Hydrogen: The Fuel for Losers

"Burton Richter, the Paul Pigott professor of the physical sciences and a Nobel Laureate, is clearly not going to line up to buy a hydrogen car anytime soon.

"The present hydrogen fuel cells are losers... Losers," he said. "They have to go back to the R&D lab."

Richter spoke at the Almaden Institute taking place at IBM's Almaden labs, but I ran into him at lunch. So while he ate fajitas, I pestered him with questions. Here's what he had to say:

• Fuel cells fail in a variety of ways. Hydrogen is expensive to produce. The membranes inside the fuel cells don't last long and the membranes also require lots of platinum to generate the electricity-producing reaction.

"The entire world production of platinum isn't large enough for 10 million cars," he said.

• Electric cars, or at least plug-in hybrids, are a lot closer economically than many believe. In California, electric cars cost about 3 cents a mile to operate. Gas cars cost around 12 cents a mile at $3 a gallon gas. Plug-in drivers thus can save about $1,000 a year or more in fuel costs.

Consumers also want electrics. "They will snap them up. It will be like the Prius. It will start off slow but then take off," he said.

In his presentation, he showed the efficiency of electric cars in another way. It only takes about 3.3 kilowatts to get an electric car to 40 miles an hour and 10.8 kilowatts to get it to 70 miles per hour. It takes a Prius 4.8 kilowatts to hit 40 and 16.8 kilowatts to hit 70. Meanwhile, a Ford Expedition needs 10.3 kilowatts to hit 40 miles an hour and 38.1 kilowatts to get to 70 miles per hour.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hydrogen-the-fuel-for-losers/

Kind of bizarre.

would be a better comparison. How much of the difference in wattage is due to the efficiency of an electric motor, and how much is due to the massive size of the Expedition? I'd like to see the same numbers for a Corolla or a Ford Focus.

I'm guessing he chose the Expedition because it made for a more dramatic presentation.

I agree it's a pointless comparison because there's no doubt my old CB350 could get up to those speeds while using a tiny fraction of the energy usage... same goes for any small car.

Without a good working heater sales are going to be zilch anywhere north of the gulf states.

The beauty of electric cars is that they can run off of batteries that can be charged in numerous ways not dependent on the oil companies.

Car batteries can be recharged by plugging them in to an electric power grid, a wind-powered generator, a solar panel, or by means of an on-board engine run on gasoline, or biofuels, or even by a pedal driven generator.

Hydrogen fuel cells make you dependent on the corporations to power your vehicle just as much as you are now dependent on the oil companies. To maximize profits, they will burn coal and oil to produce hydrogen, since they already have access to those fossil fuels.

Hydrogen powered vehicles is as much of a scam as putting ethanol into gasoline was alleged to "save" fossil fuels. It didn't save oil since lots of oil was used to produce corn for ethanol (which also drove up food prices), and you used more oil anyway since the ethanol reduced gasoline mileage.

we need to ask ourselves this question: How is Burton Richter an expert in cars?

His Nobel was in particle physics and not fuel cells.

There is another Nobel Laureate who actually works on fuel cells, albeit methanol fuel cells, and that would be Chemistry Laureate George Olah. He offers a very different opinion.

Also it is not useful to use units of power instead of energy. In theory, but I realize not in practice, a car consuming 38.1 kilowatts for ten seconds usese less energy if it accelerates in ten seconds than a car using 3.3 kilowatts for 100 seconds.

Maybe the reporter screwed it up, I don't know, but kilowatt-hours would be a better unit, or maybe the SI unit for energy, the kJ.

I agree however that hydrogen cars are a bad idea. Amory Lovins made money at them I'm sure, but only by making his investor's stakes worthless, in other words, by running a scam.

"It only takes about 3.3 kilowatts to get an electric car to 40 miles an hour"

Re-phrased as "maintain 40 miles/hr" it would make sense, although using different vehicles for the comparison still doesn't.

What's really annoying is that the pretend that they know science.

I recently had a journalist tell me that he "knows what scientists say...because he wrote about it in the 1970's..." and then proceed to inform me with complete balderdash.

4.8kWh to 40 fits in dimensions, but IIRC the standard Prius battery only holds 1.3kWh: You'd never get above 10mph in electric-only mode (which you can).

It seems like an understandable (if stupid) balls-up to translate kWs to kilowatts, though.

So long as all the figures have been mangled in the same way, it shouldn't matter to the conclusion, but it's damn annoying.

The reporter may be at the level of an anti-nuke.

In a world where "Typical American household" is apparently a measure of power, "kJ" doesn't stand a chance.

Ask 5 people at random what they know about Joules and you'll get three responses about Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction, a rambling monologue about a Francois Truffaut film, and some confused comments on how rubbish the Tom Cruise re-make of War of the Worlds was from some guy getting Wells and Verne mixed-up.

Sigh.

Embrace the stupid. Let if flow over you. You know it makes sense...

It seems to me that the unit most Americans seem to understand the best is, regrettably, the gallon of gasoline, although obviously the energy content of gasoline is not uniform.

They may also understand the kw-hr sometimes.

We have to try to educate when we can, unless of course we are dealing with dumb anti-nukes in which case I agree the case is hopeless.