Honda Rolls Out Zero Emmission Cars Today

[tallrick]

I would rather build a photo bio reactor and use algae to produce Diesel for a big, American truck. I would build some kind of on-board gasification and use waste heat to convert raw algae into fuel. We already use hydrogen as fuel in natural gas, propane, gasoline, Diesel and all hydrocarbons.

[f_m]

Originally Posted by 58robbo

you might find this interesting The Hydrogen Economy

I read it, but it doesn't say anything about fuel cells in general being a bad idea. Fuel cells don't have to run on pure hydrogen. But there was no solution indicated on how to replace internal combustion engines, which is one of the major issues as they are major sources of pollution.

The fact that Honda (an engine specialist, making engines for weed wackers, lawnmowers, motorboats, scooters, automobiles, motorcycles, jet aircraft, etc...) is investing in fuel cells is a good thing. There needs to be alternatives to internal combustion engines. The government has been working with fuel cells for decades, but they don't work on consumer/commercial products for sale.

The fact that he says "you will never drive a hydrogen fueled car" is not a good sign about the article's information given that people (general consumers) have been driving them for a few years (although in a limited capacity). He says "It's important to realize that hydrogen is not a fuel source; it's an energy carrier," of course gasoline is an energy carrier also, so what?

I'm not saying cars should be hydrogen powered, I'm saying an alternative form of engine should be
developed. That's a good thing. In fact, what the article ends with saying "In such applications, hydrogen is smart," in regards to energy generation for a building. That is what I said, but the development will never come quickly without a company like Honda pushing the technology.

[steve327]

This is an interesting thread.

It is true that there are energy carriers, energy sources and energy utilization devices. In the right circumstances, different technologies offer the most efficient means of providing energy from some source to some energy-utilizing thing.

The ultimate source of energy is sunlight. I am not counting nuclear energy sources...that would have to be a whole different thread. The sunlight above the atmosphere, in geosynchronous orbit is about nine times what is available at the surface of the planet, in the middle latitudes. The whole subject of THAT, collecting it, transmitting a beam to the surface and collecting the energy that made it down, would have to be a whole 'nother thread.

So, here we are on the surface of the planet. What can we do?

google.org recently gave a boost to esolar. They have a nice design for solar-thermal energy collection, resulting in electrical energy generation and distribution via the power grid. Figure about twenty percent efficiency in converting solar energy to electrical energy. There are small distribution losses in the grid but we will always have those in broad-electrical-energy-distribution systems.

Energy is typically generated in locations remote from where most energy is consumed. I think 80% of the U. S. population lives near the coast. Individual homes and buildings, if they have good sun exposure, may be able to generate their entire household needs, but capital investment is significant.

Industry and commerce need much more energy than most of them can generate on their own roofs, so we are back to looking at energy-capture, conversion, distribution and utilization. So far I have been talking about distribution via the electrical power grid. Why? Because it is an efficient functioning piece of infrastructure that is already there. We aren’t paying for its construction, just operation and maintenance.

Amorphous silicon solar cells are inexpensive, but have efficiencies I think around 8%. Very new solar-cell technology [copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cells] recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency, I read recently. Now, indium and gallium are not inexpensive materials, any more than single-crystal silicon, so don’t look for these to be cheap either. Solar cells put out a Direct Current that needs to be converted to Alternating-Current and then fed into the power grid. The electronics for doing that will have some small losses. Regardless of cost, we are back to about twenty percent conversion efficiency, in round numbers.

Wind generation cannot be installed everywhere, and the cost of the turbines is considerable. Still, it is practical, generates clean energy and that energy can be efficiently distributed via the grid. Is there enough wind energy to power our civilization? I don’t believe so, not by several orders of magnitude.

Hydro? We have dammed most of the rivers that can be dammed, and perhaps a few more. I doubt we can plan on much more hydro power in the future. We may even have to take down some dams…I recently saw a PBS story about salmon on some rivers going extinct. It may be the dams, but Salmon themselves are having problems…seems a hundred years ago we killed off most of the whales in the Pacific. The whales used to eat the Krill, but there were enough Krill left to feed the Herring, but not much more, so the Pollock population stayed in check. Salmon ate the Herring, and everything was fine. With the whale population greatly reduced, there were now plenty of Krill, and too many Herring, and the Pollock population exploded, and they began eating Krill and Herring, and now there’s not enough Herring for the Salmon, and they find the Pollock rather indigestible, not like the Herring, so the Salmon are staving to death, or so it seems. Living in an ecosystem and attempting to change the environment to better suit ourselves and our improved quality of life and knowledge, is what we have to do to survive and expand and flourish and prosper as a society, but sometimes it sure brings out an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

What else can we do with the incoming solar energy? Well, plants capture it, and make cellulose, and oils, and the oils can be thermally cracked [a wasteful process, not energy-efficient] to make gasoline and diesel, or can be chemically converted into methyl-ester biodiesel [only about ten percent waste in the waste glycerin stream, other processes don’t have that waste stream and can produce fuel oil, but still we utilize most or all of the oil.]. So, isn’t this good? Well, yes and no. How efficient are plants?

If you look at the 200 gallons of oil per acre that Jatropha yields annually, or the 600 gallons per acre that Honge, also known as Pongamia [an oilseed tree, native to India and southeast Asia] yields, or the [unknown practical] yield per acre of algae, isn’t there a lot of energy there? I did a calculation, using the heat of combustion of triglyceride oils, and came up with a sunlight-to-thermal-to-electrical conversion efficiency of about one percent. Plants may be very efficient in their biochemical process, but the chlorophyll only absorbs a very small fraction of the solar energy getting to the surface of the planet. Solar cells are more efficient, but again absorb only a fraction of the energy getting to the surface. Thermal maybe less efficient but absorbs more of the solar spectrum. So, we can probably budget about twenty percent conversion of solar energy collected in the daytime, to arrive at the power grid.

Fixed things usually can utilize electrical energy. Depending on the nature of the thing that uses the energy, it may be more practical to transmit it as stored chemical energy. Whatever works is fine, given an environmental-pollution-from-utilization tradeoff. Things that move have different considerations.

Airplanes are the most demanding of stored energy for locomotion, and then come trains, ships and cars (in no particular order…that’d be another whole thread right there.). The most efficient means of storing energy is chemical, be it hydrogen [under pressure, liquefied, dissolved in hydrides or nanowhatevers] methane, methanol, gasoline, or diesel fuel. These things are all allowed to react with the oxygen in the air and some of that energy captured by some means, and converted into useful work at an efficiency limited by the laws of physics. One can get more of the available energy from something that is hotter, all other things equal. Properties of materials also limit our attainable thermal conversion efficiency. When the temperature is too high, stuff melts or vaporizes. A man’s got to know his limitations. Stored-electrical-energy technology other than chemical is pretty-much batteries, and our civilization just does not have really lightweight really high-energy-density battery technology. Besides, the best batteries store their energy as chemical energy. So there you are.

If we don’t want to continue to burn fossil fuel, we have a real challenge. There are very-well-established vested interests that want to sell us fossil fuel until they run out. That’s anyone who owns fossil-fuel deposits or distribution, who can make it difficult for anyone who wants to go anywhere or do anything, to do it without petroleum or natural gas. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. People in some locations don’t care to breathe the air downwind of a coal-fired power plant. In some countries, those people are allowed to say or do something about that. Then, there is the established infrastructure of civilization, and the fact that most of the people on the planet don’t want complicated lives, don’t want change, and even though being basically good people, cannot see very far and are mostly asleep anyway. How do you offer change to someone who fears an uncertain future? Most people do…civilization has advanced as the very few who can see a beneficial change, drag the vast majority, kicking and screaming, into a better future. So far they have been mostly right. So far. It’s getting dicey….

Then, there are other countries, and they are run by people, in most cases very small groups of people, who have their more personal interests uppermost. I read somewhere that China is building one new coal-fired power plant every three days. Perhaps it is true. They have a LOT of coal, little oil or gas, and a great need for energy to power a large and expanding economy. The rulers of China care little for air pollution or the health of their subjects, as long as there are enough of them to provide the power and glory that such rulers crave [that’s my opinion; yours may differ]. On a planet of independent countries, less than half of which are anything resembling a democracy, the balance being dictatorships or kleptocracies, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree on common goals that put a stable future there.

So, there’s a real challenge, to do something useful and affordable, and set it up so it makes enough of a profit to pay for itself and establishment of expansion for the future. Everything must make a profit, and have expansion as a built-in quality, else it will die. Things that only stay level will slowly deteriorate and dissipate and fail. If we want more efficient vehicles, it’s wonderful to have a hydrogen-powered vehicle; I think it’s great. The overall energy-conversion issues make it a challenge, but something can be done. That activity or some other needs to provide the profit to put it there and make it expand. I admire the founders of Google. They are making money selling advertising, and using it to put a future there. Would that everyone with big bucks felt the same way.