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It's official Toyota is full speed fuel cells for compliance after 2014

Discussion in 'Prius, Hybrid, EV and Alt-Fuel News' started by austingreen, May 13, 2014.

  1. 2k1Toaster

    2k1Toaster Brand New Prius Batteries

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    Oh Toyota... So ugly.
     
  2. Zythryn

    Zythryn Senior Member

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    Perhaps it is some sort of 'welcome to Texas' hazing ritual?
     
  3. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    I think you answered your own question there. Long haul trucks need lots of fuel, and that means even 10,000 psi is not dense enough, you need liquid. It takes a lot of energy to go from natural gas to liquid hydrogen, while liquid natural gas (lng) isn't too bad. We don't even know if a fuel cell truck would be more efficient than a lng one, but we do know the fuel and truck are much less expensive with lng.

    There is a not so secret other way to get hydrogen, and it gets imports from friendly countries Australia and the United States. Yep you can steam reform coal, especially in a IGCC coal electrical power plant, to produce hydrogen. The carbon stream can also be sequestered. This is more expensive hydrogen would be in the US, but .... the Japanese government will subsidize a great deal. But we should face facts, even at $50K per car, say they subsidize 1 million cars a year for 10 years until infrastructure is built, that is only $50B/year or $500B in 10 years. It sounds like a big number, but the US spent more than twice that on the IRaq war, and has a war with ISIL to show for it.

    The US car market is over 4 times bigger than the Japanese market, and the infrastructure is probably around 10 times more extensive. Even if infrastructure cost half as much per station, building infrastructure in the US would probably cost 5x more in the US than in Japan.
     
    #343 austingreen, Sep 16, 2014
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
  4. 70AARCUDA

    70AARCUDA Active Member

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    Uh, something from the asian GODZILLA Academy of Automotive Designs...maybe?
     
  5. GrumpyCabbie

    GrumpyCabbie Senior Member

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    Or the Cube off Terrahawks;

    [​IMG]

    I knew it reminded me of something I just couldn't place.

    Terrahawks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
     
  6. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    [​IMG]

    Bob Wilson
     
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  7. 70AARCUDA

    70AARCUDA Active Member

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    Bob Wilson -- EXACTLY!
     
  8. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    The Toyota hydrogen car eerily looks like dan akroyd in the dentist chair ahla ConeHeads
    [​IMG]
    .
     
  9. Troy Heagy

    Troy Heagy Member

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    I had a mini-debate with a professor at Univ. of California Irvine. She is extremely pro-hydrogen and when I said H2 cars are really just CNG-powered, she said we could get the H2 from landfills.

    I politely ended the debate, but there are not enough landfills to supply 200 million U.S. cars, so that isn't an answer. 99% of the H2 will still be CNG-derived in California and other states. IMHO putting solar panels on homes & using the sun to recharge an EV is much, much cleaner than having CNG-powered fuel cell cars.
     
  10. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    UCI has an entire bogus department that gets tons of money from the fuel cell Lobby - & that pretty much says it all . . . . except for this; They know what side of the bread that their butter is on.
     
  11. 70AARCUDA

    70AARCUDA Active Member

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    OVER ABUNDANCE of miopic EYES and miopic MINDS...
    There seems to be an OVER ABUNDANCE of miopic EYES and miopic MINDS...too many people simply refuse to see the TREES for the FORESTS (wink,wink)!
     
  12. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    +1
    Yes, definitely you can get biogas (mainly methane) from biomas like sewage and land fill garbage, then process this down to generate hydrogen, UCI has done just this.

    Hydrogen fueling station cornerstone of UCI research program | Giving | UCI
    What they don't tell you when trumpeting this triumph, is it is expensive and not scalable. The UCI station can fill 10 fcv a day, if you need to fill up once a week that is 70 cars. Tesla this year will sell about 35,000 cars. That would require if they were fuel cell running on landfill gas require 500 of these stations, but land fills and sewage are not placed neatly where you want to have your hydrogen station, so you need more electricity to liquify the stuff and truck it to the stations.

    In Austin we take the same gas and generate electricity from it. It costs more than wind, but this prevents ghg from escaping from our waste, and is only a small percentage of the electric bill.

    The cheapest, fastest way to substitute natural gas, or biogas, for oil is the pickens plan. 15% of oil goes to long haul trucking. If we ran these trucks on liquified natural gas instead of oil, we would reduce oil usage much more than hydrogen could promise in the next 2 decades.
    +1
    Some of the UCI "research" is payed for by Toyota, some other is payed for by CARB, both want taxpayer money to produce hydrogen. Follow the money.
     
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  13. Troy Heagy

    Troy Heagy Member

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    But natural gas still emits pollutants (CO, NOx, HC, soot). That's why a Civic CNG is rated no cleaner (lifetime analysis) than a Civic Hybrid running on gasoline.
     
  14. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    When we think of unhealthy pollutants natural gas vehicles well to wheel emit very low nmog (non-methane organic gasses), particulates, SO2, and NOx.

    They do emit the ghgs methane and carbon dioxide. In fact I think they put out more ghg/mi then hybrids. lng trucks take even more energy to liquify the natural gas.

    As low as hybrids are in the tailpipe, I can't believe small cng vehicles do much productive. The pickens plan though targets those big vehicles that are not easy to hbridize. Here you trade lower unhealthy pollution for higher ghg pollution, and more importantly can reduce a great deal of oil imports for less expensive domestic natural gas. Here hydrogen would be no lower in ghg pollution, and fcv can not in the near term (next decade) substitute nearly the quantity of natural gas for oil. The other part of the original pickens plan was to build more renewables to substitute wind and sun for coal for the power grid, which would make it a net decrease in ghg.
     
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