Hydrogen powered cars

[Dick Cheeseburger]

With all this talk of the gubbermint telling straight petrol and derv engines to eventually FRO, and the push for 'EVs are the future', I thought it apt to mention the underdog - hydrogen power. Funding has been pledged to develop the fuel station infrastructure and the key advantage over EVs is that hydrogen fuel cells can be refuelled rapidly, unlike those in EVs. Wind and solar farms can easily convert water into hydrogen as well waste from crops.

Cost is the main issue - I'm amazed by the claims in this quote about the potential costs of EV vs. hydrogen power.

 

"Electric cars can run for as little as 2p per mile, yet hydrogen vehicles won’t match that. Our car delivered 227 miles on 5.6kg of gas, which set us back £56 (hydrogen costs around £10 per kg). That’s pricier than a petrol or diesel in terms of miles per pound, plus you have to refill more often."

 

Fuel of the future?

 

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/93180/hydrogen-cars-new-government-funding-for-fuel-cell-vehicles

 

 

 

[MorrisItalSLX]

I love the idea of Hydrogen Fuel Cells as an alternative to fossil fuels, they are so much more practical than battery electric vehicles. The costs may be high at the moment but I think it will drop as the technology advances and becomes more common.

I have not heard of anyone doing Hydrogen Fuel Cell conversions, possible future for the Jag?

 

So, Is it the future of the car? I believe so.

[John F]

I really don't like the idea of vehicles that have hydrogen tanks (and hydrogen supply lines).

[DodgeRover]

A hydrogen tank would be like LPG I think mega thick and hard to rupture - At the moment you're happy riding round with 10 gallons of flammable liquid surrounded by 0.8mm pressed steel vessel

 

In the event if a leak it would bugger straight off into the atmosphere, unlike lpg or petrol diesel which collect at ground level.

[dollywobbler]

Government will favour it as it's easier to tax than electricity. It has some appeal, I must admit. Check out Riversimple in Wales, who are boldly trying to pretty much rethink the car. A trial is starting next year.

[DodgeRover]

It's pretty easy to create your own hydrogen by electrolysis - if I had a reliable hydro power scheme going on I could envisage using excess power for this once all batteries were at capacity.

 

I'm sure I can remember a TV show with a university running a Princess on hydrogen at the back end of the 70s

[Tayne]

Hydrogen is just a big scam so the oil industry can keep you buying petrol for as long as possible.

If it ever becomes a valid road fuel it won't help the environment.

 

Over 90% of the world's commercial hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and a hug amount of Co2 is emitted doing this.

This is because the electrolysis method uses far more energy than you get back.

 

Given that hydrogen needs a whole lot of heavy duty short life equipment to pressurise, store and transport, its not going to be cheap to get it to the nearest hydrogen station.

And don't think you can just repurpose a petrol station as all the apparatus will need to be above ground.

The cost of all this gear is going to be borne by its customers, this won't be any cheaper than petrol.

 

Even assuming the energy used to make it (and the Co2 produced in the process), pressurise it, store, transfer it, ship it and transfer it again is worth it there's still the problem of rapid refuelling.

There are issues with pressure and temperature differentials which mean its nothing like a petrol station.

Here's Graham Cooley from ITM Power to talk you through the process, imagine being the fourth car in the morning...

 

 

GRAHAM COOLEY Q&A

Q: Can anyone use the station? 

A: Yes once they’ve been trained. Training is provided to everyone leasing vehicles. At the end of training users are given a fob to access the refueller and gate.

Q: How many cars can the station fill in a day? 

A: 16 vehicles can receive a full refuel per day (approx. 5kg each).

Q: How do you refuel? 

A: Very much the same as we do now. Drive up to the station, pop the nozzle into the vehicle, press the screen to fill, the station will run safety checks and then refuelling will commence.

Q: How long does it take to refuel a vehicle? 

A: From empty the process will take between three-five minutes.

Q: Can it do back-to-back refuels? 

A: Yes. It can do three back to back refuels.

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-3581468/First-London-based-super-green-hydrogen-station-opens-Teddington.html#ixzz4o9cZAkHZ 
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Its not cleaner than petrol, it won't be cheaper and won't be as quick to refuel.

If you're still in doubt then you could always ask long term hydrogen investor Jack Nicholson about his returns.

 

 

As a contrast to the 14 UK hydrogen stations (224 cars a day) there over 10,000 petrol stations.

If you have an electric car there are over 5000 dedicated charges not to mention the billion or so three-pin plugs.

[Snipes]

Can you recharge a leccy car with a 13amp plug top? All the charging points I've seen have been blue commando sockets - that maybe because they're outdoors though.

 

I agree about your points on hydrogen. Seems like a step on the wrong direction.

[pbottomley]

Just out of helping the conversation along, did you know there is a huge push in the gas industry to convert to Hydrogen in the gas mains and away from "the stuff thats in the pipe" (aka Natural gas which is anything but)? This is the one way to meet environmental targets. There is some serious investment going on over the next few years to plan the conversion of major cities. 

 

It would not take a rocket scientist to then lay a service off a gas main to a garage and "recompress / store" it like a LPG filler point at a fuel station as the way forward. Car could either be fitted with an INC engine which uses hydrogen or a fuel cell to power electric motors.
 

[SiC]

Can you recharge a leccy car with a 13amp plug top? All the charging points I've seen have been blue commando sockets - that maybe because they're outdoors though.

 

I agree about your points on hydrogen. Seems like a step on the wrong direction.

Yes you almost always can. However a 13a socket is limited to around 2-3kWh, so it's going to take a very long time to charge a flat battery. But then if the vehicle is used for short trips often, or long trips infrequently then it can be sufficient. Better off getting a sparky in though and fitting a decent power port onto the side of the house though.

[Asimo]

The present cost of industrially produced hydrogen is not really relevant to it's likely long term use as a portable chemical fuel.

 

A huge amount of work is being done on direct solar production of hydrogen. One line of research is GM algae or similar simple plants that exhale hydrogen as part of their photosynthesis. Another is some sort of catalytic decomposition of water involving clever nano-level chemistry. Again powered by sunlight. Although these processes are some way off, they are regarded as ultimately do-able, not requiring new magic, just lots of work and investment. And then lots of cheap empty space with bright sunlight.

 

Hydrogen will be perfect for the old car hobby in the future. All spark ignition engines can be readily made to run on hydrogen. One of Hydrogen's advantages as a fuel is how insensitive a fuel/air mix is to the ratio of fuel to air compared to petrol. Makes adaptation of old engines less challenging than LPG conversion.

[mercrocker]

[Asimo]

You ain't anymore dead in a hydrogen fire accident than in an oil fire accident.

 

A hydrogen leak outside is much safer than a petrol leak: all the fuel goes upwards out of the way at high speed. Even if it does burn, the burn produces no flame so radiant heat hazard is much reduced. The flames in the Hindenburg fire are made visible by the burning gas bags rather than the burning gas.

 

Probably much more of a practical hazard than the flammability of the hydrogen fuel is the stored energy in the pressurised gas. Exploding pressure vessels in a car can be lethal even without any ignition of the contents.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JytQR6LWjkI

[Junkman]

I don't really give a shit whether the flames that kill me are invisible or not.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

You ain't anymore dead in a hydrogen fire accident than in an oil fire accident.

 

A hydrogen leak outside is much safer than a petrol leak: all the fuel goes upwards out of the way at high speed. Even if it does burn, the burn produces no flame so radiant heat hazard is much reduced. The flames in the Hindenburg fire are made visible by the burning gas bags rather than the burning gas.

 

Probably much more of a practical hazard than the flammability of the hydrogen fuel is the stored energy in the pressurised gas. Exploding pressure vessels in a car can be lethal even without any ignition of the contents.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JytQR6LWjkI

That's got to hurt. I like the way the car on the right just casually drives off.

[DodgeRover]

I think they were filling something that wasn't intended as a pressure vessel or the tank was damaged.

CNG tanks are mega thick

[Tayne]

Just out of helping the conversation along, did you know there is a huge push in the gas industry to convert to Hydrogen in the gas mains and away from "the stuff thats in the pipe" (aka Natural gas which is anything but)? This is the one way to meet environmental targets. There is some serious investment going on over the next few years to plan the conversion of major cities. 

 

 

 

 

 

Well my first thought was embrittlement.

Surely thats the best way to destroy all the gas mains?

 

It turns out they're being converted to polyethylene pipework so "will be fine".

This chap seems to think its all good.

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/converting-the-gas-network-to-hydrogen/

However he also thinks that steam reformation for hydrogen is the best way to decarbonise heating (leaving carbon capture aside for the moment)....

 

It turns out that its slightly more complicated. 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319913006800

There's about 19,000km of high pressure, high strength steel pipelines which would be destroyed by hydrogen and whilst all the polyethylene stuff is H safe the connectors, PRVs, and meters aren't.

Its starting to sound like another petrochemical scam.

 

 

 

 

 

It would not take a rocket scientist to then lay a service off a gas main to a garage and "recompress / store" it like a LPG filler point at a fuel station as the way forward. Car could either be fitted with an INC engine which uses hydrogen or a fuel cell to power electric motors.

 

 

No, it wouldn't be rocket science.

But given the regulatory issues with domestic gas appliances I'd suspect there would be also sorts of regulations to stop you tapping off your main and then compressing hydrogen to 700bar. 

[DodgeRover]

Oddly there currently isn't with CNG just the mains connections from the fuel maker need to be made by someone registered with Gas safe.

 

That's assuming you can find one of the old British Gas CNG fleet cars and you get the "fuel maker" with it to refuel overnight at home

[Tayne]

So you can legally use domestic gas (taxed as such) as road fuel?

[DodgeRover]

Yes - but you need to keep records of the amount you use as road fuel and pay the appropriate amount of duty to C&E like you used to before they bought in the exemption on veg oil

[Tayne]

And what pressure does it run at?

[Junkman]

Guys, forget fuel cells.

 

In the late Eighties, I was co-campaigning a Top Fuel Funny Car that ultimately got us the European Record.

Yes, we were the first ones to do the quarter mile in less than six seconds outside the Ununited States.

Whoever was ever around a nitro burner knows exactly what I'm talking about.

 

At the same time, I was involved in engine development at AVL in Linz. For the ones not in the know,

this is the company that developed the first BMW V12.

It runs better than the rushed effort of Mercedes, which was developed by themselves just to keep up with BMW,

but I digress.

 

Anyway, after that was done, AVL went on to new ventures, one of which was feeding hydrogen into a BMW V12

as a propellant.

 

Let me tell you guys, compared with that, our Top Fueler was lukewarm coffee.

We then went on to feed hydrogen into our supercharged Keith Black Hemi and forgot about nitro PDQ.

 

Needless to say, that the NHRA (No Hot Rods Allowed) immediately nixed our effort and we had to revert

to lame nitro at 26 quid a gallon (you need 19 of those for a run, I leave the arithmetics to you).

And we are talking 1980s money here.

 

It took until now that Don Garlits proclaimed Top Fuel is no longer sustainable and built an alternative

rail dragster, which is powered by - you guessed it - electrickery.

He clipped the 200 mph mark recently and is now aiming for the 300 mark, as you would.

 

The only country that is still producing Nitromethane is China. The Peking Olympics required a production

stop due to pollution. The stuff has become scarce ever since and the few remaining Top Fuel teams are

fighting over it.

 

My dream is to beat Garlits by powering a Fueller with hydrogen and consequently make everyone

in the game look silly.

It's a thing I already did in the 80s. I didn't become famous for it, mind.

[HMC]

"Like" simply just doesn't cover that^

[dollywobbler]

I remember a hydrogen powered BMW on Tomorrow's World.

 

Back to the 13amp question, a 30kwh Nissan Leaf takes about ten hours to charge from pretty empty, so fine for overnight. Most EV owners get a 32amp charger fitted at home which will fully charge in under 4 hours. Motorway rapid chargers run at over 100amps.

[TagoraSX]

[Clanger]

And what pressure does it run at?

My Ford Crown Victoria stores the fuel at 3600 psi - it is then reduced to about 120 psi at the fuel rail

[castros_bro]

Just out of helping the conversation along, did you know there is a huge push in the gas industry to convert to Hydrogen in the gas mains and away from "the stuff thats in the pipe" (aka Natural gas which is anything but)? This is the one way to meet environmental targets. There is some serious investment going on over the next few years to plan the conversion of major cities. 

 

It would not take a rocket scientist to then lay a service off a gas main to a garage and "recompress / store" it like a LPG filler point at a fuel station as the way forward. Car could either be fitted with an INC engine which uses hydrogen or a fuel cell to power electric motors.

 

 

 

Shirley that's the sort of fing rocket scientists do do?

 

 

[inconsistant]

 

 

 

Shirley a bundle of twigs would be much safer?

 

 

 

 

 

ps: great thread btw, sorry not to be able to contribute better than this.

[tooSavvy]

Ha! Rocket Science??

 

The silver 'dope' on the skin of the H was [effectively] solid Rocket Fuel (fair on them - they didn't know that).

 

TS