EVcast #283: Electric Penetration

Roy McAlister is a supporter of hydrogen, but just doesn’t see the entire picture.

Bo, a deflective argument is an argument that tries to take the debate to an area that is easily defensible rather than talk about the indefensible main issue. Mr. McAlister may be doing this unintentionally but he moved the debate away from what we know, that all automakers are doing fuel cells, everyone except BMW, and moved it to hydrogen in an ICE. The main problem with hydrogen is that you can’t store enough hydrogen aboard a hydrogen ICE vehicle to go very far. For example the hydrogen Hummer had 150 miles range, but when you looked inside the vehicle was only a two passenger car. The entire vehicle was filled to the ceiling with hydrogen tanks. This is something to think about when converting vehicles to hydrogen as Mr. McAlister seemed to suggest.

When I was interested in hydrogen I wanted to convert a car to hydrogen and found shops that specialized in doing natural gas conversions that would do it. They quoted me very high prices. When I balked at the price one of the shop mechanics told me that I was better off finding a used CNG fleet vehicle at a fraction the cost of converting one. GreenCar.com says that converting a car to natural gas costs between $12500 to $22500 dollars to do. Not a cheap easy conversion like McAlister alluded to.

Roy McAlister touted getting hydrogen from plant waste. Plant waste hydrogen releases CO2 in large quantities, not pure carbon that Mr. McAlister alluded to. Getting usable carbon from CO2 is extremely difficult and costly. There are other problems with it too. It is a fermentation process that is slow. It is very expensive. We don’t have enough plant waste and other waste to displace the amount of oil we want to. It requires added electricity, heat energy, collection of the waste energy, transport energy. If it has a positive energy output at the end I would be surprised. However, if you burn it in an internal combustion engine you can knock off 83% in efficiency losses right off the top. Not a good use of renewable energy, since you can transmit the electricity directly into batteries and homes with out all the losses or the processing costs associated with it.

OK. Let’s play a game and say that hydrogen isn’t going to come from steam reforming of natural gas, which releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is the how hydrogen is made today. Nor is it going to come from the process that oil companies use to boost octane levels of gasoline in the refining process, which is what they are hoping to use to make hydrogen for the hydrogen economy that they want forced upon us. Even if we were to make hydrogen by some miracle in a way that doesn’t release CO2, and we don’t spend all or our renewable energy making it, it would still be a bad idea, because there isn’t an infrastructure to distribute it. That infrastructure will cost someone at minimum half a trillion dollars to put in place. What venture capital firm has that kind of money to spend on a hydrogen infrastructure? Especially when the electric grid is accessible to everyone already and nearly everyone has access to natural gas? It just isn’t going to happen. It’s not real.

Natural gas already has an infrastructure, it is cheaper than gasoline and much cleaner and yet it hasn’t found a market place for cars. Why would hydrogen that doesn’t have what natural gas has make it into the market place?

Think. The air car can go 125 miles at 40 miles an hour on a compressed tank of air (a gas) filed to 4500 psi. To get ranges comparable to gasoline, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been employing hydrogen tanks compressed to 10,000 psi. The energy in the compression of the hydrogen gas in these vehicles is equivalent to 250 miles in an air car. Think about how much energy it costs to compress a gas to 10,000 psi.

I could go on and on explaining why hydrogen isn’t a viable alternative fuel and probably never will be, but it gets tiring.

Bo, you asked why it was that electric vehicles activists don’t like hydrogen. It’s because the ZEV mandate was killed for the promise of hydrogen. What is worse is that the automakers and oil companies managed to persuade the California Air Resources Board that hydrogen vehicles were only a few years out. CARB gave in by having the rules keep the numbers they had for electric vehicles only they substituted hydrogen vehicles 5 years into the future. What I want to know is where are the pissed off hydrogen people making movies about who killed the hydrogen car, because that never happened either.

We, the electric vehicle activists, knew at the killing of the ZEV mandate that we would never see hydrogen cars in the numbers that we could have seen with electrics. Look at where we are just six years later with electric vehicles with just market forces rather than legislature doing the pushing. Can you imagine where we would be right now if the automakers hadn’t killed the ZEV mandate? We wasted a decade where American industry could have been the standard barer for the new economy, with millions of jobs attached to it, and billions of dollars that went out of the US in oil money that would have been circulated here at home, and for what? For the myth of hydrogen? Hydrogen vehicles that are still a decade or more away and probably always will be.

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Robs pluginsupply.com system is way ahead of Toyota. I have the 10 Kw lithium system in my 05 prius and we drive totaly electric about 25 miles a day. We can go up to 35 -40 but our commute is less. My wife drives it to work everyday and just pushed the pure EV button and off she goes. Who needs the hybrid mode, we do when we go up to 100 miles at 100+ mpg. It's the car that can do everything.

The pluginsupply system is the only one I have seen with a pure EV button. The battery balnacing and monitor system is flawless. We just plug it in at night and forget it. The system monitors for temperature and balnaces the batteries.

The Toyota plugin won't be out until 2012, has a 9-10 mile EV range and is projected to cost $48K. Ours was about $10K after federal incentive of 15% off the kit price of $12K. What a deal.

jim

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at one point in the evcast you mentioned an EV company that your CNET guest couldn't remember.  I believe you were talking about WrightSpeed:  http://wrightspeed.com/  Not sure if this company is much more than a hobby or interested in actually making production vehicles, but they certainly have a great ev platform.

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Roy McAlister is a supporter of hydrogen, but just doesn’t see the entire picture.

Bo, a deflective argument is an argument that tries to take the debate to an area that is easily defensible rather than talk about the indefensible main issue...


Roy has worked with and lauded hydrogen for decades, but by no means has he lost sight of the entire picture by indulging in advocacy. He looks at the entire picture with regard to its use. If you noticed in the interview, he didn't hide diesel's command of energy content; no misleading the public there. Read a book by him.

Hydrogen, with respect to cars, has always been about combustion and fuel cells. BTW, the ICE's first fuel was "illuminating gases" -- that included hydrogen.

Focus on fuel cells pushed combustion to the backburner and, to some extent, off the stove. However, the Japanese automakers and R&D companies have brought both back onto the front burners. Mazda had its hydrogen combustion engine in the labs at the release of the Rx-8 in 2004. It's been on the road for real world testing since 2006.

Granted storage is a major obstacle. [Touché] It does require compression to get more fuel on board or liquefaction. Hmmm... one wonders why you picked the extreme/a worse case scenario to imbellish your point. BTW, how far does the all-electric Hummer get when weighing storage vs. range?


When I was interested in hydrogen I wanted to convert a car to hydrogen and found shops that specialized in doing natural gas conversions that would do it...


I agree those are high numbers, but you seem to have an aversion to posting the extreme as a point. Do these numbers reflect a compression station at home for fillups included in the conversion? Were or are you under the impression that T. Boone Pickens would jump into this market with an absurd conversion cost that would have him balked at the moment he quoted it? Even you know better to get more than one insurance quoute. :-)


Roy McAlister touted getting hydrogen from plant waste...


There is a joke in there, but I will let it go. ;-) I guess the best way to answer this is to have Roy answer it or have him on and debate him with those who feel they know better. On a few things... requires added electricity = solar/wind; heat energy = solar and/or recaptured heat; waste collection = waste management/sewers; transport = on the spot/mobile/on demand; 83% efficiency losses??? = someone is fudging numbers and doesn't know how the ICE functions. Also, you can use the waste energy for different applications; it does not have to be all for cars.


OK. Let’s play a game and say that hydrogen isn’t going to come from steam reforming of natural gas, which releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is the how hydrogen is made today...


Let's not play a game and say we did. :-) Infrastructure and Distribution. You may want to review the current infrastructure, that is urbanism, to see if this is what you really want or wanted, or is it a conglomeration of ideas from a bunch of yahoo's bent on business and industrialism. [See New Urbanism] You may continue with the current infrastructure only to discover later that it would have been better to redesign the current infrastructure to fit your future destination. For cars, the current gas stations can be augmented with hydrogen equipment, as well as adding new hydrogen stations.

Distribution is solved in part by producing locally, instead of centrally and transporting. If you want central and transport, take a look at Braun's idea. That ought to have you pulling your hairs out.


Natural gas already has an infrastructure, it is cheaper than gasoline and much cleaner and yet it hasn’t found a market place for cars. Why would hydrogen that doesn’t have what natural gas has make it into the market place?


Replace 'natural gas' with 'electricity' and you have the same thing. You are no further down the road than natural gas. Everyone of the alternative/substitue fuels has a shot. This is a mixed bag solution; not winner take all.


Think. The air car can go 125 miles at 40 miles an hour on a compressed tank of air (a gas) filed to 4500 psi...


This is a comparison of apples and oranges.


Bo, you asked why it was that electric vehicles activists don’t like hydrogen. It’s because the ZEV mandate was killed for the promise of hydrogen...


Blame Canada! :-)

All seriousness aside, you are blaming hydrogen for what a committee did? Nice work.

Making a movie is one way to express yourself. The hydrogen people just used another... keep working at giving yourself better opportunities, more applications, lower costs, higher efficiencies...


Peace
marcus

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