Toyota: Fuel cell hybrids ARE the best hybrids
A fuel cell version by 2015?What's the future of the automobile? Hybrids, plug-ins or fuel cell vehicles?
All of the above according to Toyota.
Obviously, Toyota already sells a number of hybrid cars, and Toyota will begin rolling out plug-in electric vehicles by 2012, followed by fuel cell hybrids in 2015.
While demonstrating how Toyota plans to cut fuel cell costs, the company noted that plug-in vehicles will be used for small, short range intra-city vehicles. However, for larger vehicles and longer ranges, Toyota believes that fuel cell hybrids are the most well-to-wheel efficient autos compared to conventional hybrids, plug-in EVs and conventional gas vehicles.
Labels: electric cars, fuel cells, Hybrid Vehicles, toyota
posted by Dahcredyns at
7:12 AM
9 Comments:
Toyota is pretty much saying that the plug-in is, apparently not a longer-term solution for longer range non-urban cars - which I find interesting because in order to think that - they must not have much faith in any near-term battery technology breakthroughs.
This chart is interesting - and provocative:
http://bioage.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4fbe53ef0120a5ba443f970b-popup
they show gasoline going from well to tank at 84% efficiency and hydrogen at 67% efficiency then at the tank-to-wheel, gasoline at 23% for ICE and hydrogen at 59% for essentially generating on-board electricity for a hydrogen hybrid combo.
I'd like to hear some energy scientists weigh in on this chart. I'm a little skeptical.
They claim that the hydrogen will be cleaner because the GHG that come from extracting it from NG because they will sequester said gases in played out gas wells but couldn't you make a similar argument for a gasoline refinery?
There are at least two issues that get conflated in these issues that tend to work against apple-to-apple comparisons.
the first is that making a car more efficient by cutting the weight ..making it smaller, etc is not the same as a car that has a more efficient powerplant.
For instance, you can take any old ICE vehicle and do the same weight reduction strategies and achieve a very good improvement in mileage.
The second is to say that fuel such as hydrogen will be "cleaner" even though creating it will produce pollution - but since the GHG will be sequestered that - that demonstrates it's an inherently cleaner fuel.
No.
If you want an apple-to-apple comparison you would compare hydrogen to gasoline with BOTH of them utilizing GHG sequestration OR ..BOTH of them without sequestration.
so if you wanted a more objective comparison - you'd take two identical Chevy Impalas ( or Honda Civics.. choose your vehicle) but you pick two identical ones - and one you power with hydrogen (with or without sequestration) and the other with gasoline (with or without sequestration).
THEN you'd actually have IMHO a more realistic and honest comparison.
seems to me - on ANY fuel that is a fossil fuel .... or any fuel that is derived from a fossil-fuel .. it needs to be recognized that until and unless GHG gas sequestration is a viable practice that we are not really dealing very objectively because we are assuming that sequestration is a proven viable - sustainable practice as opposed to an emerging technology that may or may not prove to be a solution.
and I think that's what bothers me about the Toyota energy chart.
If sequestration were, in fact, a viable process, then even our coal-powered electricity plants could be considered as "clean" fuels - as long as we could, in fact, sequester the pollutants.
Essentially, what we are talking about doing is to produce super-clean, very low polluting fuels that do not exist in nature and that will require the use of energy of some kind to produce these super clean fuels.
To turn this around - what if sequestration - as a process - is found to be not viable at all?
then what happens?
I'd say that a whole lot of supposed solutions go away... and we are back to a square one type situation...
My question - what would we do if sequestration turns out to not work?
what paths do we take in that scenario?
i'm not following larry.
natural gas reformatted into hydrogen and used by a fuel cell vehicle is well-to-wheel more efficient than a gasoline vehicle in terms of CO2 emissions.
i don't see any question there.
my questions would be around long term cost-effectiveness predictions.
therefore, you're small car talk is point on. is it, for instance, better to focus on vehicle weight reductions versus powertrains, at least in the short term?
might not carbon-fiber and nanotubules actually be more important than lithium and automotive battery technologies, or hydrogen for that matter, especially if aerodynamics and design or rethought using these lightening technologies?
again, at least in the short term?
i'm not saying they are, but moving weight around is the critical issue.
is too much attention paid to just powertrains?
that would be my primary attack on Toyota - and most major automakers' beliefs on - on fuel cell technology, and battery plug-in technology, at least in the short to midterm.
still, toyota does seem to take this cost-effectiveness angle into account.
" natural gas reformatted into hydrogen and used by a fuel cell vehicle is well-to-wheel more efficient than a gasoline vehicle in terms of CO2 emissions."
"Study: Hydrogen Cars Don't Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions"
" The Reason Foundation report shows that if the U.S. replaced 20 percent of today's vehicles with hydrogen cars, CO2 emissions would either drop a tiny amount from 1.67 billion tons per year to 1.63 billion tons, or actually rise to 2.13 billion tons a year, depending upon what method is used to produce the hydrogen."
http://reason.org/news/show/1002886.html
now I'm not a big supporter of the Reason folks .. it was just the first link that came up...
but the point is that you generate GHG when you produce hydrogen from NG.
" However, when fossil fuels (natural gas, oil, or coal) were used, the greenhouse gas emissions were greater than for gasoline fueled vehicles in most cases. The use of steam methane reforming to produce hydrogen is included in the analysis."
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4057326
so more GHG are created by extracting hydrogen from NG than from refining and using gasoline in ICE vehicles is what I get out of this.
hydrogen could also be produced from oil ..and from coal - as well as NG but GHG are emitted in the extraction process - and is emitted by the fuels used to provide the energy needed to power the extraction process.
no?
well, we're dealing with studies and statistics, so that leaves a tremendous amount of gray area, especially since there is a huge amount of money invested into these area.
So, who is really being objective? Whose 'facts' do we believe?
generally speaking, most would agree that burning natural gas, well-to-wheel produces 25 percent less CO2 than does burning gasoline. however, it's also much cleaner in many other ways as well, such as carbon monoxide and a host of other pollutants.
according to data i've seen on this subject, natural gas reformation takes about 20 - 30 percent extra natural gas to reformat into an equivalent pure natural gas versus hydrogen fuel comparison.
the efficiency of the fuel cell makes up for this difference, and then some, according to GM, Toyota, Honda, etc.
furthermore, i think the belief is that natural gas reformation into hydrogen is as bad as it gets in terms of both co2 pollution and efficiencies. for example, many believe that it will be far more efficient to store excess solar power as hydrogen versus electricity in lithium batteries.
hence natural gas reformation is just an immediate conduit away from oil, especially foreign oil, and towards green energy.
thus, i would say the question might really be, if you could produce unlimited solar and wind energy, would it be easier and more practical to store that energy as hydrogen or in batteries?
re: gray areas
well.. it's part of the landscape with regard to which directions that automotive technology will take.
re: hydrogen produced from solar..
it's a real working technology right now.
The only problem is that it will cost between 25 and 50 cents per kilowatt hour and result in hydrogen that costs in excess of 10 bucks a gallon.
having said that - I would expect either a breakthrough in solar panels or fusion technology to arrive prior to the time we have no option other than $10 a gallon fuel.
well, there are a lot of different pathways being developed, solar-powered microbial electrolysis, for instance.
one way or another solar breakthroughs are going to lead to massive energy production capabilities, but capturing and storing that energy is still going to be critical to going completely renewable. many believe that role is best played hydrogen versus batteries for instance.
I saw "who killed the electic car" for the first time in a while and was reminded about the "5 miracles of hydrogen vehicles".
It seems that 2 or 3 of these miracles still haven't occurred yet....
however, let's be honest, who killed the electric car isn't a completely objective movie.
of course, automakers aren't completely objective either.
still, automakers know the plug-in vehicle will happen faster than the fuel cell vehicle, and nobody has more research on this issue than the major automakers across the globe, and all of them believe the fuel cell vehicle isn't going to be too far behind the electric vehicle - maybe 5 or 10 years.
if they knew now that fuel cell vehicles could never compete with EVs, wouldn't a few of them give it all up and focus all their r and d on battery technology?
if you talk to the engineers working on these fuel cell vehicles, they'll tell you that change is happening rapidly right now.
smaller, lighter and made with new materials and designs, today's fuel cells are vastly superior to those of just a few years ago, and like Moore's Law, automakers claim that the new science that is driving these changes in fuel cell technology is exponential in the same way that forever changed computer chip technology.
each generation of fuel cell technology is becoming smaller, lighter and more efficient and made of cheaper materials that provide scalable economics, at least according to the automakers.
nonetheless, certainly, this could be rutted thought in the industry, and they are simply unable, or too afraid to let this idea go.
if it were just gm, ford and bmw, it would be easier to buy, yet hyundai, honda, mazda, for instance, are some of the biggest advocates. even tata has gotten into the game.
likewise, automakers are getting to a point where their investments into plugins are going to soon eclipse their fuel cell investments. for some it might have already been eclipsed.
why not then just focus exclusively there if most of your r and d money is going there, and the data paints a very dark picture of fuel cell reality?
therefore, not only is it automaker's reluctance to let fuel cells go that is interesting, but the sudden resurgence of fuel cell hope throughout all of the world's top 10 automakers+ that is also very compelling.
of course, that doesn't prove anything. then again, plug-in EVs are a long way from proving that they are the world's renewably-powered solution.
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