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From: chuckcar on 13 Apr 2010 23:21
Tegger <invalid(a)invalid.inv> wrote in
news:Xns9D59D56029D3Ctegger(a)208.90.168.18:

> "hls" <hls(a)nospam.nix> wrote in
> news:Rc2dnQAzsbjSlljWnZ2dnUVZ_hmdnZ2d(a)giganews.com:
>
>>
>> "PolicySpy" <pintell(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:2d39affb-9162-4b34-834a-f1ff2fbc619e(a)u31g2000yqb.googlegroups.com
>> ...
>>> There is a fuel-cell car currently being leased to consumers in
>>> southern California. It's the Honda Clarity but also MB was said to
>>> have a fuel-cell car for the U.S. market in 2010.
>>
>> The time is nowhere near ripe for this.
>>
>>
>
>
> Sure it is.
>
> Just corral all those illegal Mexicans in Arizona, then give them all
> teeny tiny knives. Set them to work cutting the H's off the O's on
> water molecules, and stuffing the H's into gas containers. If they put
> the lids back really quickly, the H's will stay inside. Now we easily
> have enough fuel for our Honda Clarity.
>
> Plus, if we let the Mexicans keep all the leftover O's for themselves,
> they can become entrepreneurs, setting up oxygen bars for San
> Francisco metrosexuals.
>
ROFL, Thanks.


--
(setq (chuck nil) car(chuck) )
From: Don Stauffer on 14 Apr 2010 10:12
hls wrote:
>
> "PolicySpy" <pintell(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:2d39affb-9162-4b34-834a-f1ff2fbc619e(a)u31g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
>> There is a fuel-cell car currently being leased to consumers in
>> southern California. It's the Honda Clarity but also MB was said to
>> have a fuel-cell car for the U.S. market in 2010.
>
> The time is nowhere near ripe for this.


The thing that gets me is that it is possible to run hydrogen in a
standard IC engine. The conversion is only a bit more complicated than
converting for natural gas or propane. One gets the low pollution
benefits (as long as care is taken to avoid nitrous oxides, usually with
heavy EGR).

One doesn't need to wait for fuel cells.

Big problem, of course, is that free hydrogen is very scarce on Earth.
By free I don't mean price, I mean almost all hydrogen is chemically
combined with other substances, and it takes a lot of energy to reduce it.
From: Scott Dorsey on 14 Apr 2010 10:56
PolicySpy <pintell(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>Now the fuel-cell car fuels with hydrogen, takes oxygen out of the
>air, produces electricity, runs an electric motor, and sends water out
>the tailpipe. And the advantage of the fuel-cell vehicle over the plug-
>in electric-vehicle is that the fuel-cell car has easier fueling,
>lighter vehicle weight, a lower cost of battery replacement, and a
>longer travel range.

Right. The issues are all to do with storage and transport of hydrogen,
not with the fuel cell itself. What we really need is a fuel cell that
can operate over the long term with a liquid fuel that can be readily
transported. Folks are working on that. I don't expect it soon, but it
might happen.

>Of course physicists are working on balls of carbon that store
>hydrogen without it being compressed so the day might come when very
>strong hydrogen tanks are not needed.
>
>Now I included this post to a civil engineering newsgroup because
>civil engineers sometimes work in aircraft structure positions and
>certainly can work with bridge structures.

Well, the good thing about hydrogen is that if it leaks and ignites,
you get a huge plume going straight up and most of the actual combustion
takes place in the air some distance up. So in that regard a fuel explosion
is actually safer than a comparable gasoline explosion from the point of
view of the people in and around the car, because the hydrogen is lighter
than air even when cold.

Now... the bad news is that if that happens under a highway overpass, the
damage may turn out to be a good bit worse than with a gasoline explosion.
That's going to be an interesting thing to try and model.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
From: Scott Dorsey on 14 Apr 2010 11:07
Don Stauffer <stauffer(a)usfamily.net> wrote:
>hls wrote:
>> "PolicySpy" <pintell(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
>>> There is a fuel-cell car currently being leased to consumers in
>>> southern California. It's the Honda Clarity but also MB was said to
>>> have a fuel-cell car for the U.S. market in 2010.
>>
>> The time is nowhere near ripe for this.
>
>The thing that gets me is that it is possible to run hydrogen in a
>standard IC engine. The conversion is only a bit more complicated than
>converting for natural gas or propane. One gets the low pollution
>benefits (as long as care is taken to avoid nitrous oxides, usually with
>heavy EGR).

You can do this, and you can do this on your existing '72 Ford with only
minimal modifications and a fancy new carb. The problem is that you run
into the same inefficiency issues that you always run into with internal
combustion engines on cars: you need a huge engine for high peak power,
even though most of the time you're running it the throttle isn't anywhere
near all the way open. The fuel-cell/electric motor combination is less
efficient at full throttle but way more efficient at cruise.

>One doesn't need to wait for fuel cells.

That either... hydrogen fuel cells were swanky new high technology when
NASA used them on Gemini in the early 1960s, but these days they are
pretty much into proven technology. The problem is all with creation and
storage of hydrogen in the first place.

>Big problem, of course, is that free hydrogen is very scarce on Earth.
>By free I don't mean price, I mean almost all hydrogen is chemically
>combined with other substances, and it takes a lot of energy to reduce it.

Well, it takes almost exactly the same amount of energy that you get back
when you burn it. So you can think of electrolysis of hydrogen, hydrogen
storage and transport, and the fuel cell as being a sort of way to store
and transport electricity from place to place in a convenient and portable
form. It's not a power source, it's a power storage and transport medium,
and it could turn out to be a pretty good one.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
From: hls on 14 Apr 2010 17:40

"Don Stauffer" <stauffer(a)usfamily.net> wrote in message
news:4bc5cd30$0$87069$815e3792(a)news.qwest.net...
> hls wrote:
>>
>> "PolicySpy" <pintell(a)hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:2d39affb-9162-4b34-834a-f1ff2fbc619e(a)u31g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
>>> There is a fuel-cell car currently being leased to consumers in
>>> southern California. It's the Honda Clarity but also MB was said to
>>> have a fuel-cell car for the U.S. market in 2010.
>>
>> The time is nowhere near ripe for this.
>
>
> The thing that gets me is that it is possible to run hydrogen in a
> standard IC engine. The conversion is only a bit more complicated than
> converting for natural gas or propane. One gets the low pollution
> benefits (as long as care is taken to avoid nitrous oxides, usually with
> heavy EGR).
>
> One doesn't need to wait for fuel cells.
>
> Big problem, of course, is that free hydrogen is very scarce on Earth. By
> free I don't mean price, I mean almost all hydrogen is chemically combined
> with other substances, and it takes a lot of energy to reduce it.

They were running a hydrogen fueled passenger bus in an airport in
Germany (and may still be). It was an experimental project but seemed
to work fine.

We are not ready for hydrogen for the exact reasons posted in this
thread...storage and availability.

Statoil has committed to a project to have the first Hydrogen Highway
in the world between Stavanger and Oslo. They could, and probably
will, do it.

Statoil has also commissioned a GTL plant, floated into site, which will
convert natural gas to liquid hydrocarbons. There is another such
plant (Pearl) in Qatar built upon Shell technology. We could do the
same here. If you count the natural gas reserves, converted into liquid
fuel, we would have about twice as much liquid hydrocarbons as the
middle east, according to T. Boone.

These hydrocarbons range from naphthas through kerosene and to
base oils. And through the wonders of refining, you could make a lot
of fuel from those heavy ends.

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