"Linde expects to fill on average 10 hydrogen vehicles a day—making the center, according to the company, one of the busiest hydrogen filling stations in the world."

What a GAS.
I,m sure they will be selling other gasses from the process to offset the cost of building this.

In a zillion dollar gamble like fuels are you dont leave any remotely p[ossible direction undeveloped. As such the h2 sations are simply covering all bases.

I heard that hydrogen is made from happy thoughts and press releases, actually. Now I'm hearing it comes from reforming natural gas or by burning coal to make electricity for electrolysis?

John Baldwin,

it is not CO2 free, if you look at how they make the hydrogen. Sure the car produces steam while driving down the road, and everyone will go..."wow..." But what these people never seem to dwell on is the umpteem billion pounds of other carbon intensive fuels they need to burn in the first place to produce all the energy to split the water and get the hydrogen in the first place! And producing hydrogen from water is extremly! energy intensive.

It's so frustrating. They usually only tell half the story, which is in essense a lie. If hydrogen plants would mention the major amounts of CO2 they're pumping into the atmosphere making their hydrogen so that people could steam down the road in their blissful ignorance, there wouldn't be such a clamour for it. It's much more efficient/cheap to just put that electricity used for electrolysis straight into batteries/ultra-caps.

John W. -

Carmakers only tell half the story because they want to get out from under the onerous TAILPIPE emissions regulations that make their products look dirty.

The gas and nuclear industries are keeping schtumm about how they intend to produce the hydrogen because the fuel makes their dirty processes look clean.

Politicians only tell half the story because they are scientifically illiterate and/or in bed with the aforementioned industries. Case in point: Dubya claimed nuclear power was not just safe and clean (highly debatable) but also renewable (uranium grows on trees, you see...)

I agree with Robert Schwartz here: on-road vehicles should run on hydrocarbons for the foreseeable, preferably liquid ones with high energy density (esp. volumetric). Where feasible, biofuels should be preferred.

"Windmill + water = Hydrogen"

Windmill + generator = Energy

Who needs the hydrogen?

Battery electric cars provide 3-4x the efficiency of hydrogen cars.

That means $4 / gallon hydrogen vs. $1 / gallon electricity.

Battery electric cars can be produced today & in the coming years we'll see them actually for sale.

A battery electric car can provide amazing performance & be efficient at the same time... not possible with hydrogen or gasoline / diesel cars.

Battery electric cars require no new infrastructure.

Hydrogen cars, I'm guessing, represent the oil & gas industries last gasp at trying to keep the world using hydrocarbon fuels. (hydrogen gas comes mostly now from reforming natural gas)

But you can't change the laws of physics. So, hydrogen loses. Batteries win.

I'm surprised that Europeans, who I thought were more sensible than most, are being led down the same Hydrogen hype path.

To answer pizmo's question, the carbon is in all the energy and materials used to design, manufacture, assemble, truck/ship, and set up the windmill in the first place, at which point you have a source of energy which is low maintenance (but not maint free) and several times more expensive than the cheapest forms of electricity. It's also several times more expensive than hydrogen reforming from natural gas, which is why no one creates hydrogen that way.

If you want to play that game, then GM's vehicles are all 85% renewable because you COULD make them run on ethanol. Sure, hydrogen COULD be made from renewable sources, but it isn't. Ever.

Several well-to-wheel studies have shown that hydrogen made from fossil fuels is madness, both from an emissions as well as from an efficiency point of view (as Robert Schwarz says: better compress the NG for CNG cars - no need to make the inefficient detour via hydrogen).

H2 from wind is very inefficient and expensive, whereas biohydrogen is foolish because the biomass can better be transformed into other biofuels rightaway.

According to the EU's latest well-to-wheel analysis of over 70 fuel paths, hydrogen is out, and biogas is in. (Biogas being the most environmentally friendly transport fuel).

Check it out:

Hydrogen out, compressed biogas in
http://biopact.com/2006/10/hydrogen-out-compressed-biogas-in_01.html

Every day something new comes up. A couple of weeks ago
There was a article about algae producing Hydrogen, no C
When algae is deprived of o2 and sulfur it produces hydrogen this can be turned on and off . and there are other byproducts also Bio fuel the ablity to take c02 out

I think I've finally worked out the sense in all this hydrogen nonsense....

You just have to replace the word "hydrogen" with "environmental PR" and it all becomes clear!

eg:
GM: "We have spent one billion on environmental PR".
Bush: "This administration will spend millions on environmental PR, developing a future US economy based around environmental PR".

Nobody ever cared about the economics or the energy balance of the thing....

Roger Pham wrote: Now, tell me, Lorenzo, why would biogas be any more efficient than H2 when both are produced from the thermal decomposition of biomass?

Biogas is made from the anaerobic digestion/fermentation of biomass, not from thermal decomposition. In biogas, bacteria do the work, not some external energy source.

But you can use biogas (anaerobically digested biomass) as a feedstock for H2 production. Only it makes no sense because you can better use the biogas directly in a CBG-hybrid, instead of making the detour via hydrogen.

Have you had a look at the WTW efficiency and emissions data in the EU report? It clearly shows which paths for H2 are efficient and which ones are not. Only a very limited number of paths are better than gasoline on both accounts, and those that are (compressed H2 from wood gasification, used in a fuel cell; and compressed H2 from wind, via the electrolysis of water, used in a fuel cell), have alternative paths that are many times less costly. The only path that stands a bit of a chance is compressed H2 from the gasification of biomass, but only provided the cost of fuel cells and distribution infrastructure comes down radically. (Distribution infrastructure for biomass too, because for gasification plants you need big plants with scale advantages; that means you need to bring in enough biomass to a plant; bulky as biomass is, this is quite costly).

So if you look at the entire picture for possible H2 paths, either the WTW path is too inefficient, or will kill the planet with its CO2 emissions or there are alternatives for the use of the primary energy that make more sense (in the case of biomass-gasification), or the path is way too expensive.

The report identifies biogas (which is the least CO2 intensive of over 70 fuels, and often even CO2 negative) used in a dedicated hybrid-biogas car, to be the most efficient, cleanest, and relatively affordable. Not me saying this.

It's possible you're right about potential efficiency increases in the future, for H2 WTT paths that were not taken into account in that recent report. But such efficiency increases are probably to be expected for non-H2 paths too.

Lorenzo:

Thank you for your last post, it was very well articulated and reasoned. Helpful for many I'm sure.

Pizmo, you are also right that there can be a "carbon neutral" path to hydrogen via wind turbine, etc, but as Lorenzo highlighted very clearly above, it just doesn't make as much sense, that is all I was trying to say earlier anyways.

Nice thread here guys, with no name calling going on even! :)