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I think Hydrogen Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. No range limitations exist once the infrastructure for refueling is in place. It's going t

by cenal 11y ago

I think Hydrogen Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. No range limitations exist once the infrastructure for refueling is in place. It's going to be interesting to see how the next 20-30 years of automotive technology plays out between these alternative fuels and the autonomous driving technologies.

sharps_xp 11y ago
from my brief reading about hydrogen fuel, that infrastructure is going to be crazy expensive and going to be political suicide for anyone who wants to write policy supporting it. Let's just pour all that money into making superconductivity at room temperatures a reality!
- mikeash 11y ago
  A hydrogen fueling station costs millions of dollars. A Tesla supercharger costs maybe $200,000. A home charging station is typically less than $2,000. I can't understand why anyone thinks hydrogen is worthwhile.
huhtenberg 11y ago
> No range limitations exist once the infrastructure for refueling is in place Holds true for any type of energy source.
- ars 11y ago
  Mostly true, but only if refueling doesn't take more than 5 minutes or so. So not necessarily true for battery energy storage.
  - duhast 11y ago
    Tesla demonstrated battery swap in less than 2 minutes. So it is at least technically possible.
    - ars 11y ago
      Technically, but not practically. You'd have to have some government involvement here so that all batteries are owned by the same entity, so you can swap batteries from different manufacturers, at any energy station. You also have to standardize on only a few battery types, which makes it harder to design the car, since you can't custom fix the battery to available space. And that means future battery advances are impractical - who wants to use a battery that can't be part of the swap network? It's not realistic. A hybrid power system is more practical - use hydrocarbon fuel for >50 mile trips, and a battery you plugin at home for shorter trips.
      - keenerd 11y ago
        Practically it could work out very well. The Big Three might voluntarily standardize on a battery formfactor and swapping bay, because it would put them ahead of Tesla. "Our patent is free, follow our lead Mr Musk." There could still be plenty of flexibility in shape, but it would likely be constrained. Like, the width/depth must be a fixed number of centimeters, and there must be a common connector and common mounting points. But the length is up to the manufacturer, programmed into an RFID tag for the swapping bay. (And you'd be able to use shorter batteries inside a larger vehicle.) Battery advances are the most trivial of all to incorporate. Already li-ion packs require dedicated charging circuitry. The exact cells used don't matter, a tenth-of-a-cent EEPROM is programmed with the charging curves of the cell chemistry. If anything battery tech will advance much faster with swapping. Without swapping you have to be very conservative. Advances can only be introduced with new models (so once a year) and are very costly to get wrong across a fleet. With swapping you could put a couple of prototypes into the pool every month, and swap them out immediately if the prototype underperforms.
    - Shivetya 11y ago
      but they did nothing with it. there is a lot of talk it was only done to qualify for a specific tax break and after that one station where have they built more? is that one station even open to the public? to be honest I think the idea of swapping the battery is more of admission of the shortfalls of battery technology than anything. Now I think having a battery that swaps is more interesting from the serviceability aspect
  - nkoren 11y ago
    ...until battery-swap technology was invented.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      That's not really a mass-market option, you'd need to stock large amounts of batteries for a fuckton of different models (each car or at least segment or manufacturer having their own battery geometry), or all cars would need to use modular batteries which loses structural advantages and reduces storage capacity. Battery-swap is more of a stunt than anything useful. All vehicles can load up at a pump, you can't swap the same batteries in a tuktuk, a large sedan and a bus.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      You meant 'until it was made practical'. It was invented more than a 100 years ago.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    The current state of the art requires charging for 20-30 minutes for every 2-3 hours of driving. Not ideal, but pretty good. Already good enough to make for the best road trip experience out there as a whole. And that's today, not some hypothetical future. How good will it be by the time hydrogen fueling stations are more than a novelty?
vlehto 11y ago
I think Vegetable Oil Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. No range limitations exist now. Adapting infra is like adapting new grade of gasoline. Now chronic fuel leakage exists now. Filling the tank is not rocket science. No volumetric energy density problems for the fuel. No fishy "we make this fuel out of natural gas, but don't talk about it" shit about it. No need for high pressure containers. And it comes with all the good things that you get from fuel cells, but you can also use it with traditional diesel motors. The problems: Some C02 comes out of the exhaust. But it's carbon neutral. Hydrogen has the "water out of tailpipe!" hype about it, but it's only really clean if that hydrogen is made with electricity that comes from nuclear or renewable (and clean) sources. Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas at the moment. The other problem is that we have limited capability to produce vegetable oil. But we also have limited capability to produce hydrogen. With hydrogen you could go with massive increase of nuclear power, and you got it. But currently there is also research for oils produced by seaweeds that looks quite promising. Edit: Seems like Fuel Cell technology would be great, but it's held back by hydrogen hype. And hydrogen hype seems to be destined as hype, because hydrogen is freakishly difficult substance to deal with.
- creshal 11y ago
  > Hydrogen has the "water out of tailpipe!" hype about it ¹ May or may not contain traces of hydrogen peroxide, but shhhh.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Does that really matter? Isn't the trace of hydrogen peroxide in water output going to be irrelevant and decompose into water on short order?
- _ph_ 11y ago
  We should use anything edible for feeding people, not burn it for driving cars. Solar cells are far more energy efficient per area (about 10x) than any agriculture. And, while "grown" fuel might be CO2 neutral, it still produces the same poisonous combustion byproducts as fossil fuel (NOx, fine particles).
ars 11y ago
> I think Hydrogen Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. It's unlikely. Hydrogen makes a poor fuel because it's very hard to store. It leaks through almost anything, and embrittles most metal. It's possible to store, but it's expensive. It's also not very dense, so you need a lot of pressure, which just makes the storage/leakage problem worse. I think Methane might be the fuel (not energy source) of the future. It has almost all the advantages of hydrogen, with much fewer problems. The energy source can be something else, so the CO2 emissions of methane are not relevant. Unrelated, but if we could store mono-atomic hydrogen, that would be something! There is more energy available in hydrogen bonding with itself than with oxygen.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  And finally, hydrogen tends to go 'foom'. Compared to all the other ways in which you could propel a car hydrogen is a very dangerous one and that alone is reason enough why it probably will never happen. Compared to LPG for instance hydrogen is much harder on the system and much more dangerous to handle. I don't see it happening any time soon. Keep in mind that a lot of inner city parking space is indoors / underground.
rurban 11y ago
If the safety problems are solved, yes. But just one tiny explosion, as in the Tesla batteries when loading as it happens with the cheap chinese hoverboards, and the company is doomed. Just think of the Hindenburg desaster. See e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/a-new-road-rage https://www.propublica.org/article/a-new-road-rage
- ars 11y ago
  Explosion from hydrogen? Not a problem at all - hydrogen is MUCH MUCH safer than gasoline. The main reason for that is that it doesn't stick around - it's lighter than air, so all the fuel rises instantly, and so does the bulk of the fire, which stays with the fuel. It makes hydrogen fires rather safe as fires go - they are out within seconds. For example the hydrogen fire in the Hindenburg was out within about 10 to 15 seconds. The casualties came from burning fabric and other things (like crashing). Hydrogen is not a good fuel for other reasons (see my other post), but not because of safety.
  - _ph_ 11y ago
    This might be true for leaks in ventilated spaces, but I am really scared by the idea there could be a hydrogen leak in an underground garage. Also, in the case of a traffic accident, we are talking about a high pressure tank, so the risk of the tank failing structurally is much larger than with the unprepared fuel tank. Finally, hydrogen is much easier to light than fuel.
_ph_ 11y ago
There are several reasons why I doubt the future of hydrogen fuel cell cars. The biggest problem is, where the hydrogen does come from: - currently almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas, releasing CO2 in the process. - creating hydrogen via electrolysis is possible, but very energy intensive, using up much more electricity than it releases in the fuel cell - in any case, there is further energy used for compressing the hydrogen. So, in total a pure electrical car easily drives 3 times as far as a hydrogen fuel cell car with the same amount of input energy. This is going to put hydrogen cars at a big disadvantage to electrical cars. On the other side, electrical cars are getting to the point where the advantages of hydrogen cars are getting moot. The range is pretty close, and with fast charging the "refuel" does not take much longer as with hydrogen cars - but you normally can charge them overnight and not have to recharge them on the road in day-to-day business.
- gambiting 11y ago
  And don't forget that you need a 70kg lead cylinder to store just 1 kilogram of hydrogen. And hydrogen, being the smallest particle, escapes from literally any container, no matter what it's made from. Usually a whole tank will leak out naturally within 2-3 weeks. That's really not ideal, not to mention dangerous if your car is parked in a closed garage.

by cenal 11y ago

sharps_xp 11y ago

from my brief reading about hydrogen fuel, that infrastructure is going to be crazy expensive and going to be political suicide for anyone who wants to write policy supporting it. Let's just pour all that money into making superconductivity at room temperatures a reality!

mikeash 11y ago
A hydrogen fueling station costs millions of dollars. A Tesla supercharger costs maybe $200,000. A home charging station is typically less than $2,000. I can't understand why anyone thinks hydrogen is worthwhile.

huhtenberg 11y ago

> No range limitations exist once the infrastructure for refueling is in place Holds true for any type of energy source.

ars 11y ago
Mostly true, but only if refueling doesn't take more than 5 minutes or so. So not necessarily true for battery energy storage.
- duhast 11y ago
  Tesla demonstrated battery swap in less than 2 minutes. So it is at least technically possible.
  - ars 11y ago
    Technically, but not practically. You'd have to have some government involvement here so that all batteries are owned by the same entity, so you can swap batteries from different manufacturers, at any energy station. You also have to standardize on only a few battery types, which makes it harder to design the car, since you can't custom fix the battery to available space. And that means future battery advances are impractical - who wants to use a battery that can't be part of the swap network? It's not realistic. A hybrid power system is more practical - use hydrocarbon fuel for >50 mile trips, and a battery you plugin at home for shorter trips.
    - keenerd 11y ago
      Practically it could work out very well. The Big Three might voluntarily standardize on a battery formfactor and swapping bay, because it would put them ahead of Tesla. "Our patent is free, follow our lead Mr Musk." There could still be plenty of flexibility in shape, but it would likely be constrained. Like, the width/depth must be a fixed number of centimeters, and there must be a common connector and common mounting points. But the length is up to the manufacturer, programmed into an RFID tag for the swapping bay. (And you'd be able to use shorter batteries inside a larger vehicle.) Battery advances are the most trivial of all to incorporate. Already li-ion packs require dedicated charging circuitry. The exact cells used don't matter, a tenth-of-a-cent EEPROM is programmed with the charging curves of the cell chemistry. If anything battery tech will advance much faster with swapping. Without swapping you have to be very conservative. Advances can only be introduced with new models (so once a year) and are very costly to get wrong across a fleet. With swapping you could put a couple of prototypes into the pool every month, and swap them out immediately if the prototype underperforms.
  - Shivetya 11y ago
    but they did nothing with it. there is a lot of talk it was only done to qualify for a specific tax break and after that one station where have they built more? is that one station even open to the public? to be honest I think the idea of swapping the battery is more of admission of the shortfalls of battery technology than anything. Now I think having a battery that swaps is more interesting from the serviceability aspect
- nkoren 11y ago
  ...until battery-swap technology was invented.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    That's not really a mass-market option, you'd need to stock large amounts of batteries for a fuckton of different models (each car or at least segment or manufacturer having their own battery geometry), or all cars would need to use modular batteries which loses structural advantages and reduces storage capacity. Battery-swap is more of a stunt than anything useful. All vehicles can load up at a pump, you can't swap the same batteries in a tuktuk, a large sedan and a bus.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    You meant 'until it was made practical'. It was invented more than a 100 years ago.
- mikeash 11y ago
  The current state of the art requires charging for 20-30 minutes for every 2-3 hours of driving. Not ideal, but pretty good. Already good enough to make for the best road trip experience out there as a whole. And that's today, not some hypothetical future. How good will it be by the time hydrogen fueling stations are more than a novelty?

vlehto 11y ago

I think Vegetable Oil Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. No range limitations exist now. Adapting infra is like adapting new grade of gasoline. Now chronic fuel leakage exists now. Filling the tank is not rocket science. No volumetric energy density problems for the fuel. No fishy "we make this fuel out of natural gas, but don't talk about it" shit about it. No need for high pressure containers. And it comes with all the good things that you get from fuel cells, but you can also use it with traditional diesel motors. The problems: Some C02 comes out of the exhaust. But it's carbon neutral. Hydrogen has the "water out of tailpipe!" hype about it, but it's only really clean if that hydrogen is made with electricity that comes from nuclear or renewable (and clean) sources. Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas at the moment. The other problem is that we have limited capability to produce vegetable oil. But we also have limited capability to produce hydrogen. With hydrogen you could go with massive increase of nuclear power, and you got it. But currently there is also research for oils produced by seaweeds that looks quite promising. Edit: Seems like Fuel Cell technology would be great, but it's held back by hydrogen hype. And hydrogen hype seems to be destined as hype, because hydrogen is freakishly difficult substance to deal with.

creshal 11y ago
> Hydrogen has the "water out of tailpipe!" hype about it ¹ May or may not contain traces of hydrogen peroxide, but shhhh.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Does that really matter? Isn't the trace of hydrogen peroxide in water output going to be irrelevant and decompose into water on short order?
_ph_ 11y ago
We should use anything edible for feeding people, not burn it for driving cars. Solar cells are far more energy efficient per area (about 10x) than any agriculture. And, while "grown" fuel might be CO2 neutral, it still produces the same poisonous combustion byproducts as fossil fuel (NOx, fine particles).

ars 11y ago

> I think Hydrogen Fuel Cells are the future of the automotive world. It's unlikely. Hydrogen makes a poor fuel because it's very hard to store. It leaks through almost anything, and embrittles most metal. It's possible to store, but it's expensive. It's also not very dense, so you need a lot of pressure, which just makes the storage/leakage problem worse. I think Methane might be the fuel (not energy source) of the future. It has almost all the advantages of hydrogen, with much fewer problems. The energy source can be something else, so the CO2 emissions of methane are not relevant. Unrelated, but if we could store mono-atomic hydrogen, that would be something! There is more energy available in hydrogen bonding with itself than with oxygen.

jacquesm 11y ago
And finally, hydrogen tends to go 'foom'. Compared to all the other ways in which you could propel a car hydrogen is a very dangerous one and that alone is reason enough why it probably will never happen. Compared to LPG for instance hydrogen is much harder on the system and much more dangerous to handle. I don't see it happening any time soon. Keep in mind that a lot of inner city parking space is indoors / underground.

rurban 11y ago

If the safety problems are solved, yes. But just one tiny explosion, as in the Tesla batteries when loading as it happens with the cheap chinese hoverboards, and the company is doomed. Just think of the Hindenburg desaster. See e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/a-new-road-rage https://www.propublica.org/article/a-new-road-rage

ars 11y ago
Explosion from hydrogen? Not a problem at all - hydrogen is MUCH MUCH safer than gasoline. The main reason for that is that it doesn't stick around - it's lighter than air, so all the fuel rises instantly, and so does the bulk of the fire, which stays with the fuel. It makes hydrogen fires rather safe as fires go - they are out within seconds. For example the hydrogen fire in the Hindenburg was out within about 10 to 15 seconds. The casualties came from burning fabric and other things (like crashing). Hydrogen is not a good fuel for other reasons (see my other post), but not because of safety.
- _ph_ 11y ago
  This might be true for leaks in ventilated spaces, but I am really scared by the idea there could be a hydrogen leak in an underground garage. Also, in the case of a traffic accident, we are talking about a high pressure tank, so the risk of the tank failing structurally is much larger than with the unprepared fuel tank. Finally, hydrogen is much easier to light than fuel.

_ph_ 11y ago

There are several reasons why I doubt the future of hydrogen fuel cell cars. The biggest problem is, where the hydrogen does come from: - currently almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas, releasing CO2 in the process. - creating hydrogen via electrolysis is possible, but very energy intensive, using up much more electricity than it releases in the fuel cell - in any case, there is further energy used for compressing the hydrogen. So, in total a pure electrical car easily drives 3 times as far as a hydrogen fuel cell car with the same amount of input energy. This is going to put hydrogen cars at a big disadvantage to electrical cars. On the other side, electrical cars are getting to the point where the advantages of hydrogen cars are getting moot. The range is pretty close, and with fast charging the "refuel" does not take much longer as with hydrogen cars - but you normally can charge them overnight and not have to recharge them on the road in day-to-day business.

gambiting 11y ago
And don't forget that you need a 70kg lead cylinder to store just 1 kilogram of hydrogen. And hydrogen, being the smallest particle, escapes from literally any container, no matter what it's made from. Usually a whole tank will leak out naturally within 2-3 weeks. That's really not ideal, not to mention dangerous if your car is parked in a closed garage.