BMW's initiative on a H2-car is applaudable. But, BMW should make a HEV first (full hybrid) to make a very fuel-efficient car, and then, convert that HEV into a H2-burning vehicle. This will both increase the range on H2 as well as reduce the cost of potentially more expensive H2 as fuel. Liquid H2 cost too much energy to produce (30-40% of heating value in the liquefaction process!). Compressed H2 only costs 5-9% of heating value, and this energy is mostly recoverable if the vehicle is equipped to do so by the use of an expander motor.

See?

Folks here keep saying Hydrogen will never be a successful automotive fuel.

When are the automakers finally going to realize it.

'Can be used in a proper manner without setbacks'? Please tell us: what is the current cost of unsubsidized liquid hydrogen? Does this development lead ANYWHERE? Compared to the big Lexus hybrid sedan the 'Hydrogen 7' is laughable. BMW fusses like a small child in its refusal to build anything but fully mechanical drivetrains. They could EASILY construct a 'world's best' large hybrid sedan, but instead we get 'Quadratisch praktisch gut... jetz mit hydrogen!'

OK, a quick and obvious calculation....

BMW say their car can go 125 miles on the 8 kg of hydrogen stored in the tank. That's 15.6 miles per kg of hydrogen.

But it takes 60 kWh of electricity to produce and compress 1 kg of hydrogen. So each mile requires 3.84 kWh of original electricity. That is *TEN TIMES* (yes, 10 times) more primary energy required per mile than the 2002 RAV4 SUV electric vehicle.

Assuming 7 cents per kWh to generate the hydrogen, wholesale costs of fuel would be 27 cents per mile. Who's going to pay that?

Now let's look at its 'green' credentials in terms of CO2 production. Given the mix of different forms of electricity generation in the US today, each kWh produced releases 700g of CO2 per kWh. When on H2 power this vehicle therefore releases AT LEAST 2.7 kg of CO2 per mile.

That's the same CO2 emissions as a gasoline vehicle that manages just 3.3 miles per gallon.

A green vehicle this most certainly is not.

Well the odd thing is gm gets better fuel econ burning h2 in a massive pickup truck then these guys are getting in that car.

And ye that was burning it in an engine not even counting the fuel cell models that get vastly better mpk.

Clett, thank you. It's good to hear people talking sense about the 'hydrogen economy'.

BMW was a partner in a project run by the German equivalent of NASA in the 1980s, aimed at bringing liquid hydrogen technology to passenger cars with ICEs. When the agency was unwound and the European Space Agency founded, BMW wound up with a lot of intellectual property that had been developed with taxpayer money. They sat on this IP for many years and have now dusted it off as a relatively inexpensive foil for California emissions regulators. To mask that fact, the vehicles are being introduced in Germany first. BMW is unlikely to ever make any money off this project; its purpose is to appease the powers that be.

Two unfortunate truths remain: One, the economic and/or environmental overheads associated with the mass-production of hydrogen gas are unnacceptably high. Two, it is very hard/expensive to safely transport adequate quantitities of hydrogen fuel in a passenger car.

From a rational perspective, biofuels, the electrification of the automotive drivetrain and clean diesel are all more promising evolutions of the existing transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, cars have never been purely rational products and neither have the regulations that apply to them.

Clett: Thank you for an excellent post. I would appreciate it if you could give us links to your underlying data.

Clett,
You have done a great deal of unjustice to Hydrogen as fuel.
Hydrogen can be reformed cheaply from crude oil at 80% efficiency. Now, that's the same efficiency as gasoline refining from crude oil. H2 can be produced a lot more efficiently and cheaply from waste biomass than liquid hydrocarbon via F-T synthesis. H2 can be produced more efficiently than electricity from any source of combustible materials. The BMW car suffers from no more increase in CO2 release as the result of running from H2 if running on compressed H2. However, Liquid H2 suffer 30% energy penalty in its liquefaction, hence, some increase in CO2 if fossil fuel energy is used in the liquefaction process of LH2, but no where near the quintuple increase as you have mentioned.

That's why I propose that BMW should build a fuel-efficient full hybrid first, that would have improve fuel efficiency by 70% over the non-hybrid version. Then, BMW can use a compressed H2 tank at ~700 bar with the same volume as the liquid H2 tank, and suffer from no lost of range. Now then, instead of using a separate tank for gasoline, which takes up extra space, either natural gas can be used instead of H2 in the same tank, and one can go 3x farther than compressed H2. And, why not design the tank to accomodate gasoline also, so as eliminate an extra tank?

BMW should be applauded for pioneering work on H2 in ICE, which I heard, they will start using H2 direct inject in the future, hence reducing the power gap between gasoline version and H2 version. H2-ICE-electric hybrid is efficient enough to compete with FCV, BEV and PHEV as well as any other type of vehicles made with current technology. H2 can be easily reformed from raw stock materials locally (intracity) in order to avoid the problem associated with H2 long-distance transportation.

A hydrogen direct injection version may "reduce" the power gap between it and a gasoline direct injection version but it will still be a gap the size of the grand canyon.

Hi Roger,

My post assumed the H2 was made by electrolysis, which is horribly inefficient.

However if you make the H2 from a fossil fuel, there are still many inefficiencies along the way, and the carbon from the feedstock gets released into the atmosphere anyway, without doing any useful work. For example, the H2 needs to be compressed, distributed (needing 15 times as many lorries as oil) and then it goes through a fuel cell with a PEAK efficiency of 50% (when existing road diesels already manage 43%).

FAR better (and more efficient) to use biomass as a fuel directly rather than convert it to hydrogen and use it in a fuel cell. F-T synthesis can make much more useful liquid fuels, no need to mess around with hydrogen.

Rafael,
Thank you for the info about BMW's IP from hydrogen. It goes some way to explaining how and why they came up with this thing. I've heard that taxi drivers who use these cars in Munich just fill them up with gasoline, even though there are hydrogen stations sponsored by BMW around there.

Maybe because of its relative small size and success in the ICE market, BMW has and will remain "addicted" to ICE technology longer than some of the bigger American and Japanese companies. You'd think they would have a slightly longer investment horizon and start seeing the forest rather than just the trees.

I'm amazed to see the degree to which some people who read this website still try to justify or find ways to continue advocating hydrogen. Hydrogen was advocated as a solution to certain problems and not an end in itself. The evidence is mounting that it doesn't solve those problems. Hydrogen as an energy carrier is not inherently green...right?

Michael -

hydrogen is being pushed by the California Air Resources Board because Los Angeles and the Bay Area really do have smog problems related to vehicle emissions. The initial attempt to force the production all-electric vehicles by fiat failed/was sabotaged, so CARB "rescued" its mandate by awarding carmakers credits towards their ZEV quota for certain qualified technologies. Above all, those included fuel cells. BMW argues that running ICEs is a stepping stone in that direction, segregating the challenge of PEMFC R&D from that of setting up a production and distribution infrastructure for the new fuel (incl. the vexed issue of on-board storage).

Ergo, CARB would argue that hydrogen is indeed green in that tailpipe emissions are sharply reduced and local air quality is improved. On the other hand, while it is *possible* to produce hydrogen using electrolysis based on renewable power (solar, wind, hydro etc.), the economic reality is that it's much cheaper to produce using either natural gas or nuclear electric power. In that sense, the environmental damage currently due to the "hydrogen economy" is merely of a different type. More importantly for the pols, it occurs out of sight (= out of mind).

Btw: I doubt there are many taxi drivers in Munich who would actually buy one of these over a diesel with DPF. It simply doesn't make financial sense to fill up a car on LH2. Perhaps there's a fleet trial going on.

Ironically, the technology might actually make sense in small commercial aircraft on short-hop routes, cp. comments here:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/09/uk_parliament_r.html

However if you make the H2 from a fossil fuel, there are still many inefficiencies along the way, and the carbon from the feedstock gets released into the atmosphere anyway, without doing any useful work.

You are being unfair to the point of misrepresentation here.

The carbon does do useful work, in the sense that the chemical energy released when it is oxidized is partially converted to the chemical energy of hydrogen (water-gas shift).

Also, one of the central aspects of a thermochemical hydrogen economy is that the CO2 is produced in a centralized, stationary plant, not in distributed vehicles, so it is much easier to sequester. So it's not the case the CO2 is necessarily released into the atmosphere.

Clett & Michael,

"Far efficient and better to use biomass directly as fuel instead of converting it into fuel and use it in fuelcells..."

How do you use biomass directly, Clett? If you have a steam engine, I guess you could shove all that hays into the boiler and make steam, but you'll be releasing all that noxious pollution into the air and your steam vehicle will be banned in any municipality, or by the EPA before it leave the factory. So, the next easiest way is to heat up that dry hay with water to about 800 degrees C, and you'll have produced syngas, which is a mixture of H2 and CO. The CO can further be converted to CO2 allowing you to make more H2. Separate the H2 out and bingo, you'll have the fuel of the 21st century and beyond!
Now, instead, you want liquid fuel! You will have to go many many more synthetic steps with the right catalyst and the syngas (H2 and CO) and losing more efficiency due the exothermic nature of the F-T synthesis to get you longer and longer chain of hydrocarbon. Or, you can go the route of cellulosic ethanol and depend on expensive enzymes and many many fermatation, separation, extraction steps and distillation steps, all will consume a lot of energy...

Point to remember: It is so easy to produce H2 because H2 is the simplest molecule in the universe! H2 can be produced from combustible materials or even from solar energy at higher efficiency than electrical generation. It is hard and inefficient to transport and to store H2, I know, I know...and to go around that, one can make H2 locally within the same metropolitan area of sites of retail. Transport crude oil in pipeline, and then use that to make H2 locally. H2 is so easy to make that one can make it anywhere, even in one's own home. In fact, Honda will introduce H2 reformation and compression from natural gas for home refueling of their coming fuel cell vehicle.

Someday, we all will wonder why have we have been messing (no pun intended) with oil and going thru all the steps and expenses in refining it into gasoline (that still contains sulfur and other carcinogens) for so long instead of using a much cleaner fuel like H2 that can be reformed even easier from crude oil! No sulfur, no carcinogen, no CO, no PM etc... Of course, we haven't got the technology for handling H2 until recently.

Any thermal engine is still subject to Carnot limits... this may limit local pollution but it's horribly inefficient and nothing more than a showpiece.

Frank,
Fuel cells also has limit on their efficiency much like Carnot limit in heat engines. It has to do with entropy. Heat is a form of energy associated with random motions of the molecules, as such it has high entropy level. Mechanical energy and electricity are forms of energy associated with ordered, steady linear motion, hence lower entropy. The law of thermodynamic says that the total entropy in a system can only get higher and can never be lowered. As such, when converting heat into mechanical energy or electricity, the efficiency will always be much less than unity. Battery and electric motor are more efficient than heat engines for the above reasons: transforming a ordered form of energy as electricity to mechanical energy or vice versa (wind turbine), higher efficiency can be maintained. However, the process of generating electricity is already associated with lower efficiency due to Carnot limitation, hence electrical energy cannot be compared on equal face value as heat energy in a fuel, but one must factor-in the loss incurred by the heat engine (gas or steam turbines) during the electrical generation step.

How interesting to see Roger Pham promoting the production of hydrogen, the "green fuel" of the future, from crude oil!  That will sure address US reliance on imports... NOT!

Even the European Fuel Cell Forum has given up on PEM FC's.  The only people still pushing H2 are the astroturfers trying to prevent the PHEV dam from breaking and washing their obsolete businesses away.

Eng-Poet,
You must have such a creative imagination (Poet) to have come up with your posting above. I've always been an advocate of renewable energy. But, if large quantity of H2 will be needed for the quick transition to the H2-methane economy, natural gas, crude oil and coal can serve as a transitional source of H2 until we can gather enough waste biomass to produce H2 directly from that.
If H2 vehicles can double the mileage out of a given amount of crude oil with much reduced smog-forming pollution, then this crude oil to H2 reforming would still be a huge advantage!

The H2 path has too many losses to work with only biomass inputs.  This (along with the ability to exploit non-chemical energy sources, like wind and solar) is why batteries are the best apparent path; H2 is a dead-end.

H2 may still have a transportation use. Above a certain size probably on the order of 747s flying trans-oceanic flights where the tradeoff between fuel weight and payload weight makes economic sense. H2 to as a fuel for small aircraft and road vehicles may never be a rational way to go.

Since DME has an advantage of decomposition at lower temperature than methane and LPG, R&D for hydrogen source for fuel cell has been carried out. DME has a potential of feedstock for chemicals. DME to olefins is under development in Japan.

If you would like to know more on the latest DME developments, join us at upcoming North Asia DME / Methanol conference in Beijing, 27-28 June 2007, St Regis Hotel. The conference covers key areas which include:

DME productivity can be much higher especially if
country energy policies makes an effort comparable to
that invested in increasing supply.
By:
National Development Reform Commission NDRC
Ministry of Energy for Mongolia

Production of DME/ Methanol through biomass
gasification could potentially be commercialized
By:
Shandong University completed Pilot plant in Jinan and
will be sharing their experience.

Advances in conversion technologies are readily
available and offer exciting potential of DME as a
chemical feedstock
By: Kogas, Lurgi and Haldor Topsoe

Available project finance supports the investments
that DME/ Methanol can play a large energy supply role
By: International Finance Corporation

For more information: www.iceorganiser.com

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