5,000 miles on a gram of fuel
Jeremy Clarkson is host of the TV show Top Gear. He is not a fan of green cars like the G-Wiz or Prius. In the video above, Jeremy uses the Prius for target practice. So it might surprise you to find out, Jeremy is apparently a big fan of fuel cells. In a recent article Jeremy writes "I think that, soon, the holy grail will be cracked: the hydrogen fuel cell. ... The best way of storing hydrogen is between the atoms in metal. Already some scientists reckon they have gone one better and have worked out a way of putting 30 litres in a single gram of graphite. And 30 litres would be enough to take a family saloon of the future 5,000 miles. So there we are. Problem solved. Personal transportation will survive."
Jeremy is not all positive in the article. In the same article where he praises recent discoveries in fuel cells, he writes the Prius is "designed only to assuage the guilt of people whose opinions come from a man so hopeless he couldn't even beat George Bush to the White House." Jeremy also writes that electric cars, as the G-Wiz proves, "Do. Not. Work... They run out of juice whenever it's raining, or dry, or windy." Even the hydrogen future, predicted by "eggheads," has a potential problem: "What's the world going to look like when 600m motor vehicles start to chuck water out of their tail-pipes? A point only I seem to have spotted thus far. Which means it's probably irrelevant."
That is an interesting idea. Could you consider water vapor a pollutant? It is a greenhouse gas, after all.
[Source: Times Online]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
carwaterguide.blogspot.com 12:46PM (11/16/2008)
I'm excitedly waiting all the changes in technology and availability of vehicles in the near future!!!
http://carwaterguide.blogspot.com
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Ryan 8:29PM (9/16/2007)
Water is already a component of regular car exhaust. Do some research.
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Keith Wakeham 8:34PM (9/16/2007)
I read once and unfortunately it was a while ago, that water vapour is magnitudes worse than CO2...... however the difference is that max life time in the atmosphere before it condenses out is somewhere of the order of a week, where as CO2 is until it can react to something.
Maybe I'll try and find where i read this again, anyone know or heard same?
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Lascelles Linton 8:41PM (9/16/2007)
Ryan, According to the page below for every gallon of gas burned, a gallon of water is produced. Very interesting.
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/42882
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Lascelles Linton 8:45PM (9/16/2007)
Keith, I think you are right. I guess that settles that :D Jeremy was right. He was wrong.
http://nz.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070911073500AAmKgQYb
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derek.hofmann 9:26PM (9/16/2007)
Perhaps the Tesla will change his mind about electric cars.
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Joseph 10:47PM (9/16/2007)
Jeremy's opinions on alt. fuels are lagely unresearched, ignorant, and are based on assumptions and myths. I'm sure he's aware of this.
He just makes the show as entertaining as possible. Isn't it fun to watch someone go on bashing about something that alot of people don't like or know very little of.
They just try to make things sounds as shocking as possible, while of course still flowing along with some basic beliefs of the car community so they don't dismiss him as crazy. Everything he says, is pretty much everything hard core motor-heads want to hear. In my opinion, he is simply a character playing out all the fantasies and opinions of the people who watch the show.
Marketing, marketing, marketing...
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GreyFlcn 10:07PM (9/16/2007)
What does the thread title have to do with anything?
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Anth 10:36PM (9/16/2007)
I always wondered if it would rain more once hydrogen fuel cell cars started putting out more water vapor.
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ug 2:53AM (9/17/2007)
The best way to deal with him is to ignore him.
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Der Alte 6:50AM (9/17/2007)
Any idea where he got this crazy notion that one could cram 30 litres of hydrogen in a single gram of graphite? Or the equally crazy notion that 30 litres of hydrogen could propel any sort of fuel cell vehicle for 5000 miles? Perhaps somebody rewrote the laws of physics while I wasn't looking. At any rate, he did put one myth to rest. That would be the myth that Americans have cornered the market on ignorance...looks like the lots of people on the other side of the Atlantic gobble up that form of ignorant tripe too.
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SuperQ 2:07AM (9/17/2007)
WTF, Grams and Liters arn't even similar units of measure. Please stop abusing Math and Science for entertainment, it just makes you look stupid.
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Tomas S 3:29AM (9/17/2007)
Well he's certainly got a point about the fuel economy of the Prius.
A Golf Diesel gets 46mpg and if you want even more than that you'd have The VW Polo Bluemotion at 62mpg or get a VW Lupo that delivers 78mpg.
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Nonsense 3:34AM (9/17/2007)
30L of H2 gas is less than 3g of H2 at STP. However, its the energy equivalent of 1/30th of a liter of gasoline. The notion that this could power anything 5000 miles is laughable.
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Nonsense 3:37AM (9/17/2007)
Actually, with a rough calculation a car would have to obtain the equivalent of 600,000mpg for that to work. That's quite a feat.
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dean 10:05PM (9/17/2007)
Jeremy Clarkson is a bit of an idiot. But at least he is entertaining.
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Lascelles Linton 6:55AM (9/17/2007)
Der Alte,
"Any idea where he got this crazy notion"
If I had to guess, and I would say this.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/05/16/purdue-professor-on-the-aluminum-enabling-hydrogen-economy/
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rgseidl 8:23AM (9/17/2007)
The reason so many Americans give the Prius a thumbs-up is that electric hybrids are the only game in town in the media center of California and New York. Buying a Golf diesel, or indeed any diesel at all, is simply not an option. That will change in the next year or two, once T2B5 diesels are introduced.
If you drive more than ~12,000 miles a year, much of it on the freeway and, winters in your neck of the woods aren't arctic, a diesel will emit less aggregate CO2 than a single-mode full electric hybrid. For low mileage and mostly (sub)urban driving below 30mph, the situation is reversed. It all depends on your personal duty cycle.
As for water as a greenhouse gas: greenhouse gas activity is specified as GWP relative to CO2 (=1) and a time scale. The time water vapor produced by hydrogen or hydrocarbon combustion spends in the atmosphere is very short - it is quickly incorporated into the numerically far more significant natural hydrological cycle and therefore ignored by scientists. By contrast, CO2 and other GHG stay in the atmosphere much longer, causing a very small rise in tropospheric temperatures. That in turn boosts the natural hydrological cycle, which then greatly amplifies the rate of climate change. The only reason this positive feedback does not result in a runaway greenhouse effect is that the increased cloud cover increases the planet's albedo. The example of the planet Venus shows that runaway greenhouse effects are possible under different circumstances.
The topic of global warming is greatly complicated by the concept of inter-dependent energy and substance cycles and the associated time scales. It is far too simplistic to look purely at emissions of water vapor from vehicles or indeed, methane from cows (another crowd favorite).
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importjap 8:25AM (9/17/2007)
What I don't understand, is why not contain the said water in a small tank on board that can be removed and emptied into recycling stations for use elsewhere?
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Tim 8:40AM (9/17/2007)
Hydrogen, the lightest element rises to the stratosphere after escaping. There it combines with Oxygen to form water vapor. Water vapor locked in the stratosphere is the worst "green house" offender.
Thankfully Hydrogen is normally locked up in water as a liquid, heavy ice as a solid or forms clouds as a vapor which can't normally reach the stratosphere.
All planets with free hydrogen are void of life and it is the fact that the Hydrogen is sequestered that allows life to exist on this planet.
That is until greedy, idiotic man screws with nature and releases the genie…
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