Last we heard around here was that it was taking $1.10 worth of energy to make $1.00's worth of hydrogen. So we got one of the Japaneze companies building a bunch of hydrogen cars for some reason. Probably more "public relations." Or perhaps they'll work out some cleaver government subsity program....as soon as they actually build some useable fueling stations.

But unless something has changed via a breakthrough, is the ratio still upside down on cost vs. production or what?

yep still cost more to make then is usable, but also they still havent solved the storage problem. Hydrogen is one of the smallest molicules (sp?) it will even pass through glass

Read:

Honda FCX Clarity: The future is fuel-cell, (The Telegraph, 6/20/08)

2008 Honda FCX, Behind the wheel of the ...and a non-event, (Autoweek, 6/21/08)

First Drive: 2009 Honda FCX Clarity, world's first series production fuel cell car, (AutoblogGreen.com, 11/18/07)

All of the above expressed "concerns" are fully addressed.

Hi All;
I saw a fellow doing a fuel demonstration at the Manchester ,Vt ( formerly Hildene) antique car show last weekend using water as the source of hydrogen, making it on board.( I think) He was running a pickup truck with it. That is all I know and have not checked out the website yet myself, though I plan to do so. I offer it here for discussion on hydrogen. www.fuelfromh2o.com What do you think?

Jim 43

It's like almost every other "alternative" fuel technology to date. It costs more to make it than the value of the end product, and generally creates a different type of hazard in storage and collision scenarios.

Working with liquid and gaseous hydrogen on a daily basis, my concern is storage and explosive limit. I have seen hydrogen fires and explosions first hand. They are not pretty and not something you want to deal with in a collision. Gasoline is bad enough, but at least you can see the fire. What about refueling? I see too many people who have no business operating a gas pump. Don't want to think about these people messing with hydrogen.

Plus, even though it can theoretically be reclaimed from simple water (remember yer freshman chemistry class?) most commercially available hydrogen is produced from petroleum, with a lot of it coming from the Gulf Coast.

Well if we're going to have pump attendants again I may have something to d in my retirement years!

Try the NO FUEL air-powered car. The French guy in the U-Tube thing was on TV talking about a perpetual motion concept where the car runs an on board compressor to replenish much of the power used to run the car and partially fill the tank!

http://www.futurecars.com/
http://www.theaircar.com/acf/air-cars/air-cars.html
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqpGZv0YT4

Yes, there are concerns about hydrogen. But, you'll never find answers without building and experimenting.

CNN had an interview with Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the people selected to lease one of the Honda fuel cell cars. A Honda exec said it cost $100,000 to build the car. But, that isn't anything unusual; prototypes can cost $1 million each, and at their current production levels, these cars are slightly above prototypes.

Anyone remember the test program Chrysler did with turbine cars in the 60's? Very similar to that. Honda could decide to not pursue fuel cell cars, but their lessons learned could lead to other developments.

Personally, I'm in favor of anything that keeps OPEC awake at night, including fuel cells, wind power, solar, drilling anywhere and everywhere we think there is oil, streamlining and approving the building of new refineries, and doing away with ridiculous, antiquated EPA rules and regulations.

Have you forgotten that Ford is working on a hydrogen fuel celled car?
Last year it even tested a fuel cell powered Fusion on the Great White Dyno and achieved over 200MPH with ease.

Good!

I wish the presidential candidates would make a policy statement that manufacturers sharing or selling lessons learned from new technology would not violate anti-trust laws.

Anyone that comes up with a technology to save gas in large quantities is probably not going to be able to get it mass produced quickly enough to keep up with demand, so licensing it to other companies would help the country.

Remember Jeeps licensed and made in Ford factories in WWII?

I don't know that it's an anti-trust thing. I think it's more of a competitive advantage thing. Trust laws are more about companies colluding to control prices for mutual benefit and thereby eliminating price-driven market competition.

Say GM invents this amazing new technology that works. Why would they call Ford and say, "Hey, do you want in on this?" Although it might be better for the country as a whole, companies aren't going to give away their R&D because of it. Their #1 reason for existing (as well as reasons 2 through 100) is to make money, not help the country. So the first one to mass-market a reasonable alternative to the internal combustion engine will own the market, competition be damned. $2 gas didn't make it important. $4+ gas suddenly presents a very attractive new market. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. Once the market is there (and it is today, maybe for the first time ever), it's only a matter of time.

Licensing technology is perfectly legal, however. Porsche is building a hybrid using licensed technology from Toyota. If I have the technology, I can get doubly rich by licensing it AND building it. But, of course, that'll only come after I establish dominance on the market and become the industry standard.

And seriously, what does anyone expect the president and/or congress to do about energy prices and the advancement of new technology? They have exactly zero power to control any of it. We can't look to them for solutions or answers. Which, come to think of it, is how it has always been.

No, look to the free market to find the technology. As soon as you legislate progress or start favoring one technology over others with grants or changing regulations, you limit the choices that researchers can make. Let the guys who specialize in making money figure out the best way to do it, not the dopes in Washington. Have you seen how they've managed Social Security and the public schools? If it were up to me, I wouldn't even want those morons in charge of breakfast cereal.

Back in 1903 the Liquid Air Company built a compressed air powered car. The "fuel" was a tank of liquid air. Air liquifies if you compress it to 600 PSI and will stay liquid in a Dewar flask (thermos) at -600 degrees.

They took the liquid air which expands to high pressure air at normal temperatures, and used it to drive a steam engine.

This was a typical 1903 "gas buggy" auto.

I believe it was the same Liquid Air company that makes welding gases today.

I don't see how they can pressurise air to 4350 PSI when it liquifies at 600PSI.

Maybe they are talking about compressed nitrogen. You can buy compressed nitrogen tanks right now, 2000 PSI, they use it to air up tires. A racer friend tells me one tank of nitrogen last a whole season on his truck, running air tools blowing up tires cleaning parts everything you use compressed air for.

It just seems like somebody way up there has a bug in their butt about hydrogen. It's great. They proved the concept more or less and built some viable prototypes. But stop the hoopla and concentrate on producing the fuel at a viable cost otherwise it's just more hot air when there are several other working solutions now available.

It just seems they are ignoring all the rest and fixated on the one that actually doesn't work yet in an economic sense. I don't get it unless there is a huge number of politicians and others that figure some way to make $$ on hydrogen somehow.

Anything that uses power/energy to produce an end product, fuel or otherwise, has to do so at an economically viable rate. This means that anything which plugs into the power grid increases the need for power at that stage.

Anything electric still requires extra power plant energy. Most plants are coal, natural gas, a few garbage-to-methane and a handful of nukers. So to produce some clean energy we have to increase dirty energy output or use energy that could be better used heating homes and buildings.

And in ANY new tech do we fully know how much energy will be required to manufacture and transport the components for whatever non-gasoline cars that come along. In other words if we squander 3 times the amount of fabrication energy to build the hi-tech Wazoo Flyer over the Hyundai Zippy w/gasloine engine, what the hell is the point?

It becomes a viscious circle quickly.

No kidding! Mention hydrogen in most circles and guess what comes up? Hydrogen bombs.

There have been several hydrogen (and helium) powered cars on the salt, and even though there are no rules concerning this - all the knee-jerk alarmists wanted those cars fueled away from the usual pit areas and only allowed them to run once the starting area was cleared.
It ain't the old days anymore, but some folks don't get it.

It's a shifting environment. What isn't "viable" today will be a huge bargain in a few short years.

Home Hydrogen Fueling Stations - Generators

Gasoline to hit US$7 per gallon in two years: report, Investment Executive 6/26/08

Here's a link to the CBS News story on the $7/gal. prediction. It has a video of the story from Thursday night's broadcast.

Prediction: Gas Prices Headed To $7 A Gallon

It's going to be a different world.

Dave, unfortunately it's been a different world for the last 30 years.

The $7 per gallon predictions are a joke; probably just designed for some obscure 'think tank' to get a ton of free publicity.

We are already seeing a backlash at $4 against the restrictions on drilling. And, several news sources have already reported a 20% drop in demand and far, far fewer congested freeways.

Now, if one of these socialists gets elected president, and they can sell the liberals in Congress to add $3 per gallon in taxes to pay for social programs, $7 per gallon could happen. But, the oil market will implode before the demand is there for $7 per gallon gas any time soon.

If you ask me, this is a way to end the American car manufacturer................

Bob,

What do you think these people want to do? They want to force you to ride a bus for an hour to get somewhere it takes you 20-30 minutes to get in your car!

Why? Who do you think runs the bus companies? Gov subsidies!

Joe

Inventing your own mythical oil supplies is bad enough for your arguments that the past is the future, but pretending things that can actually be checked is an even worse idea.

U.S. oil demand has declined all of 1.4% since last year ( NASDAQ, 6/10/08 ), when demand was still increasing. Before you get all warm and fuzzy at the potential for such a (massive?) decline affecting prices extraordinarily, that decline has brought demand all the way down to just 2003 levels.

Oh yeah, and by the way even at these prices world oil demand (which is what really dictates price) is still increasing ( Reuters, 6/10/08 ).

Now if only all those mythical supplies so many people want to pretend are there were real! Then maybe prices would maybe hold steady (maybe!), and we can get back to melting the ice caps unencumbered.

I don't care what people are reading, look around, this is all a plot........ Guys, it's happening.

They've done that on their own by not preparing for the future, Sky. It is scary how close to true you are, however, at least in the result of all of this. Last month's sales figures had Toyota within less than 1% of overtaking General Motors for #1.

Oy, why is this so hard for America to understand (actually, I know why--a vast majority of people believe in simple, dumbed-down answers from politicians instead of thinking for themselves)? Drilling for oil on our own soil will not lower prices. Not today, not when it finally arrives on the market in 10 years, not ever. Whatever oil comes out of the ground will be sold on the world market at the current going price, which is currently about $130/barrel. This is why gas is expensive.

Folks, there is no shortage (at the moment). This isn't supply and demand in action (well, actually it is supply and demand for oil futures, but not the oil itself). Expensive energy is here to stay. Learn to manage it. Don't wait for a government band-aid or hand-out to make it better. Neither side has an answer, so no matter who gets elected, you're still going to be paying at least $4/gallon for gas. Politicians can't fix this for you, no matter how much you want to believe they will. There's no conspiracy, no collusion, no secret deals behind the scenes designed to stick it to average Americans.

If you belive this hype by your favorite candidate/newscaster/buddy down the street, you're just not thinking for yourself. All the politicians will make you think it's the answer, and most rubes buy it hook, line and sinker because it just tastes so good and looks so stupidly obvious at first glance. But the only way domestic drilling could make gas cheaper is if the oil companies decided to sell it to us at a discount and forego the billions they could make selling it on the commodities exchange. Yeah, sure, they'll do that. Maybe if we say pretty please with sugar on top...

The only person who can do anything to lower your energy costs is you.

Dave, other than the Prius, the US has cars that are getting the same miliage as Toyota but the people are still not buying them. The Lexus LX, a giant SUV that gets 14 mpg shows sales that doubled in the first 5 months. How do you figure that?? Our government should put a quota to how many cars can be sold here in the states. Our economy is getting killed. Something has to change............This is going to be survival for all of us and our children.