GM, Honda to work together on hydrogen fuel cells for 2020-ish

ok, so how long before the first of these things blows up? and how many innocent bystanders will it take with it?

and where is the energy for the hydrogen production going to come from?

Every methane molecule has four hydrogen atoms.

"Fuel cells" may include methane reactors, too.

No alternate fueling scheme yet uses less energy overall than internal combustion engines, but some may be better than others, and hydrogen and fuel cells are still in the running. Tank full of gasoline is not really a safe thing to be hauling around all day either, but we find it acceptable.

In a thousand years or two, when we've definitely run out of cheap gasoline, some of these alternatives may be important. In the meantime they provide people with good, clean hobbies.

J.

not sure what you're trying to say there. if you mean that it's another form of "hydrogen" fuel, that's like saying water is a fuel because it contains hydrogen /and/ oxygen. if you mean that methane is an energetic fuel that is safer, then you're absolutely correct.

hydrogen gas, the H2 molecule, is not just dangerous to transport, it's difficult to compress and energy intensive to produce.

if these fuel cells were gasoline reactors [or even ethanol reactors], them we'd be onto something actually useful. and safe. but they're not.

it's a good deal safer than hydrogen. have you ever seen hydrogen go up outside of a little "pop" in a test tube? it'll ruin your day. it'll ruin the day of your relatives too if there's no bits to even bury. did i mention that hydrogen embrittles many metals?

there's loads of good cheap fuel about. but we don't want to use it. instead, we have the devil's own brew of politicians anxious to waste taxpayer money on crap that they think looks good and buys green votes [mixed in a with a good dose of sheer ignorance], and an entrenched energy industry that /doesn't/ want to see them pour our money into anything that might actually be a serious competitor.

yup, we'll continue to see our money wasted on this crap unless we either say something and make out like we mean to vote accordingly, or a few people get killed. which one do you want to be?

JRStern wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Right. Bacteria don't grow well on hydrogen atoms.

By the way, I tried using my hacksaw to cut off the hydrogen atoms from a methane molecule I found. It didn't go well. Maybe the blade was too dull.

The Honda ones have not been, and maybe the methane reactor idea doesn't really work (yet?), it's just another idea floating around out there, I thought I'd throw in. Googling ... OK "methane reactor" seems to be used to run the other way around,

But I'm pretty sure I've read of people trying to carry around the hydrogen on hydrocarbons and still reacting them without combustion to directly produce electricity in a fuel cell. Maybe it just doesn't work. After all, you still need to do something with the carbon, and it's hard to imagine doing the hydrogen one way and the carbon another. Still, ya never know.

Yeah, the embrittlement is not a good thing, those sneaky little atoms. Yes, I've seen hydrogen blow stuff up, and we had the Fukishima reactor buildings blown to smithereens from the stuff, too.

Honda and GM want to build a hundred cars every ten years to try out the idea, it's OK by me.

J.

there are things like butane fuel cells, so i don't think the carbon is the problem, it's the contamination with all the other gunk that's in gasoline. and, as i said before, the oil industry has absolutely zero interest in an alternative converter technology that might be more efficient than current combustion.

but they're being fed /our/ money to do it - that's /not/ ok by me. i'm ok with funding academic research, but not just handing it over to the black grasping hole that is anything into which g.m. [and their partner du jour] wants to vacuum our tax dollars. g.m. never does anything with our money except overpay its executives and move jobs to china.

There's this:

It runs on methane, but maybe you could crack octane to methane on the fly? I dunno.

On the scale they operate, employing a few mad scientists on a long shot, isn't unreasonable. Even DARPA throws a few kilobucks every year for full reports on some of the nuttiest stuff out there, or at least there was once a report (in IEEE Spectrum) of them funding some zero-point energy project to the tune of $50k, again more for the report and to cover their bases, and for the laffs.

J.

as i understand it, you can have these things use lots of different hydrocarbons directly, no need to crack. the question is, how to deal with the crud that comes with it. if you use methane gas, you don't fill the reactor with nasties that poison it - so do you see where this is going? refineries could produce "clean" fuels that can be directly distributed and used in reactor cells using the traditional gasoline production and distribution model. but they don't. and they won't. like i said, they're not going to do a single damned thing that would reduce their sales, even by a fraction of a percent.

absolutely - give the money to a few uni's doing relevant [or even nutty] research, where it'll get spent on academic research. and have them publicly publish the results. DON'T give it to g.m. who will throw it away on management bonuses and keep the results in house - if g.m. want to fund their own research and keep it in house, then they're welcome to - if they want /my/ money, then /i/ want to be able to see the results.

Hydrogen cell technology will eventually happen but, probably not for another 25 years. I have a young friend who is working with this technology and he does not see it happening for this 25yr. I fail to see from a chemical perspective where any methane comes from. the research is focusing on fracturing water.

??? it "works" right now, today.

*

but at what cost in terms of safety? and at what cost in terms of energy ignorance?

language like "emissions free" is only ever written by someone without a technical background, or by a liar. hydrogen requires significant energy to produce and transport. more so than fossil fuels. [so too lithium batteries, but that's another separate issue.] people "unaware" of that fact have serious credibility deficits.

methane is available in huge quantities wherever oil is found, and on its own. it's a fossil fuel. and it's easily and cheaply produced in biogarbage biodigesters.

• note also that three buses logged 270k miles. that's less than 100k per fuel cell. a traditional diesel bus, properly maintained, will do

1,000,000 miles per "fuel cell". and that "fuel cell" doesn't cost several million dollars.

that's not news to anybody with a rigorous technical background. or even people that sell that stuff. it's only news to politicians, some of the public, and the wannabe "believers" who somehow manage to overlook the stuff that isn't convenient.

More IEEE Spectrum:

Electric cars don?t solve the automobile?s environmental problems By Ozzie Zehner Posted 30 Jun 2013 | 19:00 GMT

J.

Explosions with hydrogen fuel, and far LESS likely than with gasoline. When hydrogen does escape, and ignite it tends to rise up and away from bystanders (or passengers).

Yes, the Hindenburg was spectacular, but it was the thermite paint that was the main problem.

One of the main problems with the alternative electicity sources, is that apart from hydro, they don't track load requirements well. The sun doesn't shine at night, winds come and go, tidal power rises and falls twice a day, and nuclear reactors can't be turned down quickly or they shutdown. Hydrogen production is a way to capture the energy during the time of excess production over demand.

i read that too, but on a politically sponsored website trying to justify this wasting of taxpayer dollars.

fact is, hydrogen detonates at concentrations well below that of other fuels, including gasoline - as low as 10%. anyone thinking they'll never get a concentration of only 10% around a crash-ruptured automotive hydrogen tank needs to go back to 3rd grade.

no, it was the hydrogen that was the "problem". if the hindenberg had not had its well designed compartment structure and had not had a relatively [for its day] effective means of providing oxygen diffusion barriers, there wouldn't be any footage of it burning - it would be there one moment, the next [and a good chunk of the surrounding area] would be atomized.

fossil fuels track demand excellently. especially new natural gas generators.

why bother? there are many much better uses for off-peak electricity - electrolyzing aluminum ore for example*. pumping water back into hydro-electric schemes is another.

fact is, hydrogen is dangerous, expensive and technically misguided. fossil fuels are abundant, cheap, energy dense, and can be bio-generated much more efficiently than wasting resources on electrolyzing water.

• if aluminum were cheaper, we could make cars with it. they'd be lighter and thus burn much less fossil fuel. but nobody puts money into that - only projects /known/ to be fundamentally flawed because they don't compete with the interests of the oil industry and it's lobbying power in d.c.

My favorite is desalinating water.

J.

i guess. but we waste so much water in the first place, i question the logic of using all that energy to waste more. energy production, regardless of source, has a huge entropic impact. using less has to be better. biodigest garbage and use natural gas - we can run turbine generators to meet demand, we don't have to just run at full power and make excuses for wasting it elsewhere.

Any resource you can try to win by conservation, but it usually has diminishing returns.

Half of California's Central Valley is wasteland today because the state "has run out of water". Desalination on a large scale is coming, and I think wind power to run it may be a win-wind.

J.

i don't know where you've been, but i just drove the length of the 99, agriculture central, and while there are plenty of campaign signs repeating what you say, they're usually located next to lush green crops. iow, i see no evidence that the politics matches the reality.

not unless we're really up against it. desalination is very expensive. people may bleat saying they want something, but when it comes to paying, they change their tune. and as long as we keep wasting water on pointless vanities like washing cars and front lawns, desalination remains an illogical dream.

i don't know where you've been, but i've just driven the length of the

99, the heart of the "Central Valley", and while there are plenty of campaign signs repeating what you say, they're usually located next to lush green crops. iow, i see no evidence that the politics matches the reality.

not unless we're really up against it. desalination is very expensive. people may bleat saying they want something, but when it comes to paying, they change their tune. and as long as we keep wasting water on pointless vanities like washing cars and front lawns, desalination remains an illogical nonsense.