Fill 'Er Up - But Make It Hydrogen
Car Of The Future May Run On Hydrogen, Not Gasoline; Lucky Few Win Chance To Rent
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Hydrogen Cars On The Horizon
A select few now have the opportunity to rent Honda's new cars which run solely on hydrogen, though experts say there may be a few bumps in the road. Hattie Kauffman reports from Los Angeles.
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Hydrogen Honda Hits Highway
Honda is rolling out its newest green car. The FXC "Clarity" is a zero emission hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. It's sure to make those high gas prices vaporize. Rich Demuro gives us a sneak peek.
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Just 200 people will get the chance to rent Honda's new hydrogen-powered car this summer. The price tag is $600 a month. (CBS)
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Just 200 people will get the chance to rent Honda's new hydrogen-powered car this summer. The price tag is $600 a month. (CBS)
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"I felt like I won an Oscar," says Curtis.
But it's not an Academy Award that's got her excited. It's the chance to rent the potential car of the future - one fueled entirely by hydrogen, not gasoline, reports CBS News correspondent Hattie Kauffman.
Honda's new hydrogen car rents for $600 a month. That may not sound exciting, but from 50,000 applicants for the new cars, Curtis will receive the first one off the assembly line this summer.
"Our family is going to pay for the privilege of having the chance to show, by action, a car that is an alternative to gasoline," she says.
Only 200 other customers will be able to rent this car that runs on clean-burning hydrogen instead of gasoline. The cost to build this car? - about $100,000.
Vasilios Manousiouthakis, a professor of chemical engineering at UCLA, has been driving a Mercedes hydrogen test car for two years.
"You're on the freeway, it can go with the other cars faster than them; you're looking for the police whenever needed," says Manousiouthakis.
But the real problem with these cars is keeping them filled up - there are very few fueling stations. Even here in Southern California with the greatest concentratrion of stations, there are still fewer than 20.
Experts say the car companies and hydrogen suppliers are playing a chicken and egg game.
"They're kind of saying, 'Here's what we can do, but we have to wait for the infrastructure to come out,'" says Jonathan Linkow, managing editor for automobiles at Consumer Reports. "And the infrastructure people are saying, 'We will not make the investment in hydrogen fuel stations until we see more products.'"
In the meantime, Manousiouthakis makes do. His car can only travel 80 miles on a tank of fuel, and the nearest hydrogen station is 10 miles from his home.
On this day, the fuel pump is broken. With the nearest hydrogen station another 10 miles away, Manousiouthakis knows his car won't make it.
"I need desperately fuel right now. I'm literally on fumes so I cannot get out," he says.
It takes two men and a consultant on the phone to solve the problem.
"It takes commitment," says Manousiouthakis.
Right now, hydrogen is free - subsidized by cities promoting alternative energy like Santa Monica. Hydrogen advocates estimate it would cost about the same as a gallon of gas, though hydrogen cars get twice the mileage.
Experts say it'll be a decade before hydrogen cars are widely available, if ever. For now, only a select group are in on the experiment and Curtis, for one, doesn't mind the speed bumps that may come along with it.
"Even if it is a little bit of a hassle," she says, "to me it is so worth it."
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See all 137 CommentsJ. Bossert
Using power from power plants burning fossil fuels perchance?
Just another case of moving pollution sources around .. the ole shell game.
Yes! Hydrogen isn''t a source of energy, its an energy storage medium. Think of it as a battery: if you don''t burn oil to charge it, it runs out.
But the promise of hydrogen and electric cars is that they ''could'' use energy from renewable, nonpolluting resources. Note the emphasis on COULD!! BushCo will sell you the idea that you''re saving the planet just by BUYING one of these vehicles, and then prevent renewable energy technologies from being advanced and deployed sufficiently to actually FEED energy into them. Its the old switcheroo from a true American traitor.
DON''T LET THEM MAKE US CHOOSE BETWEEN THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS!!! - TruCrank
Look, senator, we all know you don''t stand a snowball''s chance in hell, but if you care about the Republican Party at all you should at least try to get through the campaign with a little dignity.
Calling yourself evil in a futile attempt to pick up a few stray racist votes demeans the whole Party.
Watch ''who killed the electric car?''.
Then you''ll realize, if the hydrogen car ever gets a snowball''s chance in h*ll of becoming popular, they''ll yank it before you can say ''Jamie Lee Curtis''!
Yes! Hydrogen isn''''t a source of energy, its an energy storage medium. Think of it as a battery: if you don''''t burn oil to charge it, it runs out. - ubrew12
The fact that dumbya says it would be a good idea is just an example of the fact that even extremely stupid people will occasionally get something right, even if it is accidental.
Now, the concept of hydrogen as a storage medium is neither more nor less valid than saying that gasoline is a storage medium.
There is no ''charging'' necessary. Hydrogen burns quite easily all on its own. There is, of course, no giant cloud of free hydrogen floating around with which to power automobiles. Then again, there is no ocean of gasoline out there just waiting to fill our gas tanks either. To use oil industry terminology, ''cracking'' is necessary, because the chemical component(s) of the desired fuel product has to be removed from the natural resource in which it is found in order to be useful.
In the case of gasoline, the natural resource is oil. In the case of hydrogen, the natural resource is water - with or without salt. It might have escaped your attention, but this particular planet has vast saltwater resources. It''s oil resources are nearing the vanishing point - and no matter how determined we are to ignore and deny that fact, delusional fantasies of endless oceans of oil aren''t going to fill our gas tanks.
Oil is hydrogenated carbon. So is gasoline. Hydrogen fuel is ''hydrogenated'' hydrogen.
When you burn hydrogen, oil, or gasoline, you oxygenate them. Actually, when you burn starch (another form of hydrogenated carbon) in your body, you do the same thing. Oxygenated hydrogen is water. Oxygenated gasoline, oil, or starch is carbon dioxide.
Bottom line, oxygenated compounds of either carbon, hydrogen, or any other substance do NOT constitute energy reserves, but rather the end-products of a combustion (ie oxygenation) process.
"there is no ocean of gasoline out there just waiting to fill our gas tanks either." From an energy perspective (or an oxygenation perspective) you couldn''t be more wrong. There are literally OCEANS of gasoline (i.e. oil) out there to fill our gas tanks, but they are running out.
"It might have escaped your attention, but this particular planet has vast saltwater resources. " As I indicated, water is not fuel, not even saltwater. It''s the oxygenated form of hydrogen: its a waste product, both from a hydrogen-activated car, and from our own bodies.
The ease of conversion scares the hell out of big money. We call our selfs free. Yet we let big Government tell us what to think And do.
Imagine filling up with the water hose... It can be done...
There are various ways to produce power from renewable resources but, with the exception of hydrogen, none of them are viable either singly or all together in terms of producing most of our energy needs (obviously wind, solar, etc., etc., should be developed and used whenever/wherever possible and practical).
As the article clearly pointed out, there is a chicken and egg problem with hydrogen. Capital isn''t looking for places to build hydrogen filling stations because there aren''t any hydrogen vehicles and vehicle manufacturers aren''t interested in producing hydrogen vehicles because there''s no place to get the hydrogen. Hence, it''s actually necessary that a company like Honda has to decide to push the envelope to kickstart the whole process, even though they will lose money on the first generation car.
A hydrogen-based economy requires an entirely new production and delivery infrastructure which is actually the only real problem, since we CAN produce massive quantities of it without using any fossil fuels at all. That infrastructure isn''t going to be put in place without a very large investment from the corporate world and/or government, just as was the case with the oil economy in its infancy. (A by-product of that investment will be a huge number of new jobs.)
Whether we like it or not, we''re soon going to run out of oil AND natural gas. A little further down the road, we''re going to run out of coal which, once we would have to use it in place of oil products and natural gas would last us about 35-40 years as well as being more environmentally disruptive even than burning oil to produce hydrogen (which we don''t have to do anyway).
Now, we were told 50 years ago that we''d have nuclear fusion reactors to provide all the power we''ll ever need in 5 years. Clearly, it could take another 50 or 100 or 200 or 500 years, or forever. Of course, we already have nuclear fission but I get the impression that the neighborhood fission reactor might not be such a popular idea. If you want one in your backyard and you don''t live within 500 miles of me, though, go for it; just remember that you have to store the waste in your basement.
Posted by doofus22 at 10:37 PM : Jun 21, 2008
Quit being your name and think about what you just said. Flip a cigarette out a regular car that has the gas cap open and see if you can survive that explosion any better than the hydrogen explosion.
I think he''s using the battery to produce current to create hydrogen from water (ironically, using electrolysis in another battery). He says the hydrogen production works better with saltwater than fresh: makes sense since the metal ions in the saltwater would increase its conductivity to electric current. The hydrogen is released and stored in his gas tank, which he''s filled with aluminum shavings (metals like aluminum and iron absorb huge quantities of hydrogen, then release it upon being heated). Sounds like a good idea, since burning hydrogen could potentially release the POWER to accelerate a car (cars need power not just energy. power=energy per unit time). But modern electric cars already are designed to release POWER for acceleration as needed, so not sure what the advantage is.
Bottom line: he''s using electric power from a battery to drive his car (with hydrogen as a storage medium). Its a good idea, but its dangerous when people think he''s using ordinary seawater as an ''energy source''. He''s not.
Wasn''t that already done in ''DeathRace2000''?
It DOES make it easier to run your car on solar, wind, wave, ocean thermal, geothermal, hydro and other renewable energy sources, but it shouldn''t be confused with them. Its a way of storing energy, like a battery. No more, no less.
wow.
I remember that once we would all be "driving" flying cars, and we could visit people living on the moon.
And now we are dreaming we will be driving these things.
Really.
An empty, or nearly empty, ocean is not an ocean. It''s a lake. Or a pond. Or a dry hole.
As for the oxygenation exercise, your point is not of practical use. Oxygenated hydrogen is BOTH a so-called waste product (if you prefer to insist from a very specific technical point of view that water is a waste product) AND, at the same time, an energy storage medium - just as oil is an energy storage medium and a waste product.
Posted by N8_2000 at 10:41 PM : Jun 21, 2008
The Flux Capacitor is outlawed in this country...
It DOES make it easier to run your car on solar, wind, wave, ocean thermal, geothermal, hydro and other renewable energy sources, but it shouldn''''t be confused with them. Its a way of storing energy, like a battery. No more, no less. - ubrew12
That point of view is valid ONLY for water, not its hydrogen component. In fact, it is COMPLETELY FALSE when speaking of hydrogen.
This nonsense that hydrogen is nothing more than a storage medium is a semantic exercise which has no validity in the real world...and semantics can''t power an automobile. Hydrogen stores nothing. It''s a single atom. It doesn''t mysteriously pick up some kind of magical energy from some other source outside of itself, because it CAN''T.
It has a very powerful tendency to oxygenate and THAT, in and of itself, is what produces energy we can use.
True, but there is no natural source of hydrogen in nature. Hydrogen molecules are so light they long ago migrated to earths outer atmosphere, where ionized there, and were lost to earths gravity field. So the only way to obtain them is to split the molecules that contain them, like water. and THAT takes energy, an energy that is recovered when the hydrogen is recombusted with oxygen (to form water) in an internal combustion engine.
We need to show these oil people that their reign of terror is over. We need to move beyond one of this centuries biggest reasons for war.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.
marcpcbs said: "It''s about time. We need to show these oil people that their reign of terror is over. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. "
Oh, I give up. People. Be as ignorant as you need to be.
Yes, so the hydrogen-as-storage-medium argument is a semantic invention because hydrogen stores nothing but itself. Only if you wish to claim that the whole process is in some small way SIMILAR to storing energy, would the storage medium argument be valid. Then again, it would be valid for anything we think of as an energy source - whether or not oxygenation is the trigger which happens to release the energy - so it''s not a distinction worth making.
The reality is that we''re not going to capture enough power from wind and waves to meet our needs. The investment in time and human effort (and vast sums of money to pay for it) preclude the possibility. The sun, though, is another story. And the most effective way to employ the energy of the sun is to utilize it to strip oxygen from water to create hydrogen, particularly since it''s clearly going to be possible to use biological organisms to make that process faster and more efficient.
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It''s a good thing we just wasted $1 trillon on Iraq...isn''t it... when we could have taken than money and converted over our entire transportation infrastructure to hydrogen.
Man, this country is screwed in the head.
Is this source renewable, plentiful, and is it cost effective to produce?
Also, what are the dangers of cars fueled with hydrogen if they are in a collision? We can all remember the Hindenberg and the end to that was highly horrific.
Finally, the cost is to be the same as a gallon of gas? A gallon of gas at what price? The price before Bush and the Iraq war or the prices now that change each summer?
Availability, cost, plentifulness, safety and hazards to humans and environment--what are the long term effects of asthmatics and other lung challenged people breathing the exhaust from hydrogen fueled cars? There is a long term effect--even if no one has thought to study it yet.
I hope this is doable--when we are serious about our energy problems, we will march toward and embrace solutions instead of just fighting them.
Vote the people''''''''s choice.
VOTE FOR HILLARY!!!
**WE WILL DO IT**
.....and do''''t forget to pass this on.
Posted by TruUSA at 08:13 PM : Jun 21, 2008
Cast their vote in a primary. If every single Hillary supporter would write her name in for the general, she''d have almost 18 million votes.
Unfortunately, the general election voter electorate is about 110 million. If HRC only got her 18 million, do you think she could win? after all, there would still be 92 MILLION votes out there going to someone else.
HRC was the first candidate to get so many votes in a Primary--Primary--which as the experts say--is a popularity contest between like groups. The GE is something different--If HRC got 18 million, McCain got maybe 52 million and Obama got 40 million--guess who would get the least--and guess which party would not win? Do the math--failing to do it correctly is what killed HRC''s chances the first time and what would kill the Dems chances in Nov--if they thought like you.
Posted by dragonwagon5 at 11:14 PM : Jun 21, 2008
You might want to review the reporter''s transcript of the Hindenberg--some people were indeed burned to death--he described them being on fire. "oh the humanity" LOL
MAYBE, WHEN OBAMA IS ELECTED, AND HAS USED HIS ROBIN HOOD POLICIES TO TAKE THE WEALTH AWAY FROM THE RICH, TYPICAL WHITE AMERICA, AND REDISTRIBUTE IT TO THE POOR, ONLY THEN WILL THE ADVERAGE PERSON BE ABLE TO AFFORD THESE AUTO''S.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.
GOD "BLESS" AMERICA. NOT "G D" AMERICA.
Wasn''''t that already done in ''''DeathRace2000''''?
Posted by ubrew12 at 11:26 PM : Jun 21, 2008
___________________________
Damnation Alley as well. LOL
Meanwhile Obama and many Democrats have their head buried in the sand saying we don''t need offshore drilling. They always look at the short term and never the long term, while picking up handouts from Detroit.
This person is not a Democrat but a RepubliCON up to their dirty tricks again. I''m surprised that more people are not tired of these people. Some are even being paid to do it. There should be a rule that you can only talk about the virtues of your candidate and there should be a rule on defamation. It''s sick.
I''m afraid you got it "bassackwards" "my friend".
It''s the Repugs who have blocked every attempt to find long term solutions. They''re too much beholden to the oil billionaires.
The continental shelf has become like a mantra for desperate Repugs, about to lose power. There''s not enough oil there for anything more than a short term fix. What is long term about that?
And the oil barons so beloved by the Repugs (and why shouldn''t they love their lords and masters?) don''t even explore or drill on the tens of millions of leased continental shelf acres they already have rights to.
The filthy lies of the Bushits just don''t have the force they had 4 years ago. Everyone with an IQ greater than room temperature now knows the Bushit regime is incompetent, dishonest, and owned lock stock and barrel by the international power elite.
Repugs are short term--in their plans, and in their future tenure in power in the USA.
Hydrogen is the molecule which is the basis of water the most available resource on the face of the planet. What ever happened to the man who invented the "water" car? So what happened to that idea?
I think we Americans are the most innovative, creative, inventive people on earth. We need to quit depending on oil an exhaustable resource. I hope we Americans don''t let the Chinese nation take THIS away from us. Didn''t Thomas Edison say that "necessity is the mother of inventions"?
I would love to be the first to invest in these hydrogen "filling stations" because in 10 years, I would be financially independent and so would my son for the rest of our lives.
Hydrogen does indeed burn very well. Wouldn''t work as a fuel if it didn''t. And it forms explosive mixtures with air over a wide range of concentrations.
No doubt hydrogen has some challenging physical properties. However its chemical properties are so attractive that it must be the chemical fuel of the future.
It produces no carbon dioxide on burning--only water.
It has a high energy density, so a little goes a long way.
It can be easily produced from water with electricity, either solar, wind, nuclear or whatever source.
In a auto crash, it doesn''t leak and pool up to then catch fire and burn you to death--it quickly evaporates upward.
It doesn''t require expensive and environmentally damaging in more and more desperate places.
All things considered it shows the most promise as a fuel--if you want to keep driving an automobile that is, and not be limited to electrically powered train and tramway lines.
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