we need something to do anyway…
look how fast we went to worldwide internet and all it entails
Don’t they make H2 from CH4 (methane)? So, you’re using a fossil fuel to make the hydrogen, in a manner LESS efficient that just burning the darn stuff in the first place!
H2 is a store of energy, NOT a source of energy. What makes it a better storage unit than batteries or capacitors?
throw it all against the wall and see what sticks…
Don’t rely on the sun, son. Its only going to last another 7 or 8 million years or so.
So when everything is electric where is the power going to come from…
Recently I made a comment about a number of the wind turbines here chucking their gearboxes with less than 2 years of operation. Since that comment another half a dozen have gone belly-up. The fix on one turbine alone is expensive, time consuming, and burns a lot of fossil fuel.
As of a week ago all 140 turbines are shut down now along with the sub-station (powered by fossil fuel) that made them operate. Even the safety lamps on top are dark now and one would hope that some low flying pilot who is not aware of them won’t find out the hard way… 
Don't they make H2 from CH4 (methane)? So, you're using a fossil fuel to make the hydrogen, in a manner LESS efficient that just burning the darn stuff in the first place!
Burning methane in a heat engine yields about 35% of the fuel’s energy converted into mechanical energy, the rest remains as waste heat. It makes sense if you have a use for that waste heat. That’s the whole idea behind cogeneration. Use an engine mainly as a furnace to heat a building and have the mechanical energy available to drive an alternator as a bonus.
Electrochemical reactions yield a much higher percentage of energy conversion than heat engines with much less waste heat, so using the hydrogen from methane to power a fuel cell actually releases more useful energy than burning methane in an engine even though the hydrogen itself has less energy than the methane it was produced from.
@texases.
There are a plethora of possibilities of fuels that can be used in fuel cells,even gasoline.
Here are just a few that have been used…http://www.fuelcells.org/base.cgim?template=types_of_fuel_cells
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/426252/gasoline-fuel-cell-would-boost-electric-car-range/
The big advantage…is, you drive your car with an electric motor without need ( or very little) of a transmission as we know it. The number of moving parts is infinitesimal compared to a gas engine. The savings would be enormous and you would not be tied to a charge cord. Maybe someday you could fill up at a regular gas station.
The only fuel I’ve read about for automotive use is hydrogen. That’s what Toyota and Honda are pushing, right? There are many different types of fuel cells, most of which exist only in the lab. 20 years from now, who knows?
You can fuel the vehicle with a hydrocarbon, reform it to release hydrogen (and some carbon dioxide, if a lot less than an ic engine produces). It may well make more sense as hydrogen is hard to store and handle.
You could even use metallic sodium and water to generate hydrogen as you needed it. The byproduct would be sodium hydroxide. Of course, turning sodium salts back into sodium would require that all the energy released would have to be returned.
The basic law of chemical reactions, if a reaction is exothermic, reversing it is equally endothermic. Or in other words, if going from a to b is downhill, then going from b to a is equally uphill.
@ok4450 I think the used Tesla market is insane. People buy it, drive it for awhile, then expect to sell it for maybe 5 or 10k less than they bought it for. If you’re already shopping at the $100,000 used car price point, you might as well kick in the comparative chump-change extra dough and get a brand new one.
I think there are two types of Tesla drivers, just as there are two types of any current-hot-car drivers. Those who buy it and drive it until the wheels fall off because they love it, and those who buy it because their 6 month old Maserati now bores them. And in 6 months the Tesla will be boring and they’ll move on to something else.
An acquaintance of mine is one of the former type - he got his Tesla a couple of years ago, loves it, and barring a wreck will drive it into the ground, just like he did his last car.
I’m strongly of the mindset that hydrogen fuel cell cars are the future. They are already in use in California, with somewhere around ~50 hydrogen fueling stations already in operation. Hydrogen fuel cell cars already blow away battery electric cars in terms of range.
The hydrogen can come from any number of a variety of cheap sources. The main driver in the cost of extracting the hydrogen for use is that a decent amount of energy is required. Some comments here raise the concern of “pollution” because gas or coal may be used, but in actuality the machines required to process the hydrogen just need a lot of electrical energy, they don’t care where it comes from. Nuclear power, hydroelectric power, wind power, solar power, anything can be used to process the hydrogen.
" but in actuality the machines required to process the hydrogen just need a lot of electrical energy, they don’t care where it comes from. Nuclear power, hydroelectric power, wind power, solar power, anything can be used to process the hydrogen."
Exactly. Why build a whole new infrastructure when you could just take that electricity and put it in an EV?
Not terribly long ago, hydrogen cars were pretty much a scam, because the main source of hydrogen came from cracking methane (using more energy than you got out of it). And the oil companies were all in favor of hydrogen, because a common source of methane is used up oil wells.
More recent developments, though, show hydrogen as having some promise both in the energy required to extract it and in sourcing the raw materials. It could work, provided we can figure out how to safely store it in a vehicle that is driven by the kind of people who wait to replace the brakes until the metal pad backer has chewed all the way through the rotor.
all this oil isn t gonna last forever…
"Why build a whole new infrastructure …"
Storage. Storing electricity in quantities necessary to power a car is still a long way away. Fuel cells don’t “store” electricity in the traditional sense. It is released through a chemical relation and very efficiently compared by batteries by size and weight which are not on any energy companies radars. Besides, you make the point that I have been making all along. Energy companies do not like the idea of everyone with a battery powered car they could recharge with solar cells. They want to sell you “something” at a pump. That is already in place…service station. Transitioning them over to Hydrogen or what ever is easier then finding a new way to make a profit if everyone had a functional car battery. Talk about bailouts ! If batteries could store enough electricity to go 300 miles, Exxon would go belly up.
I think that Exxon-Mobil will find a way to repurpose themselves and continue making money. Look at IBM. They were in the mainframe business, then the PC business, then the server business, and now is more of a software company, selling data management, cloud systems, and systems integration.
There are a number of long term problems with fuel cell vehicles. They’re not the obvious choice if reducing CO2 emissions is the goal. Here are several analyses:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/06/04/hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles-about-not-clean/
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/20/fuel-cell-vehicle-ghg-emissions/
http://hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/10001_well_to_wheels_gge_petroleum_use.pdf
The last one (from the DOE) shows little benefit of FCVs over regular hybrids if natural gas is the source of the hydrogen, and similar to EVs using average US electricity. If solar is used, there’s no contest, EVs are lower in CO2 emissions. Only with new, as yet unproven H2 generating sources are FCVs in the picture at all.
As for IBM and remember Burroughs? We used to call it being in the business machine business or business solutions which could cover a lot of territory like typewriters, computers, software, cash registers, etc.
I’m content to let the big boys battle it out while I continue to use the mainstream ICE with petro. I still think Tesla designs are getting stale though and will need to be spruced up very soon. As far as the used market, who wants a $70,000 car without a warranty?
Exactly. Why build a whole new infrastructure when you could just take that electricity and put it in an EV?
@texases Because batteries as an energy storage device have not yet become practical, and will almost certainly never become practical. In order to give the range of gasoline / hydrogen fuel cell cars can achieve, the batteries would be absurdly heavy and impractical.
FYI large scale batteries have been around for a very long time, it isn’t as if they are some new developing technology just for cars. There likely won’t be any major breakthrough in battery physics that suddenly allows for smaller batteries with high energy density to be produced. I do some work with UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) systems, and it can take hundreds of pounds of batteries just to make sure that only minimal systems will be powered for an hour after a power outage.