More Lipstick on a Pig.

Your bigotry realy is getting tiresome.

The fact is fuell cell cars are most of the way there. And no natter your racist views you cant stop it.

The 10kpsi tanks are already done and yes thats the 10kpsi 700 bar tank.

Wintermane - The problem I have with hydrogen is not racist but why bother? My rationale is that why do this:

fossil fuel/renewables -> electricity (lose 50% for FF) -> generate hydrogen (lose 60%) -> fill car with hydrogen (lose 10%) -> generate electricity in fuel cell (lose 60%) -> drive car with electric motor (lose 10%)

When you can do this:
fossil fuel/renewables -> electricity (lose 50% for FF) -> charge batteries (lose 15%) -> drive car with electric motor (lose 10%)

To me mucking about with hydrogen is only required to preserve oil companies brands. I am not sure that filling a 70Mpa tank is going to be quick anyway. With the new Lithium batteries from A123 etc it would seem that a reasonable charge (50%) could be delivered in 10 or 15 minutes. I am dead sure that it will take this amount of time to fill a 70Mpa tank so the advantages of hydrogen are lost.

Also this tank will not be low cost. Lithium batteries with volume production could be equivilent or cheaper than fuel cell/tank combination. Also PEM fuel cells are nowhere near practical as they require 99.9% pure hydrogen and do not last very long in a car. The point that previous posters have made is that if similar resources were put into battery electric cars then a practical 300km range BEV could be delivered very quickly as no breakthroughs are needed for this.

Wintermane - "No but the way you talk about the people who work on h2 is racist and bigoted."

I'm sorry where you talking to me?????

"The oil companies back h2 for the simple reason that they have been using h2 for a very long time and know how to handle it. Expecting the oil cpmpany to jump into battery cars is like expecting apple to start a line of womens underwear."

Where do the oil companies use hydrogen now?? The demand for hydrogen is now purely industrial and it is obtained from natural gas by steam reforming. The point is that BEVS cut out oil companies so you can appreciate their reluctance to embrace them. The question is why are we waiting for hydrogen cars just so oil companies can continue instead of implementing a solution NOW, TODAY that would not involve oil companies? Why are you and I paying to save oil companies?

"And the simple fact you refuse to get because your blinded by who is working on it is that the work is going splendedly and the goal is now no longer a hope or a dream."

Yes the work is going well however several quantum leaps in performance need to happen before practical fuel cell cars are on the road. Battery electric cars are practical now and could be on the road right now - why are we waiting?

"Frankly I think alot of people cant stand the thought that conservatives and big oil could actauly make it work."

No I object to be forced to adopt a sub-optimum solution just to justify large corporations existence. You have not explained why a less efficient solution should be chosen over a vastly more efficient and easier solution. Also you have not really explained where we are going to get the hydrogen from or how it will be piped to consumer outlets and what the cost of this infrastructure will be.

For BEVS the infrastructure is in place. In some areas we will need to increase the transmission lines however this is trivial compared to building a whole new distribution system for hydrogen. Hydrogen is a surprisingly difficult element to pipe and store as it causes embrittlement of some materials.

Maybe you should drop the racist bit and concentrate on the questions posed.

I'm confused, have "conservatives and big oil" become their own race now? I thought they were just a fanatical religious cult preying on the vulnerable. :-)

If you didnt know how much h2 is used in making low emmisions fuels you realy have no reason to be talking on this subject anyway.

Wintermane - "If you didnt know how much h2 is used in making low emmisions fuels you realy have no reason to be talking on this subject anyway."

Well then enlighten us - I am prepared to listen.

Though I mostly agree with Ender's comments on batteries vs. HFC's, I'm not ready to call the game.

The Achilles heel for both BEVs and PHEVs is battery lifetime. The high performance Li-ion batteries that everyone is so excited about are still very expensive, and I don't think we really know how long they'll last in service. Projecting from experience with HEV batteries isn't valid, because BEV and PHEV batteries are cycled much more deeply. Their ratio of energy throughput to storage capacity is an order of magnitude higher, and that's bound to matter.

If buyers face the prospect of having to spend $15,000 every three years to replace the batteries, they'll walk away. Even at $3.00 for gas, $15,000 will buy you 200,000 miles of driving in a 40 mpg mild hybrid. That's about 16 years, for the average US driver.

I'm sure that battery costs will be coming down, while lifetimes improve over the next few years. But the competition isn't standing still. There have been some promising developments in cost-performance of HFCs. Even the cost of pressurized H2 storage is coming down, as this article notes.

Somebody observed elsewhere that refilling one of these high pressure hydrogen tanks would take a long time. They were probably going by the typical refueling time for current CNG vehicles. That runs to hours. But that's because they are fleet vehicles that spend the night in maintenance garages, and have no need for fast fueling. The tanks are recharged by compressors fed from a low-pressure gas supply. A slow recharge avoids various heat problems. Nonetheless, fast recharging is quite possible.

I could design a system that would recharge on of these Quantum tanks in about the same time that a fill-up takes at a regular gas station. It would be efficient, too; in fact, high efficiency is essential if you want to fill a compressed gas tank quickly. Otherwise, the waste heat is unmanageable.

Actauly that depends entirely on how high pressure the fueling station stores its h2 at. This is also why fueling statons are still only testers. They dont realy know the final pressures. It could well wind up 15 even 25k psi.

do you guys just not have any clue about the topic, or are you just acting so ignorant? Refuelling that tank mentioned above takes no longer than 5 minutes. A battery has the *major* disadvantage of slow reloading times. Believe me, I am in a team working on an electric vehicle right now, and we are considering batteries or fuel cells. I guarantee you fuel cells have huge advantages:
Batteries have to load for 5 hours before being able to be used, FCs do not.
Batteries can store a lot less energy per weight than FCs can.
For a half an hour of flight time (we are building an airplane) we need at least 100 kg (about 200 pounds) of batteries (lithium ion, relatively efficient compared to the rest)
The fuel cell weighs 17 kg and would give us 19 kW. That leaves us with more than 80 kg of spare weight for the hydrogen tank and fuel. That means with the same weight, we would fly about 3 times as far as with batteries.

So you can see, there are reasons why this stuff is being researched. The advantages over batteries are *undeniable*.
I would suggest some of you to inform yourselves before talking about such topics.