Who Killed the Hydrogen-Powered Car?

James Anderson  Jun 08, 2009 10:10 am

Who Killed the Hydrogen-Powered Car?
 
Unfeasibility, expense were enough to do it in.
 

 
Energy density or transportation problems didn’t kill hydrogen. What killed it is the deliverable amount of energy to the wheels of a vehicle compared to a battery solution. This is why we won't be seeing hydrogen-powered cars from Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC), or Ford (F).

The table below needs a little explanation. It starts with 100 kilowatts of electricity from renewable sources -- solar or wind for example. It then compares the steps required to get the electrical energy stored on a vehicle as either hydrogen or batteries. During each step, energy is lost -- generally as heat -- until electric power is driving the electric motors on a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle or a battery-powered vehicle. Each step shows the percentage efficiency and the remaining energy left after each step.



This table used data from an article published by Ulf Bossel entitled, "Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?" in Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 94, No. 10, October 2006. You can argue all you want about the exact percentages used in each step, but the result won't be much different. A battery-powered vehicle will be close to 3 times as efficient as a hydrogen- powered fuel cell vehicle.

The DOE got it right.

If the one word back in the 1967 movie The Graduate was “plastics," the word for the future will be “batteries,” with the possible addition of “ultracaps." I’ll discuss batteries and a potential “ultracap play” in a follow-up article.
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Comments (19) See All Comments »
06-10-2009, 12:24 pm
Your comments remind me how rediculous people thought the steam engine was, it kept blowing up: How rediculous trains were, they needed to build tracks to use them and the engines kept blowing up; how rediculous cars were, they could on handle two pe
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06-13-2009, 5:11 pm
Yes, you just ran straight into the wall of the combined industrialist government partnership that will kill the idea.
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06-20-2009, 6:10 pm
Mythbusters pretty much disproved the Hindenburg burning skin myth. I used to believe it myself.

Now I have to ask "who benefits the most from battery operated cars?" I think I'll have to invest in coal companies.
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06-21-2009, 1:09 pm
I've only seen Mythbusters a couple of times, and I was not impressed with their inability to do things, but then, many of the things I have accomplished with technology have seemed impossible to others.

The burning skin of the Hin
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06-25-2009, 7:15 pm
Are we talking perpetual motion machine here?
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