Hydrogen is gasoline and diesel in a different form; if it catches on as a fuel for automobiles, it will take huge quantities of fossil fuel stock, burned in the air by the polluting process of reforming(refining) into hydrogen, to satisfy the needs of the Nation and World. It's gasoline 2 all over again. Enough hydrogen to meet the needs of this country can not be supplied by electrolysis and this is proven in the laboratories every time the cost of the product come into play...electrolysis is a false deflection argument by fossil fuel interest to keep their hydrogen idea front and center and to slow the transition to clean energy,

The compelling advantage electricity, created by solar, wind and hydro has, is it's local and the fuel source creates very little pollution, if any at all.

Davemart, that leaves 2/3 to come from fossil sources, and who's to say that the 1/3 can even be maintained if the FCEV fleet grows from 1000 to 100,000?

You can't fix ignorant egos.

Lad:

What is your obsession with attacking electric cars with on board generation of electricity to the point of making deliberately false and misleading comments when you have been offered accurate information countless times?

Hydrogen for refining is almost all from NG reforming, although trials are being made for instance in Rotterdam to change that.

Hydrogen for transport which is what we are discussing here is a very different matter, 33% of it by mandate in California and in some of the Scandinavian countries is 100% from renewables.

In addition Toyota is using biogas to power their semis in the Port of Los Angeles.

I’m going to do my part moving toward the Governor’s 5m ZEV target by picking up a Tesla Model 3 on Monday. Will spend the next year driving it all over the US and letting other people drive it too, as part of the Electric Car Guest Drive.

Send me an email if you’d like an invitation to drive my Model 3. There is no cost.

chris@...

EP:

As others here have noted, your childish ill manners put you outside the bounds of adult discussion.

I can't be bothered to read your lengthy list of prejudice, let alone reply to it.

Grow up and join the adults.

So, I would wager that the same electricity used for creating hydrogen would be the same energy used to go into BEVs. The sources are probably a wash then. "Big Oil wins"

people come on here and suggest drastic social change in the form of suggesting oil be phased out with a vice tax with BEVs being an alternative to our oil consumption, and it has to be done quickly and by force no matter the social and economic cost. I bring up the possible repercussions such as the mass majority cannot afford a car that parodies a gasoline car, the mass majority need a car to get to work, and a simple plugin electric isn't going to cut it yet, people won't be able to afford to consume goods.
I am met with people need to move to the city, the government should subsidize lower income individuals, and people need to change thier lifestyles in a severe way.

BEVs and FCs will become parody to ICEs over time. We will get to a renewable future eventually, we don't need to force it, we are trending towards it.

We can only power battery electrics with electricity, but where we get hydrogen can come from many sources.

I think hydrogen from electrolysis is probably not how we should use the electricity. Natural gas can be captured from several sources, even from non renewable sources it has the very potential of being greener than our current grid today powering a BEV, using advanced processes (which are still in the lab).

Assuming these technologies work as described, what does it matter if we emit some CO2 to suppress the entire emissions of our entire road going fleet?

Also, other harmful emissions like HCs, PM, NOx and various carcinogens come from ICEs. Fuel Cells AND BEVs can help displace this. CO2 isn't our only concern.

If it weren't for you two arguing, most of us probably wouldn't be so well informed from your differing points of views.

We have a lot of issues in the States as it pertains to our energy consumption and transmission. I don't think we can be idealists, not yet anyway. There is always something better than what we have now, but to reach out and grasp at extremes of what could be instead of working towards gradual and consistent improvement isn't going to net the results any faster.

We as a nation need to bite the bullet on carbon neutral power generation. I am not talking dams, or wind, or solar(I really don't like dams). We need a baseload of Nuclear, and Geothermal. Both we can do at scale to power a large portion of the United States. The government needs to step in and raise funds for secure power generation. If the scale of these plants are big enough, and we bother updating our infrastructure, we could feasibly power most of our country from a handful of carbon neutral plants. It might take high tension DC lines, and some sort of on demand system (like dispatchable H2 to power plants with battery backup, as they can be almost instant).

I think H2 should come from methane or natural gas. I don't care if its from renewables, the notion of big brother, oil, battery, or what have you is disingenuous. Its the damn retailers that really hit you below the belt, I've seen 200% markup on gasoline for a few weeks when we had oil glut. I had information on the wholesale price to the stations.

The reason I think we should get it from natural gas now, and in the future is we have technology coming out that will change the efficiency and fast. It would be more energy efficient to run a car on hydrogen, than straight BEV, if the following was built:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/11/20171120-coorstek.html

On top of that, the US has many uses for natural gas, and we are a net exporter already, we won't stop drilling or fracking because all our vehicles are electric. We frankly will never stop. We can only hope to use less of it. Oil/Hydrocarbons are an amazing substance, we frankly cannot live without it, but we don't need to burn it for power or transportation at the rates we do.

We would need to have an additional 102,000 tonnes/day of hydrogen for all the cars in the US(255 million) to run on if such a thing were to occur. The unique thing is that what I listed above in that website is scalable from 10kg/hr to however big they decide they can make it, which means in most of our stations could generate onsite without much change in infrastructure to the building.

There is this process too:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/11/20171117-ucsb.html

similar but with an added benefit of making pure carbon as byproduct.

Hydrogen has many uses, and likely we would never use more than 1000 tonnes/day for transportation in the US, but other consumers of it would easily surpass what is needed for transportation. We currently make about 25,000 tonnes/day with methane steam reforming.

Steam reforming is very wasteful, the new processes in the articles I linked will likely take the cost from $4.50 a kg, below $2/kg., or even lower if its made on site at a station. At $4/kg H2 isn't that far off from the cost to run a gasoline car, if it falls below $2, we could really see hydrogen take off.

The two technologies I listed could really tip the scales towards a hydrogen future happening sooner than later. Before this, it was more of a optimistic view point, and partly a necessity because of the limitations of batteries in cost/size/weight. These bring hydrogen from obscurity to disruptive.

The problem I have with "clean hydrogen" is than it uses electric power that otherwise could be used more efficiently. The round trip efficiency for electrolysis, compression and back to electricity via fuel cell is 25-30% and with battery storage, it is probably around 90%, so the efficiency is about 1/3. California still gets a large amount or it's electricity from coal which is mostly burned in Nevada and Utah so they import electricity and export pollution -- clever. And I live downwind of some of this pollution.

The coorstek scheme could sequester the CO2 rather efficiently assuming there were no other transient pollutants, and if its clean enough, we could put it to use.

Its byproducts look at quick glance to be water and CO2, sure there are possibly other reactions, but methane is pretty simple to break down, you likely wont end up with anything but what is expected.

The reason why I suggested geothermal and nuclear, was because they can create tremendous generation without exponential costs if sized right from the beginning. Most of the costs are really upfront on these buildings, nuclear has the added cost of being forever a target for terrorists, We need to enable buildings like these to sell to as many markets/customers as possible(reducing the cost of kwh by way of utilization). These are very very reliable base load generation. If we can start by making a smarter and much more capable grid, we can start offlining and shuttering coal, diesel and other less efficient generation.

I brought up dispatchable H2 power because you don't need much grid storage if you can ramp up local backup/ dispatchable power in under 20 seconds. They could have the stacks running at 1% of capacity and ramp up in time of need almost instantly, and can be sustained indefinitely via shipments of hydrogen.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/

As for energy storage in all the other sectors: Transportation is 28%, If we electrify the first 30 miles of travel (from the grid), we are talking maybe 9-12% has to come from other sources such as petroleum.

So, that accounts for 58% of our total energy, if we have plugin hybrids capable of most short trips, and places to charge them.

If we chose to store our energy in the form of H2, and produce this from advanced methods or possibly surplus carbon neutral/negative power we stand to stand to gain if we are using it to replace conventional petroleum uses.

We make 9,000,000 tonnes a year of H2, transportation wouldn't need much to be rid of ICEs. New processes would make it very efficient to produce and consume in a variety of ways

Most of the costs are really upfront on these buildings, nuclear has the added cost of being forever a target for terrorists,

If they're such targets, why have terrorists been going after night clubs, bike paths, buses and subways instead?

The truth is that NPPs, especially the AP1000s at Vogtle and everything that will follow, are

1. extremely HARD targets which
2. would have zero direct impact on major populations even if they were hit.  Further,
3. hitting them requires a level of team coordination far beyond 9/11, and that's not likely to be able to get together in the USA ever again.

Ideally we'd let terrorists waste their efforts on hard targets like NPPs instead of rented-van jihad, but terrorists are actually bright enough to have this figured out already.  Ending rented-van jihad requires expulsion, and that is coming.

I brought up dispatchable H2 power because you don't need much grid storage if you can ramp up local backup/ dispatchable power in under 20 seconds.

Exactly how do you store this hydrogen?  How do you ship it, when it has about 1/3 the energy density of methane and NG pipeline congestion is already one of our biggest problems?

that accounts for 58% of our total energy, if we have plugin hybrids capable of most short trips, and places to charge them.

That's getting there (IF all your NG energy is 100% sequestered) but you still need to hit 75% of the remainder.

We make 9,000,000 tonnes a year of H2

Remember, 1 kg of hydrogen is the energy equivalent of about 1 gallon of gasoline.  The USA uses upwards of 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year; 9 billion kg H2 falls woefully short of replacing it.  (Did I mention that this problem is STAGGERINGLY large?)

FWIW, the Coorstek unit consumes water; the net reaction is CH4 + 2 H2O -> 4 H2 + CO2.  Pumping out the hydrogen as it's created drives the reaction to the right.  However, to get carbon sequestration you have to capture and dispose of it at the end.  If you're doing this at fueling stations it means CO2 trucks going out rather than fuel trucks going in.  I'll let you calculate volumes and masses.

Once current power contracts expire in 2027, it will be illegal for California utilities to get coal power from out-of-state plants. As a result, the plants will need to be shuttered or converted to natural gas.

In order to keep selling electricity to California, Utah’s Intermountain Power Project is expected to convert to natural gas by 2025. The Utah power company sells about 90 percent of its power to six California municipalities. About 45 percent of the company’s capacity is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who has indicated that it will curtail coal use by 2025.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will also sell its 21 percent ownership in Arizona’s Navajo Generating Station to the plant’s operator, the Salt River Project, by summer of 2016. It gets 477 megawatts of electricity from the plant’s coal-fired generators. As part of the sale, the Salt River Project must close one of the plant’s three coal generators by 2016.

New Mexico’s San Juan plant is planning to shutter two coal-fired generators by the end of 2017 due to federal EPA regulations.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/californias-hidden-coal-use/