ChrisBarron wrote:The most prolific and cheapest way to get hydrogen is through water electrolysis. The energy required to compress the hydrogen to the required 5,000psi (and more) is massive.To produce 1kg of liquid hydrogen requires about 70kWh. That's enough to power the FCX for about 72 miles, and the Tesla for up to 300.
Chris
Nice examples Chris. It really does get under my skin when I hear hydrogen fuel cell technology being touted as some sort of panacea, a source of unlimited clean, free energy that's always just over the horizon.
What it effectively does is take a battery vehicle and add a very complex and unnecessary intermediate stage that is extremely costly, inefficient and environmentally harmful – simply to shore up the existing fuel production and distribution infrastructure.
It's natural that industry should want to protect its own, and I realise that a lot of people depend on these industries for a living. However this doesn't change the fact that it makes more sense to plug in at home than it does to use a great deal more electricity to electrolyse water, compress the resulting hydrogen into liquid, distribute it all around the country, and then mix it with oxygen again in order to generate electricity locally.
I've nothing against fuel cell technology as such, it's very clever and there are bound to be some valuable spinoffs from all the development work. But if a fraction of the R&D budget that has been spent on fuel cell technology had been invested instead in battery development it's likely we would be seeing batteries with twice the energy density we see today.
Please excuse the lecture, but it's much more therapeutic than shouting at the kids