with their market or technology savvy in recent years compared to several more foreign-based auto companies (admittedly that line blurs more and more as time passes and as they all struggle to compete, even survive, most are increasingly using, shall we call it a new type of "hybridization" - of continental, national, and even inter-company blends?). Second, all I can guess is that they do in fact see viable potential in the future of hydrogen cars, and granted, so far they've made just a few billion more in profits than I ever will. Time will tell if they've guessed correctly by keeping hydrogen on their list.

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Schmeltz: You make the assumption that the car manufacturers are completely autonomous and a good predictor of future technologies.

The fact is, they are not. They spend money where it is logical for them politically. You mentioned that they are not the government, but you kind of miss an important point : they are subsidized by the government for research into fuel cell technology because politicians bought into the hype about fuel cells.

Want proof? http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/presidents_initiative.html

Government research money is being spent foolishly in this area, on the hope that in 20 or 30 years, some miracle will happen that will solve the massive inefficiencies of the system.

In the end, it's all a ploy to make sure that oil companies like Exxon and Shell stay relevant... Since fuel cell technology is going to be at least 20 or 30 years off, that's 20 or 30 years of oil profits yet to be reaped, and if a breakthrough occurs, then Exxon or Shell will be there to reap profits from selling you hydrogen too.

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Benson: I share some of your ideas, especially that governments and corporations are both trying to influence, or even control, each other, although without emphasis so much on the conspiracy perspective as seeing it as their pursuit of their perceptions (frequently errant) of their self-interests. They use their money and power to try to get what they want. I do that too, and enjoy the freedoms we have here to do just that.

But I'm finally beginning to realize that extrapolation of the status quo leads to a future few of us will savor. I've just started coming to sites like this to learn what I can do to at least improve my individual choices. One of the biases I bring from my (energy) corporation career is my best chances to influence are by doing a better job of voting with my wallet. Europe already seems to have many more existing choices for cleaner and more economical vehicles but I haven't figured out yet how to accelerate their arrival here. I don't know, but have no reason to believe that their oil lobbies are any less powerful. I believe it's in the self-interest of any seller to make whatever sells best/profits them most. As a consumer, anytime I'm disappointed with the choices at retail, I suspect they are frequently so poor more because that's what most of us buy.

Probably belongs in a different thread, but I need a new vehicle soon and can't get figure out how to get a variety of choices of some of the cleaner, 60+ mpg, vehicles that are already in production outside the US w/o waiting longer than my ancient, inefficient 11-year old minivan that's about to croak will last. Although it weighs too much, I'd rather not send it to the crusher, and would only need to improvise a very small new powertain to get my transportation needs met (35mph max). Their's plenty of room in the seatless (took them out to cut weight) 4'x8' cargo bay. It's front-wheel drive so I could do something creative (like that David Arthurs guy on Mother Earth News - although needs be cheaper than his $1.5 to $2k budget) in the back and drop a belt or chain or motor wire down through the floor to the uncluttered space around the rear wheels to make it rear wheel drive (then remove some of the engine/tranny weight if/after my rube goldberg proved reliable. Anyone have a suggestion of which websites/blogs would be appropriate for ideas on that? Thanks, Tim

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Hi Tim and Benson:
Thanks for your comments. This stuff fascinates me, and I enjoy a good discussion every now and then.

Tim: you mentioned first that your main problem is the inefficiency of Hydrogen. Otherwise, you would have no problem with it, correct? I'm not sure of the percentages anymore but I think gasoline in ICE's is fairly inefficient as well. Diesel is slightly better. With that said, (and no numbers to back me up unfortunately), society already adopted a reltaively inefficient transportation system, what's wrong with replacing it with another inefficient system that doesn't pollute the environment, and of which there is an almost limitless supply of? Plus, the Hydrogen is made locally to each Country. No need to import foreign Hydrogen when you can literally make it right at home.

Responding to the second part, are you suggesting that the Automakers are sheep, and when one recklessly pursues a technology, the others follow? I just can't see that because of the financial situation of some. GM and Ford just cannot afford to be working on "science projects" that will never see the light of day.

Benson: Even with political money, I'll say it again, GM and Ford just cannot afford to be working on "science projects". They are still accountable to stock holders. If they are being subsidized so heavily to work on Hydrogen, they should be rolling in dough, correct? Why does all the press say otherwise?

Sorry guys, but you haven't convinced me.

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Thanks Schmeltz. I'll reflect upon your comments.

Although I espouse that I began to come to sites like this to learn, and believe that I don't have a desire to convince you/us for/against hydrogen - or any other potential solution - I'm sure that, like any of us, I bring some baggage, habits of thought and action, prejudices and biases.

I think that one of the strongest of these is the bias I bring from my refining career and life experiences which are stronger in the "let free markets work" category than in any allegiance to fossil fuels or resistance to hydrogen. The misgiving I have about this perspective of mine, though, is that whole concept of tipping points and the question of will we consumers demand enough change fast enough.

Here’s a slightly different angle of view. Don't public companies have the fiduciary obligation to manufacture whatever sells most profitably? To me the problem is more demand-side oriented than supply-side oriented. In general I believe that our American appetites have become selfish and short-sighted. I see it every day when so many drivers can't/won't anticipate even ten seconds ahead and zoom around me in order to get to the clearly visible next red light first, while throwing away the momentum they complained about paying too much for at the pump, only to be left behind again as I roll through at the speed limit – and they’ll sometimes do this five times in a row in as many minutes! I think the solution is not likely to come from our corporations or our government, but more likely from a grassroots effort prompted by those few who have been looking around the bend and thinking about where this behavior is leading us – but only if the masses can be awakened in time. We humans seem to have a long-demonstrated knack for being the most short-term adaptive but long-term bullheadedly blind species on the planet.

As to hydrogen in particular, while patently obvious, I just hadn’t ever focused upon its lack of “source to demand” transportation cost – say, as opposed to all that transoceanic freight we spend on moving crude oil. That’s part of the value of dialogue, and even debate, we all can improve the knowledge base we use for the choices we make. I just don't know enough facts on how hydrogen would compare to gasoline on a "whole-cycle" basis (or whatever the correct term is for fuels that means something akin to “cradle-to-grave”, and we’d have to include infrastructure additions/replacement). And I agree that the gasoline-based transportation that we are all used to accepting without much thoughtful challenge is horribly inefficient.

The intrigue of the optimization "game" is only more compelling as the costs and threats continue to rise. I would support any efficiency step forward, including hydrogen and/or others, no matter how unorthodox, as long as its benefits outweighed its costs. Defining and weighting benefits (efficiency, cleanliness, etc.) and costs ($, sustainability, survival, etc.) leads us into the greyer area of opinions and values. I see it all the time on the two sides of the net energy gain (and the less discussed direct, and collateral, economic effects) of the fuel ethanol program that seems to be such a “favored son” lately.

Thanks again for your comments, and the strong, but inoffensive way you present them.

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Tim:

Thanks for your kind words and insightful opinions. I particularly liked this comment:

"We humans seem to have a long-demonstrated knack for being the most short-term adaptive but long-term bullheadedly blind species on the planet."

Well said. I also liked:

"I would support any efficiency step forward, including hydrogen and/or others, no matter how unorthodox, as long as its benefits outweighed its costs."

Amen Brother. I try to keep an open mind about things as much as possible, and I guess that's how I view this Hydrogen thing too. Here's to hoping someone is in the right place at the right time some day, to figure out a better way to revolutionize transportation, and clean up this world that we have done so much to mess up.

Best regards to you.
Schmeltz

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Yes, Schmeltz, H2 can be made in lots of ways. Unfortunately, they all tend to be expensive and most are inefficient. Currently, the cheapest source of H2 is by reacting steam with natural gas to produce H2 and CO2, the 2nd cheapest is to react steam with coal to produce H2 and CO2. So guess where almost all H2 comes from! How many people will be willing to pay for H2 from renewables, when H2 from fossil fuels is nearly half the price? Kind of a moot question, when driving on electricity is about 1/4 the cost per mile of even the cheapest source of H2.

Electrolysis is only 60% efficient, PEM fuel cells 50%, overall 30% - less, if we subtract the energy for compression or liquifaction. Compare that with 85% efficiency for batteries and charger. Renewables are in limited supply, it makes much more sense to use it to displace fossil fueled electricity rather than waste it on inefficient H2 fuels. .

It's easy enough to grasp the concept of H2 cars, what isn't easy to figure out is why anyone would want to pay considerably more to buy a car that uses a fuel that costs more than gasoline, especially when plug-ins are so much cheaper to buy and operate. The fuel cell alone costs much more than even a very large long range LiIon battery pack, add in the high cost for any form of H2 storage and it's a deal-breaker for the average Joe.

There are several reasons most major automakers are working on it. One is that the government is paying most of the costs, and some of the research and development discoveries "trickle down" to other non-H2 cars. Another is that the automakers have a long history of building exotic "concept cars" that draw a lot of attention but never get built - think of it as an exotic sort of brand advertising. There is also a "follow the crowd" tendency, to do what all the others are doing, even if it looks like going over a cliff, financially. Also, it is a way of holding off the "Zero Emissions Mandate" - they got the CARB board to cancel the ZEM if they did research on H2 powered cars, and now have endless excuses for not delivering. Always yet another problem to be solved. Finally, the oil companies are pushing H2, as they plan to be the ones providing it and it keeps their profitable business when the oil runs low, and they have a lot of influence on the government and auto companies.

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I found a lot of opinions out there, with "scientific" studies that reach "wheel to well" (WTW) efficiency conclusions that all seem to lean towards the self-interests of the authors and/or sponsors; only thing I found that didn't smell like an opinion in fact's clothing was that the letters in “WTW” probably really do stand for “wheel-to-well”, and this seems to the appropriate lingo that I was struggling for in my earlier posts when I used terms like "whole cycle" and "cradle to grave"

from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYH/is_3_7/ai_98246943

"Diesel-electric hybrid vehicles continue to beat all other alternatives (including fuel cells) on well-to-wheel carbon dioxide ([CO.sub.2]) emissions per mile, at a fuel cost far lower than fuel-cell alternatives, according to an ExxonMobil study presented to U.S. congressional staffers this month."

from: http://www.epa.gov/ORD/NRMRL/std/fuelcell/fuelabstracts/Brinkman_abs.pdf

this one's in Adobe and I can't pull an excerpt, but it appears to be presented by Detroit, sponsored at least in part by Big Oil, and surprise! comes to a WTW conclusion that petroleum products in automobiles is the most efficient

and finally, from: http://www.climnet.org/CTAP/workshop2004/CAN_WelltoWheel.pdf

again, in Adobe and I only have the reader version, but this group (Climate Action Network Europe) seems to favor H2 into fuel cells post 2010 (written in 2004?)

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Hi Chris M:

Reflecting on your post, I agree that the likely "cheaper" way of scoring H2 is to strip it off the back of some fossil fuel already, but I have to ask, how much more is it to build a nuclear plant and make Hydrogen AND Electric? Most nuclear plants easily serve the power needs of entire city without breaking a sweat. Are you trying to tell me that a nuclear reaction is not capable of making lots of cheap abundant Hydrogen? I can envision nuclear plants making electric in the day, and both electric and H2 at night, utitlizing their full capacity around the clock.

You mentioned that driving pure electric vehicles is cheaper than H2, so why even bother with H2? Pure EV's still don't have the range issue nailed down. I think all-electric vehicles are wonderful, believe me, I'm all for them. Sadly, it is easy to say battery technology will get there, but will it? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Chevy Volt range extender is a good idea, where H2 augments the normal range of the all-electric. Will they be cheap to drive and buy. Heck no. But expense has not stopped many people from buying things before. When people WANT something, they find a way to get it.

Next, I agree in that the Average Joe, (I'm included in that teir) won't be able to afford a FCV. I think that will be the case initially. Look at cell phones though. 30 years ago, only the wealthy had them, and there were only a few spots on the globe that you could actually use them. Now, third graders are walking around with them! (Not exagerrating).

Lastly, you pointed out what I addressed in an earlier post in that the Automakers are all basically sheep. When one plunges over a cliff, the rest will follow. I think they are sheep to a degree, perhaps in terms of a striking design that everyone will get on the bandwagon with, but not a technology such as this. Research costs money and time, and GM and Ford have neither to waste. You mentioned that the gov't. subsidizes this research...is Washington subsidizing Toyota and Honda too? I doubt it. Of course they have all the money anyway--they don't need subsidies. So is Hydrogen just a political shoe shine then to make the automakers look progressive and sharp and green? Seems to me that it is an enormous expense just to put on a show. That is just a little too convenient to explain away as Hydrogen is just done to "make somebody look good". It would be a lot easier to believe, that maybe these scientists at these Automakers see an application for this in the future, and are trying to make it work, wouldn't it? I probably sound like an apologist for the Hydrogen economy--I'm not. But I'm also not convinced that it is a complete dead end like some people imply.

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really like your better round-the-clock idea for any type of electric generation capacity, not jst your nuke/H2 suggestion; i got a little exposure to calif elect dereg in one of my jobs and heard that elect prices just past midnight freq go to near, or even below zero (b/c of a desire to avoid hi start/stop costs) only to zoom back up every morning when demand surges; so many have tried creative elect storage to take adv of this almost daily, almost sure, wide 24-hr price swing (pump water up a hill, make a big "ice cube" in the basement of a skyscraper for later use as a/c, etc., etc.); i suppose we have to build elec gen to cover peak daily demand, but this leaves such an opport for creative off-peak uses of that publically funded infrastructure and all i've seen for the off-peak suggestions have been elect stg ideas, not alt use of plants, nuke or otherwise . . .hmmmm, something to ponder on the commute home tonight

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Tim, I have a question that's slightly off topic to this (great) thread, but you might find interesting. In your first post here, you stated that you have been:

"making a living for over 30 yrs manufacturing gasoline."

so you are probably the most likely to know the answer:
I read once in some other blog that it takes about 10 kWh of electricity to refine a gallon of gas. If this is true it would throw the whole Well-to-Wheels energy calculation on it's ear... it would actually take the same or less electrical generation capacity to power a BEV a mile than to refine the gas to drive an ICE a mile.

EV ~250 Wh/mile @ 85% conversion = ~300 Wh/mile
ICE @ 30mpg: 0.033 gal/mile = 330 Wh/mile

The 10 kWh claim seems a bit high to me, my first-guess numbers don't quite seem to work out:

55 gallon crude @ $70.
$1.25/gal
10 kWh @ $0.1/kWh
$1/gal
That only leaves $.75/gal for distribution, tax and profit.

Do you know, or do you know someone who would know the correct number?

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