Electric and Alternative Vehicle Fuels

Hydrogen is expensive and difficult to manufacture, transport and store, I expect actual prices to be above the optimistic suggestions being bandied around now.
If it is going to be produced using renewable energy, then that partly covers for some of the inefficiencies of the processing required, but right now, our grid is mostly fossil fuel powered, so we’d be burning coal to produce Hydrogen if done by electrolysis, hardly a good environmental outcome, or otherwise extracting it from Methane, as is mostly done now… likely to lead to more CSG wells, also a bad environmental outcome.

Personally I don’t think it is likely to progress very far, given how efficient Lithium batteries are.

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Is that an issue? If you’re sleeping/at work/doing the shopping, who cares? I’m struggling to see a real need for rapid charging. To me, it looks like a marketing gimmick - one that will probably fade away within a decade.

That brings up another factor - autonomous vehicles. If we can call for a vehicle that’s appropriate for the job at hand, have it turn up, then go to its next assignment when we’ve finished with it, do we need to own a vehicle at all?

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Indeed, it is probably more accurately referred to as a very inefficient energy storage system, rather than a fuel.

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Practically not at all!
It’s all in the minds of the marketing gurus and manufacturers who will see their business model broken and massive declines in sales through so many fewer vehicles needed. All old technology will be relegated to static museum displays, and memories like the bullockies of old. Imagine a driverless Bathurst with silent projectiles hurtling down con-rod?

In total agreement the quoted costs appear optimistic. They have not been substantiated or qualified by the source?

There is a need to consider all the costs including production. Something will need to replace the lost tax income from the lost sales of hydrocarbon fuels. A super big tax on hydrogen is one option.

Another pricing risk is one or two big conglomerates will tie up key patents for any core technology essential to a hydrogen fuel future. Between governments and private companies it is reasonable to predict the price per km travelled for hydrogen fuelled transport will always equal or exceed the carbon alternatives. After all we already pay more for E10 fuel per km, while lpg has more than doubled in price to be uncompetitive.

Will the world agree to hydrogen technology patent being free for all to use?

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History has many good ideas that for whatever reason were relegated to obscurity.

Remember the Sarich Orbital Engine? It was petrol but initially touted to be cheap to manufacture, light, and fuel efficient. In the end it did not go well :frowning:

How about the Pritchard steam car? I met Ted Pritchard around 2004 and his tale about how he was led along to do tweaks on his own capital, and finally done over by lowball licensing offers, put him in bankruptcy. His description of his car engine reminded me of an automotive thermoblock - seconds to startup and off you went.

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To quote the RAC WA article linked above:

Unlike petrol, hydrogen does not actually fuel the vehicle, but acts as a storage medium for electrical energy like a battery.

I was surprised to read:

Although hydrogen cars need batteries to store electricity, they get away with lighter and cheaper battery packs than required by EVs.

So hydrogen vehicles are more like hybrids.

That’s probably where the main interest lies for Choice.

There will still be manufacturers, though their market might shrink (if poorer communities find that they can now afford transportation, it might actually expand).

There will still be dealers, though they will sell very few vehicles. Most of their business will be in providing a service - transport. Imagine all those autonomous vehicles, returning to the dealership for maintenance, recharging, garaging or whatever, to await their next assignment.

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Some devil’s advocacy here.

There has been considerable reference to efficiency in the interesting to and fro above, but little about basic resource constraints.

In our water parched continent water is generally a scarce commodity. Using a single example to make a wider point, no matter how efficient or inefficient power generation may be, a plant that uses less water could be the only viable option in the absence of more significant overriding constraints.

Further, the assumption is coal, petroleum, and gas are finite. Perhaps technology will one day deliver those commodities from man made processes, but not today. OTOH if something is plentiful and renewable in a balance that sustains or at least minimally affects life, does it matter how efficient it is?

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It was in the context of long distance travel, where the distance and required duration exceeds the capacity of the battery or the expected duration of the driver/passengers.

I personally would not be all that impressed having to wait hours/overnight each 400km of a journey waiting for the car batter to recharge. This is the issue and has been a significant limitation of battery systems.

Using rapid charge technologies has the potential to reduce the functional life of a battery/its return charge capacity.

Downside of using rapid charges, if they don’t affect battery warranties, is something which one needs to consider. Namely, reducing charge times at the expense of the battery.

Time waiting to continue a journey will be far more critical than battery impacts as one also needs to consider the time to wait for a standard charge (e.g. accommodation and additonal meals while [overnight] charge occurs). At the end if the day, it may be more cost effective to rapid charge and potentially impact on the batteries than doing a slower standard charge.

The other downside to lithium is many locations where it exists and available for mining, the environmental impact will be significant. For example, Bolivia’s salt lakes which once mined, may take 1000s, if ever, to return to premined or stable conditions. While lithium is a useful metal for battery systems, there are externalities which also need to be considered before jumping head first into exploiting the earth’s resource for a potentially short term solution.

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Like that at Millmeran that uses 90% less water than a conventional plant. The same technologies could be added to new/retrofited to existing power generating plants which use steam turbines, to reduce water use. Anything is possible, but comes at a price.

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Indeed. Photosynthesis isn’t very efficient. That doesn’t seem to have stopped plants. :grinning:

The questions then become:

  • which is most efficient?
  • Which are efficient enough?

In this context, battery technology seems most efficient. Is hydrogen efficient enough?

As the article notes, if you’ve travelled 500 km, it’s probably time to take a rest. If you really feel a need to drive for 15 hours non-stop, then I guess gas-guzzlers will be available for a while yet. I strongly doubt hydrogen will be an option in the lifetime of anyone alive today - if ever.

You’ll need to link to your sources for those assertions. Here’s a balanced overview:

So you’re saying that a coal-fired power plant uses less water than a solar array of equivalent output?

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And a more humorous take:

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Yes, but you took an example I used to make a wider point and made it a specific. I believe my point still stands. Perhaps put another way one ‘size’ will not fit all because of variations of what constitute scarce resources, that could become overriding considerations.

That ignores long distance where there are relief drivers and ‘time is of the essence’. Assuming there is a shift to ‘something else’ it will be one-way, and at some point if the issue of range and refuelling/recharging is not solved ‘transport’ could become collateral damage one way or another.

It is getting harder and harder to know which fact is most factual. From the linked article ‘The primary sources of lithium are from the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia’, and that could be referring to specific mining sites, but we are way up there as a country.

This SMH article could be subscription walled to some, but the gist is ‘Western Australia is tipped to produce more than half of the world’s lithium supply by the end of this year, as new mines come online and the world’s appetite for the materials used to make batteries for electric vehicles grows.’

And a more humorous take: If the search for life referenced in the Daily Kos found none around the mines except for some flamingos, WA might get more desolate than it is.

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Having been in Chile recently and seen the impacts first hand, there is no need to post a link. The impacts in Bolivia are just, if not more significant. One can also google if they chose to as there are numerous papers in Google Scholar which provide infromation on the mining and processing risks of lithium, as well as other metals used in battery production.

I prefer to either see things myself or review independent journal articles rather that that posted by the popular and often biased, other forms of information dissemination.

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This is an interesting way of putting it. Fuel cells take the same inputs as an engine that burns fuel and all produce some useful energy, some waste heat and some byproducts. Hydrogen ( whether used in fuel cell or Internal Combustion Engine), battery and hydrocarbon fuels all store chemical energy, none of these technologies actually store electricity directly as (for example) a capacitor does.

So this statement "Unlike petrol, hydrogen does not actually fuel the vehicle, but acts as a storage medium for electrical energy like a battery. " is wrong on two counts. Firstly hydrogen does fuel the vehicle and secondly the battery does not store electrical energy. Journalists should not write about matters that they do not understand.

For simplicity compare the hydrogen fuel cell engine to the hydrogen burning ICE. Both take in hydrogen as fuel and add oxygen from the air. Both produce mechanical energy to move the car, waste heat and water. In both cases electrons are transferred from hydrogen to oxygen.

This stripping hydrogen of electrons (acting as a reducing agent) also happens with burning hydrocarbon fuels with oxygen (acting as an oxidising agent). So burning petrol is the same process as the other two from a oxidation-reduction point of view.

For the two hydrogen engines the difference is the process in between the same inputs going in and the outputs coming out.

H2 Fuel cell
H2 + O2 —> [(cell) ----> electricity ----> (electric motor)] ----> turns crank shaft + H2O + heat

H2 ICE
H2 + O2 —> [(ICE)] ----> turns crank shaft + H2O + heat

Note the chemistry is grossly simplified.

You can write the same sort of schematics for burning hydrocarbons as you can for burning hydrogen in an ICE. The format and processes are very similar but if you burn a hydrocarbon (generically CxHy) you must get some CO2 as an output too. If you don’t want CO2 to be released you must not burn hydrocarbons.

Assuming you are going to use hydrogen as a fuel choosing between fuel cell and ICE tech (there are both types of vehicles in production) you may want to consider things like efficiency, safety, cost etc but misrepresenting fuel cell tech, as the journalist has done, only confuses.

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The thought cycle?
Do you fix something with what you now know can work?
Or do you look for a different way?
(Apologies! there is no pun in suggesting this is ‘lateral thinking’)

Who needs to worry about recharging or refilling on long trips?
No one if you change the way we travel longer distance.

There are many ideas to embed power in all main highways to directly energise a vehicle that are technically possible, but economically unlikely.

Closing all long distance roads and forcing all but local travel to mass transport by electrically powered rail is 100% within all our exisiting technology, economically possible and political suicide. Smaller vehicles, less range, less battery materials make this more likely if we are resource limited.

Reality is any solution being acceptable providing we are the ones who do not need to change. That is until we have no choice. Miracles might also happen!

It is good that hydrogen might be part of a solution, but so might new battery technologies based on more common materials such as carbon nanotubes, or iron oxide or???

P.s. on hydrogen economics - no tax, no capital costs and free power
My rough take is it’s 1kg of hydrogen in a fuel cell gives less than 20kWh of electrical energy released and needs at least 55kWh of pure electrical energy to make.

There is some reasonable detail on Wikipedia re the efficiency of hydrogen production, options and fuel cell efficiency. The science reinforces that we have some way to go in understanding the resource demands that might be made by a hydrogen economy. Eg Platinum, nickel in producing hydrogen. Assuming we don’t hide behind the current convenience of making hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels. What byproducts - CO2 is the big one. Might as well burn coal and return to steam powered cars.

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Batteries are certainly chemical energy storage, but the process is invisible to the end user, the capacity is measured in kilowatt hours, a common measure of electrical energy, and the output potential and current is measured in volts and amperes, a system which is understood by most who paid attention in high school. Simple and easy to understand.
Start talking about ORP and you’ll have a confused audience.

Commonly available capacitors are not used for storing electricity either, as their capacity is miniscule, although one day supercapacitors may become useful for storing electricity on a significant scale. There is already a Lead-acid battery on the market that incorporates a supercapacitor to overcome some of the deficiencies of the Lead-acid chemistry. I’m not sure it will be useful for EVs though, due to its weight.

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If the exact mechanism behind these energy systems is not important then why did the journalist mention it? If oxidation-reduction is of no significance to the core issues to the common person why did he go there at all? I didn’t bring up either but commented on the confusion generated by the author in doing so and getting it wrong.

I also thought it would help to point out that while there are most important differences between hydrogen tech and burning hydrocarbons some that the author infers do not exist. We ought focus on the ones that do.

Hydrogen is a fuel and whichever way you turn it into usable energy there is no reason to liken it to a battery when the comparison misunderstands the operation of both. A fuel cell isn’t a battery, better to look at batteries and cells and ICE as they are without any pointless simile.

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I note that you can’t substantiate your assertions.

So you concede that your terminology was somewhat less than exact.

Yet you repeatedly can’t substantiate what you assert.

Inasmuch as, in both cases, the primary power source doesn’t directly drive the wheels, it’s accurate enough. I suspect that, in the case of hydrogen vehicles, the fuel cell can’t supply enough power for acceptable acceleration.

Does getting bogged-down in semantics advance discussion?

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Yes, there are bigger problems to solve.
I have read that the hydrogen fuel cells produce ‘heated’ water. How wonderful. Sitting in a driverless car sipping your own home made tea as the miles whisk by.

A better battery with cheap readily obtained materials is possibly all the step change needed. I’d still settle for a club car (multi use) and battery assisted bike.
For those long trips - just hook up the hydrogen fuel cell trailer? Or order a Holiday-Uber. Wonder if they have trade marked that option?

https://batteryuniversity.com/index.php/learn/article/fuel_cell_technology

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