Still, it was fun to park at a Total gas station outside Berlin--one of a few demonstration hydrogen-car filling stations in Europe, with several others scattered around the world--and fill the sleek machine with liquid hydrogen. A fill-up takes about eight minutes. The retail price was 8 Euros (about $10.60) for a kilogram of hydrogen, which has the approximate energy content of one gallon of gasoline.
Klaus Draeger, a BMW research manager, suggests that hydrogen today is where gasoline was 100 years ago. A century ago, he says, "who could imagine that there would be a world-embracing network of filling stations? Only a few visionaries would imagine that happening." Many of the BMW engineers hovering over the journalists noted that radical infrastructure changes are not a major challenge. And they're probably right. I've seen pictures showing what Berlin looked like 60 years ago. It's hard not to agree that infrastructure can be completely rebuilt in a matter of decades.
But only if it makes sense to do so. In this case, the infrastructure isn't the largest issue. Hydrogen is the largest issue. You can't just dig it out of the ground and burn it. You have to either extract it from hydrocarbon fuels, which defeats the clean-energy purpose, or extract it from water molecules by applying electricity--which means you are either burning the fossil fuel back at the power plant or taking away much-needed renewable electricity from the power grid.
When you extract hydrogen from fossil fuels, you actually end up emitting more carbon dioxide. In fact, driving a car whose hydrogen was extracted from natural gas results in roughly double the carbon-dioxide emissions produced by driving a car that simply burns the natural gas directly. For fossil-fuel extraction of hydrogen to ever make sense from an environmental perspective, the separated carbon dioxide would have to be sequestered underground.
And if you use electricity to split water, you'll need to make sure the electricity doesn't itself come from fossil fuels. The electricity would have to come from a renewable source, like wind or the sun. It's not clear that hydrogen production is the wisest use for renewable energy, except marginally: it can absorb electricity on very windy or very sunny days, when renewable power plants are producing excess supply.
BMW maintains that once we have breakthroughs in renewable supply and hydrogen storage, cars based on Hydrogen 7 technology can fill every driveway--and perhaps even every garage. I want the company to be right. The idea of a high-performance car that essentially emits only water vapor is very alluring. But for now, the Hydrogen 7 appears to be a remarkable engineering achievement for a future that may never arrive.
Comments
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/converted.swf
http://www.efcf.com/reports/
Andreas
11/13/2006
Posts:1
Hydrogen - the closer you look, the dumber it gets.
SVE
11/13/2006
Posts:48
snedunuri
11/13/2006
Posts:30
1) We are already living in a hydrogen economy of a kind. Crude oil refinement is a big consumer of hydrogen. Hydrocracking is used to produce diesel and jet fuel from heavier crude oil fractions.
2) Bulk hydrogen is produced usually by steam reformation of natural gas. Once natural gas production starts declining, one way to mass produce hydrogen would be thermal decomposition of water in high-temperature nuclear reactors.
With breeding, nuclear fission fuel reserves are enormous. It is curious that the author neglected to mention nuclear power.
I agree that hydrogen combustion might not be the best option to power vehicles in the future. There is a lot of scope for battery development using nanotechnology. The vast majority of motorists will never need high performance for their daily commutes.
MarkkuJantun...
11/14/2006
Posts:3
As long as the hydrogen is made from natural gas (steam reforming), it would be way more sensible to fuel the BMW with natural gas. Just wonder what type of noise the engine would make then...
But even when the H2 would come from nuclear, I won't sit in such a car - too dangerous. Once batteries get better (and they are not far from acceptable performance), then electricity is the best solution. And I swear, BMW will start making electric BMWs. An interesting alternative, in particular for aviation fuel, is synthetic liquid hydrocarbons (cf. the discussion on the "Methanol Society") that can be manufactured from a carbon feedstock (coal, biomass and even CO2 from flue gas) and hydrogen. The hydrogen in turn can be produced by electrolysis or high temperature thermochemical processes.
And this is where nuclear comes in: there is no better power source that could possibly provide all the H2 for transport fuel or even fertilizer production. Renewables are fine but limited and unreliable, natural gas will be gone soon, and coal is extremely dirty, not only in terms of CO2 emissions.
futtemi
12/04/2006
Posts:5
Second, there are hydrogen-on-demand solutions (such as Ecotality's Hydratus, just to name one example) that don't require stored hydrogen, taking most of the explosive risk away.
Lisa Hart
Ecowriter
01/08/2007
Posts:7
Instead of burning hydrogen, bio mass or fossil fuels, BMW could burn ‘a new gaseous and combustible form of water’ that produces 3 times the BTUs of hydrogen alone. This gas is called Aquygen by its inventor Dennis Klein at Hydrogen Technology Applications, Inc. As noted in your article, hydrogen gas alone is difficult to make and store. However, when hydrogen is combined in “supermolecules” with oxygen it becomes safe, stable and dramatically more powerful. This new gas can be efficiently produced from water, via Klein’s invention, using only the electricity from the car’s alternator. The emissions are only water vapor.
I, too, want BMW to be right. BMW has gone a long way towards a remarkable goal, the last step is to use the fuel breakthrough that will make it all work for BMW, the consumer and the environment.
Best regards,
Pam Harding
Bluesky
01/08/2007
Posts:1
fuelcell
11/18/2008
Posts:1