Has anyone seen the TV commercial from Exxon saying they are working to produce hydrogen from gasoline within the car to produce hydrogen for the fuel cell?

Here is a link I found to describe it a little better.

http://www.mmh.com/article/CA6504609.html

Does anyone really believe the public would except this as an alternative solution to produce hydrogen?

I wonder if Bo and Ryan could get someone from Exxon for an interview.

Hasbro

I attended a symposium about 15 months ago where alternative fuel tech representatives were there. Of all the alternative fuel techs Electric vehicles was only represented by four people. (The symposium was planned and ran by a conglomarate of Fuel cell advocates...)

Throughout all the panel discussions and papers, electric vehicles were bashed as having poor range, poor acceleration and poor enviornmental status. Until I questioned one panel member on how they produced the Hydrogen for fuel cells and hydrogen combustion cars.

.....

Hyrdogen, it appears, is mainly produced from compressed natural gas, which is changed, at great expenense, into hydrogen for those nice clean cars...

Shame the journey there isn't so clean eh?

If we could find a clean way of producing hydrogen it'd be different. But as yet, it's not possible.

Exxon will, I assume, be doing a similar process to the one I was told about. Which only moves the pollution...

What a joke? That's like going to California from Washington DC via Asia!

There are lots of ways of producing hydrogen. Any hydrocorbon can be cracked (a process called carbon cracking) to release hydrogen. Nikki is right that most all our hydrogen comes from natural gas (it doesn't have to be compressed) through a process called steam reforming, which separates the corbon dioxide from the methane (natural gas) and leaves us with a very clean form of hydrogen. A few years back people were talking about having methanol reformers to produce hydrogen on board cars, so that the cars could use a liquid and send the hydrogen through the fuel cell. Kind of stupid though because the reformer realeases all the polutents that an internal combustion engine does and then the Proton Exchange Membrane in the fuel cell produces only water vapor. It is a long way around to get to the same place. What I believe that the oil companies want is to use the hydrogen they produce in the refining process. Oil refiners produce a mixed series of gasses mainly hydrogen when boosting the octain levels of gasoline to the market numbers. Vast amounts of hydrogen are produced this way but it isn't pure hydrogen and there for needs some reforming. Not a lot. Refiners do use steam reformed hydrogen in the refining process because it is cheaper than their having to clean p the hydrogen that they produce, but if there was a saleable product at the end of the process and they could stop making purchases of the steam reformed hydrogen then they would go for it. They sell gasoline and then they take the waiste from producing gasoline and sell that too. I really think that is what they are after. If they could make hydrogen from a methanol reformer right in a car than I am sure they must have figured out that one hydrocorbon chain isn't that much different from another and figured out how to reform gasoline. It still is a stupid idea, since the reformer will still put a ship load of corbon dioxid into the air.

Still have not added "BIOMASS" fuels that are carbon neutral are being tested in fuel cell vehicles other than hydrogen.