Making solid progress in alot of different areas here. Looks very good for the planned initial rollouts in 2012-2018 timeframe.

Did i miss something or did solve the problem of creating and storing Hydrogen?

Progress has been made on the creation side of hydrogen, but the show stopper is still storage. Doubling the pressure isn't a reasonable solution, an industry insider told me that anything above 3000 psi is just asking for trouble.

You could store natural gas at 3000 psi and reform it on the car. You would get more range for the same size tank at that pressure. I suppose that reforming is not easy nor cheap, but it might be worth considering. Especially when natural gas is under $2 per gasoline gallon equivalent retail.

Methane, i.e. bio-methane can be produced for $5 per million BTUs and certianly for under $10. That is 58 cents to $1.15 per gallon equivalent gasoline. Why reform it? Why not USE it?

Storage is not realy an issue as they could simply make the tank a bit wider and the trunk a tad longer or taller and get all the range they need and then some even at 5k psi.

Also industrial standard mass produced 5k tanks and even 6250 psi tanks are popping up now that cheaper methods for making them have come out.

No what it realy is is they have plenty of time left working on cheap compact batteries and cheaper more compact and longer lasting fuel cells and on everything else they might as well shoot a bit higher and farther with the tank and make it as good as they can BEFORE they go mass.

The Honda FCX Clarity uses an adsorptive matrix inside the tank, along with an industrial standard of 5000 psi pressure, for an acceptable range of 270 miles in a family sedan with sufficient trunk space and performance to be practical for the public. The problem of H2 storage is not unsolvable, and the technology is getting better and better.

It isn't clear what extending the program for 24 months will accomplish.

But the infrastructure, program setup, and team building have already been paid for. So stopping and then restarting for those tests of the next generation in 2010 probably wouldn't save a cent.

The results to date sure sound good. Glad to hear it.

Anyone: What does 96% up time mean in a trial like this? Is that good, great, awesome?

I really needed to know that the air conditioner was superior.
I'm sold.

That 96% may mean you only push it for 4klm per hundred. But a more charitable interpretation is that the total hours (days when the vehicle is unusable or in the workshop) is just one day in 25.

The engineers are smiling.

That there is 'virtually no degradation in performance' is important.

I presume however that this cell uses large amounts of unobtanium.

If I were calling a race with batteries, batteries are out in front, electricity being ubiquitous.

It's another 24 months in which to transfer federal subsidies to the Ford Motor Co.

The race with batteries is over before it starts. Big Oil can produce, control, and deliver hydrogen, not so with electricity. For that reason, electric cars will never be on the table, except from backyard enthusiasts. The easiest, cheapest, and most common way to produce Hydrogen is by reforming mined hydrocarbons a process that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a similar rate to burning fossil fuels. The cost of entry into hydrogen fuel delivery will be so high that only companies like Shell with existing fuel delivery infrastructure will be able to compete. Big Oil will claim that carbon sequestration in "safe" underground storage will be the answer that saves the world from global warming. Until an earthquake creates a little hiccup in the geology and releases a carbon dioxide cloud that suffocates an entire city (read about carbon dioxide releases from the lakes in central Africa.) Sorry to be so upbeat. But the price of hydrogen is the only thing that will matter in a free market system (as it should be) and the only corporations that can deliver hydrogen at a low cost are the oil companies. Electricity will always be safer and more efficient, but Big Oil is wealthy enough, organized enough, and connected enough to keep it from ever becoming the fuel of transportation.

They go for h2 because they know one thing above all else.. they know where the money is and how to get it.

While there is a market for bev.. its not a lucrative market from the fueling side of things so of course fuel siders arnt all that interested on a large scale.

Biofuels... iffy future what with pollution issues and co2 limits curbing them more and more.. and food issues and cost issues and water issues and weather and and and...

But h2.. No real problems.

They just plug away until they have something they can make money off of and then they make money off it. Simple as that.

At the current rate of progress they will start to grind into the next phase of the h2 whatever in 2 years.. Likely with fleets of h2 busses and trucks h2 delivery vans and so on.

By 2018 they likely will have a fair number of luxury h2 cars and trucks as well as a massive bus and truck fleet.

By 2025.... it will replace all ice engines. Remember a sofc is far better at converting a liquid fuel or methane into power for an electric motor then a genset is and you can fuel such a beast on ANYTHING the refomer can digest... whatever is cheap that day.

By 2030 they will own the main performance car and truck segments and luxury markets and all long haul trucking and and and and...And h2 will likely be cheaper then biofuel by then... in some places cheape then electric cars even as utility rates skyrocket.

I would reform natural gas on vehicle because fuel cells are more efficient and you can get natural gas in many places. ANG storage of natural gas can be done at 500 psi and 1000 psi will get you even more storage. You could burn the natural gas in hybrid engines, but the article was about fuel cells.

As far as methane from biomass, I agree. But until you set a price floor for methane from biomass, you will be up against the natural gas market that goes up and down like a yo yo. You can not invest with reduced risk when speculators can drop the prices in a blink and wipe out your whole investment.

@sjc
Biomass to bio-methane is a good idea for several reasons: mentioned above is a cost of $5 to $10 per million BTUs for end use energy. That's a fraction of the cost of gasoline/diesel and a far smaller fraction of the cost of H2. It will always be far less expensive than H2.

SOFCs love methane.

The best reason though is that the price of bio-methane is not determined in a global commodity market. It is produced locally. That means that an end use form of energy can be put on the market, with profits for all in the local market, for under $1 per gallon of gasoline equivalent. The hedge fund managers and oil companies can then legitimately be told to pack it in their shorts.

Year 2020?

Don't know about you guys but when 2020 rolls around - it will represent nearly 20 years of commercial LiIo battery production. My 25KWh silicon nanowire pack will represent about a $2k cost item in my PHEV and I'll have NOT purchased gasoline or H2 for the last eight years.

I plug in every night at home and again at the workplace, charging at an average of $.05/ KWh. Sure big oil hates me and the car maker - but they can't make these vehicles anywhere near fast enough to meet demand. PHEV manufacturing is the largest grossing commercial business on the planet.

Oh yeah, my home residential power unit splits water and H2 genset produces 10KWh for all my home electrical use. Electrolyzer input is 5.5 dcv @500ma. It set me back $2,500.00 including installation at Sears (brand name WattRPwr - made by Honda)

I have liked SOFCs for quite a while. They are making lower temperature models that may solve the sealing problems. If you could run biomethane from ANG tanks, combine cycle with an output turbine and do V2G, it would be quite a vehicle.