[p2p-research] Open Source Design Hydrogen Car

[Stan Rhodes]

Did you notice:
"The lightweight Smart car-size vehicle uses hydrogen in a modest 6kW fuel
cell, and – in the case of this prototype – uses hydrogen converted from
natural gas. Hydrogen can also be created from water using electrolysis and
potentially even from bio-fuels."

Heh, talk about inefficient fuel production.  Quick impressions.

Natural gas reformation to hydrogen captures more energy than using
combustion to generate power, I believe.  If you have to use nat gas, not a
bad way to go, but you're still using a fossil fuel, still generating a
bunch of CO2.  Plans have been to pump the CO2 into the ground. No one's
sure how easy it is to contain that volume of gas, and if it suddenly
erupts, you suffocate everyone around it, like the Lake Nyos incident.

Electrolysis is wasteful, although high temp is isn't bad.  Need a lot of
heat, and the best way to do that is Gen IV nuclear plants, online around
2030.

Biofuels into hydrogen. Sure, you can use biofuels or ethanol to make H,
which also produces CO, CO2, and methane.  Plus you need the biol feedstock
to make the fuel, which uses fertilizer from nat gas plants.  Biofuel as a
mainstream solution has been debunked over and over, and even by the guy who
won the nobel for photosynthesis research.

Just give the car plug-in batteries until the hydrogen tech's there; it's
meant to be a city vehicle.  If the bike-modders going from gas to electric
get their hands on the open source designs, we may see the car industry
collapse even more rapidly.  Here's hoping these people are serious about
open source being free as in beer, as the article states.

-- Stan

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://gas2.org/2009/06/16/open-source-hydrogen-car-takes-to-the-road/
>
> Ryan
>
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