This could have some repercussions..

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This could have some repercussions..

In terms of weight vs volume is it on par with petrol/diesel? Would we be looking at a 40l/40kg tank for an average hatchback? Because if so, that's some insane ranges could be achieved.

Given that hydrogen is lighter than helium, 5kg of hydrogen at a normal ambient temperature would occupy about 60,000 litres, and would need to be very highly compressed.

It would be very impressive to squeeze 60,000 litres of hydrogen into a 40litre tank.....

A K sized hydrogen bottle from BOC has 7210 litres and is 1.5metres tall and the gas bottle weights about 65kg.

So you’d need 8 canisters for 5kg of gas, so about 520kg of gas bottles.....
 
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There is far more energy in the C-H bonds than there is from oxidising the hydrogen. Hydrogen is also very difficult to store. It leaks through most plastics and even some metals and it makes steel go brittle. The only way to make hydrogen is by electrolysis. Today's electricity is generated from fossil fuels.

Don't believe the BBC (and the press generally) who always shout about the amount of wind power installed. It's fake. They always quote max capacity, but wind has a load factor of about 20%. 80% of the time all that expensive technology and copper is standing idle. 800MW of installed capacity is only 200MW in reality and the output fluctuates randomly.

The Danish installed enough wind turbines to delver 20% of their energy needs and expected to get 20% less CO2 emissions. They actually got next to no CO2 reduction because wind always needs fossil fired plant to fill the gaps. Running at part load is less efficient so the CO2 savings are lost.

The reason I go on about Moltex nuclear is that they have a plant that emits no CO2 and is designed to load follow with no reduction in efficiency. They have a 1000MW reactor with 3000MW generators. The reactor runs full power 24/7 with the heat going into thermal stores containing very hot molten salt. Heat is extracted at peak times and restored at quiet times. This is the exact same tech as used by thermal solar power plants so well proven.

Moltex plant build costs at New Brunswick are the same as gas at current prices (Canadian gas is cheap). Build costs of the nuclear portion could double and they would still undercut gas. When they go to factory production they will be cheaper than coal. When that happens one wonders why anyone would want to pay for wind power which runs at around 10x the cost per KWH.

By the way, when water is irradiated it cracks into hydrogen and oxygen. It's a big problem in pressurised water nuclear plants and led to the explosions at Fukushima. Molten salt reactors could be used to create hydrogen directly without going through the electricity bit.

Ammonia is one of the most important chemical feedstocks and uses about 2% of the world's energy. Molten salt nukes run hot enough to do the job with zero CO2 emissions. Molten salt nukes can also add some carbon to make diesel fuel from the ammonia.

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/what-is-molten-salt-reactor-424343/


Check these out


 
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Given that hydrogen is lighter than helium, 5kg of hydrogen at a normal ambient temperature would occupy about 60,000 litres, and would need to be very highly compressed.

It would be very impressive to squeeze 60,000 litres of hydrogen into a 40litre tank.....

A K sized hydrogen bottle from BOC has 7210 litres and is 1.5metres tall and the gas bottle weights about 65kg.

So you’d need 8 canisters for 5kg of gas, so about 520kg of gas bottles.....

All that means is that Toyota and ITM are cleverer than BOC.

From the Mirai specifications:

"The Mirai has two hydrogen tanks with a three-layer structure made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic consisting of nylon 6 from Ube Industries and other materials. The tanks store hydrogen at 70 MPa (10,000 psi). The tanks have a combined weight 87.5 kg (193 lb). and 5 kg capacity."
 
So having done some reading it is approximately 5kg in the two fuel tanks which are 122litres total volume so considerably larger than a normal fuel tank from a diesel or petrol car.

Then there is the range, 5kg will get you a grand total of 312 miles so not the 500 miles you claimed in fact a very long way off.

A Tesla model s will do easily more than this to a charge and you can actually recharge it unlike a hydrogen car for which there is literally zero infrastructure for, you can’t even buy a hydrogen car in the U.K. the other issue is the extremely complex drive train in a hydrogen fuel cell car like the mirai gas/tanks/fuel cell/battery/motor/control systems/safety systems etc

The Tesla is a battery and a motor, to make it go further you fit a bigger battery. If cells in the battery fail you have a robust system to keep it going, what happens if the hydrogen fuel cell fails or if there is a gas leak, you need a very highly specialised centre to work on such a car, Tesla only make Tesla and servicing and repairs are virtually non existent.
 
The reason I go on about Moltex nuclear is that they have a plant that emits no CO2 and is designed to load follow with no reduction in efficiency.

Moltex plant build costs at New Brunswick are the same as gas at current prices (Canadian gas is cheap). Build costs of the nuclear portion could double and they would still undercut gas. When they go to factory production they will be cheaper than coal. When that happens one wonders why anyone would want to pay for wind power which runs at around 10x the cost per KWH.

I watched a few videos on this from moltex themselves out of interest, driven by your enthusiasm.

From what I understand no plant has been built, it would take 10 years just to change current laws regarding the management and definition of fuel rods to even begin to build something and while the benefits are well known and commented on the whole idea is still largely an unproven theory.

It’s interesting and likely to work well, but in 10 years time the likes of iter could have made huge leaps in fusion technology rendering the whole thing pointless.
 
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Schumi2001 I have a genuine question: what will happen when the world eventually runs out of fossil fuels? It might not happen for 30 years yet, but it will happen 1 day. What will we do for energy "production" and fuels/transport then?
 
Schumi2001 I have a genuine question: what will happen when the world eventually runs out of fossil fuels? It might not happen for 30 years yet, but it will happen 1 day. What will we do for energy "production" and fuels/transport then?

That's the big question to which nobody has a sensible answer so far!

Estimates of oil / coal and gas reserves are constantly being revised, so we don't truly know how many years we have left, either - suffice to say, the estimates generally increase as new reserves are found. Wales, for example, is sitting on a lot more high quality coal than we ever extracted.

Nuclear, in some form, has to have a part to play, as renewables are very flaky if it's not windy or sunny! We can invest in storage - but we need to look at moving away from a reliance on batteries using metals mined in the developing world, where child labour is exploited and nobody cars about the environmental damage done.


To go back to some other points - I completely forgot about the Mirai's front tank, as we only ever look at the one under the rear seat. Still, the weight is the same and range has been quoted as 'up to 500 miles'. I work in sales, so only deal in best case ;)

But yes, the true range of the Mirai and the latest Tesla Model S are roughly the same ball park if you look at EPA figures.

FCEV is relatively new, it's improving all the time - and any developments in BEV drivetrain transfer across to FCEV, too.

The team at Linde gave me some figures on how much they've cut the cost of hydrolysis over the past 10 years - but I can't for the life of me recall what it was - it was, however, the kind of figure that makes you think 'bloody hell, that's signifiant'. Spent ages talking to them last year, too - but my memory is shot. In terms of transportation, hydrogen becomes a pretty effective battery, even if we need to work on hydrolysis energy input.
 
I remember hearing somewhere about solid state batteries: do they contain less precious metals than conventional acid or ion cells?

I'm not sure, but as energy density is higher, you'd potentially expect content to be higher, but that's just a guess.

I note that 'faster charging rates' are one of the advantages - we're past the point where charging rates are limited by the battery and into the realms of charging rate being limited by the infrastructure already. And that's the expensive bit to fix!
 
Lithium polymer batteries as used in phone computers and Tesla cars have a narrow safe voltage range but they accept rapid charge rates and can give a hefty belt (at the cost of significant range reduction). They use a liquid electrolyte so can be cooled more efficiently. Tesla cars use thousands of AA sized cells.

The Lithium-Ferrous-Phosphate (LiFePo4) are solid state and not quite as power dense as a LiPO, but they are far tougher making them ideal for engine start batteries. I have one on the bike. It can sit unused all winter and still start the bike with no storage damage. It's also tiny about 2lbs compared to 10lbs for the lead acid it replaced. It charges with a standard car battery charger though the fancy recovery type (Optimate) will kill it stone dead with their high voltage boost.
 
I watched a few videos on this from moltex themselves out of interest, driven by your enthusiasm.

From what I understand no plant has been built, it would take 10 years just to change current laws regarding the management and definition of fuel rods to even begin to build something and while the benefits are well known and commented on the whole idea is still largely an unproven theory.

It’s interesting and likely to work well, but in 10 years time the likes of ITER could have made huge leaps in fusion technology rendering the whole thing pointless.

Moltex have a project signed off in Canada. It's full size and fully modelled so no need to build a test plant. They expect to have it on line around 2026. All power plants take a while to build so that's pretty good going. Their big gain has been to remove as much as they possibly could from the nuclear area (island) and what they do have uses proven techniques and proven metals.

PWRs have very expensive solid fuel (contained in sealed tubes) which has a short service life and very costly storage or reprocessing issues for the irradiated stuff. The Moltex fuel is a uranium salt contained in a fuel tube just like the PWR but it's vented so the noble gasses (e.g.xenon) that poison and pressurise a sealed fuel tube are vented away. They have radioactive half lives of a few days and are safe to vent to atmosphere after a few weeks of storage. The ambient pressure operation of the fuel salt and the cooling salt is a massive gain for build costs and certification.

Moltex have done the absolute minimum of new engineering. That makes safety certification much easier and cheaper - there's (a lot) less of it. It has to be shielded of course. The neutron flux and gamma rays inside any reactor shell are unimaginably nasty. But that's done with proven materials mostly thick concrete. All stuff the regulators understand and sign off with no issues other then QC/QA needed for any nuke plant. The molten salt nuclear space has no pressure vessels, no pressurisers, no safety valves, no hydrogen/oxygen recombiners, no containment dome that can contain a steam explosion. Even in the worst case accident scenarios, the reactor core is self stabilising. It simply cannot explode its contents downwind as Chernobyl and Fukushima did.

Don't let the the nuclear fusion guys kid you. Not one plant has run for more than a few seconds and it still made less power than was needed to contain the ultra hot plasma. They are not even close to a commercial running plant and when they do its unlikely to be low cost or easy to operate. They will not be immune to nuclear regulations. It will need heavy shielding as the radiation levels inside a running torus will be every bit as bad a fission reactor.

The Oak Ridge MSRE molten salt reactor operated for years with no problems but was killed off before a full size power plant could be built. Today we don't need to build a pilot plant as everything can be computer modeled with enough accuracy to keep the (very fussy) regulators happy.

Even if ITER do manage to create a commercially viable plant in 10 years they'll still have to build it and operate it. Some parts will be subject to nuclear regs and it then gets properly complicated because new materials take years decades even to certify. Then there's the issue of cost. We need zero fossil zero CO2 energy that is cheaper to build and operate than coal. If it costs more than coal, the world's poor will ignore it and global warming will continue unabated. Nuclear fusion has no chance of beating coal on cost this side of 2050 if we are lucky. Moltex could do it now with factory build reactor modules. Their first plant will be built on site so wont beat coal but it will beat gas and Canadian gas is cheap.
 
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I’m not going to get quite so excited about a technology which is not new by any stretch and is unlikely to be seen in the U.K. for at least 10 years, from what I can tell they’ve not even broken ground on.

Having been doing some looking around and reading about the up coming technologies, the gist in the industry is that hybrids are reducing in sales in favour of all electric cars.

The hydrogen cars have so many draw backs that even the chief designer of the Toyota Miera has said that full battery electric cars are better.

In order to make hydrogen you need to either take natural gas from the ground and separate out the hydrogen, this makes hydrogen gathered in this way (which most of our current supplies are) a fossil fuel.

Or you electrolysise the hydrogen from water, this requires huge electricity input to obtain the gas, then you have to compress it, pump it, store it, then put it in a car.
The car has to put the gas through a fuel cell to turn it back into electricity and water, then puts that power in a battery, then feed tha battery power to the electric motor... you still need the battery and the motor, then you add a ton of other highly specialist and complicated electronics.

Battery electric car, you put power from the grid into the batter then drive the car, massively less complicated and far cheaper.

Also looking around there are a lot of moves towards localised power storage, charging home batteries to charge either from solar or from the grid when there is too much power in the grid, then feed it back in later, if there was sufficient batteries In the general public then the peaks and troughs in the grid would easily smooth out. Currently they are paying money to wind farms to switch off at low demand as they can drive the wholesale price of electricity negative If there is far too much in the grid and no demand, like over night.
 
Well, the last verifiable figures showed PHEVs growing YOY by over 70%, whilst BEVs grew by 19%.

Putting this into perspective, petrol hybrids and pure petrol grew by 21%.

Ultimately, the solution is likely to be a mix of BEV and FCEV, if we want to rid ourselves of a reliance on fossil.

BEVs continue to fall short for many drivers - whilst those who could use one most of the time would have to hire a fossil powered car for their family holidays.

(The biggest challenge to BEVs will continue to be peak time charging - Friday afternoon and Sunday evenings when people are dashing to and from weekend hideaways or their home after working away all week. This is not easy to fix, as you're talking about large numbers of vehicles all needing a rapid / super charge in the same place at the same time).

The Grand Tour episode last week with the BMW i3 may have been deliberately skewed in favour of fossil, but it did highlight the real world issues with BEV charging infrastructure.

One thing that we can say that BEV and FCEV have in common is the ability to use energy stored during times of excess production - running hydrolysis 24/7 and storing in a local tank or charging industrial scale battery packs. Again, a mix of both technologies is likely to be where we go in the future.
 
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Well, the last verifiable figures showed PHEVs growing YOY by over 70%, whilst BEVs grew by 19%.

Putting this into perspective, petrol hybrids and pure petrol grew by 21%.

Ultimately, the solution is likely to be a mix of BEV and FCEV, if we want to rid ourselves of a reliance on fossil.

BEVs continue to fall short for many drivers - whilst those who could use one most of the time would have to hire a fossil powered car for their family holidays.

(The biggest challenge to BEVs will continue to be peak time charging - Friday afternoon and Sunday evenings when people are dashing to and from weekend hideaways or their home after working away all week. This is not easy to fix, as you're talking about large numbers of vehicles all needing a rapid / super charge in the same place at the same time).

The Grand Tour episode last week with the BMW i3 may have been deliberately skewed in favour of fossil, but it did highlight the real world issues with BEV charging infrastructure.

One thing that we can say that BEV and FCEV have in common is the ability to use energy stored during times of excess production - running hydrolysis 24/7 and storing in a local tank or charging industrial scale battery packs. Again, a mix of both technologies is likely to be where we go in the future.

Weird because the SMMT who are the official source of all U.K. car registration data show battery electric vehicles are up over 100% on last year’s figures and
Plug in hybrids just under 16% since last year.
Petrol only cars are up just 8% while diesel sales are down 14.3% this is all verifiable on the SMMT website SMMT.co.uk.....

Where do your figures come from?
 
Same source. But mid 2018 data.

If nothing else, this shows that statistics can paint a very different picture depending on when you take the readings!

This is probably a decent representation as it's full year on year data and not skewed by any short term campaigns or promotions. (Which have a significant impact when market share is under 1%!)

Screenshot 2019-03-26 at 18.23.21.png
 
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Well, the last verifiable figures showed PHEVs growing YOY by over 70%, whilst BEVs grew by 19%.

Putting this into perspective, petrol hybrids and pure petrol grew by 21%.

Same source. But mid 2018 data.

If nothing else, this shows that statistics can paint a very different picture depending on when you take the readings!

This is probably a decent representation as it's full year on year data and not skewed by any short term campaigns or promotions. (Which have a significant impact when market share is under 1%!)

View attachment 199032

So your claim of 70% increase in PHEV sales year on year was more like 8% and your claim of BEV growing by 19% was actually 60% and that’s just using the data you posted, in the month of December which you claimed was not skewed by any short term campaigns forgetting that December is skewed by Black Friday deals which start at the end of November (29th) and usually involves buying your new car by the 31st of December to get the deal so they boost their year end figures. Also picking the month of the year that historically has the lowest car sales figures of any month.

Stop plucking figures out of midair. What the data you’ve posted shows is significant growth in battery electric vehicles and much lower growth in hybrids. I Don’t care how you spin it.
Even your claimed market share of 1% is wrong! It’s in the data you posted 6.2% up from 5.75% the year before.... :nutter:
 
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I didn't 'pluck figures from thin air' - I posted figures from a press article published in the middle of last year.

Not sure which figures you're reading, but 2018 market share for BEVs is 0.7%

PHEV declined (probably due to BMW ceasing production of 330e and 530e models whilst they modified them to meet latest legislation), whilst non-plug-in petrol hybrids grew by 1% to 3.4% of the market. (Probably due to increasing range available from Toyota, Honda and Hyundai/Kia).

Pure BEV is a minuscule part of the market, with some peaks when manufacturers throw money at shifting stock. But last year, it was still well under 1% of the total market.

You appear to have fallen into the trap many fall into where AFV (alternative fuel vehicles - which include PHEV, petrol-hybrid and diesel-hybrid as well as hydrogen) sales are taken to be BEV sales.
 
I didn't 'pluck figures from thin air' - I posted figures from a press article published in the middle of last year.

Not sure which figures you're reading, but 2018 market share for BEVs is 0.7%

PHEV declined (probably due to BMW ceasing production of 330e and 530e models whilst they modified them to meet latest legislation), whilst non-plug-in petrol hybrids grew by 1% to 3.4% of the market. (Probably due to increasing range available from Toyota, Honda and Hyundai/Kia).

Pure BEV is a minuscule part of the market, with some peaks when manufacturers throw money at shifting stock. But last year, it was still well under 1% of the total market.

You appear to have fallen into the trap many fall into where AFV (alternative fuel vehicles - which include PHEV, petrol-hybrid and diesel-hybrid as well as hydrogen) sales are taken to be BEV sales.

If you can’t show where you are getting your figures from then you are plucking them from midair, especially when they don’t match the figures that are easily accessible.

Look at SMMT figures they do not show what you are claiming.

Experts in the industry have observed that battery only electric vehicle is taking off, many more models available and there is plenty if infrastructure in place to support them. Hybrid technology uptake is decreasing. People who may have previously bought a hybrid are switching to electric cars and this is set to increase further as the main manufacturers bring their own all electric cars to market.
 
Jesus, this is hard work.

I googled and was linked to this article from the middle of last year.

It largely fitted the presentation given by the Petrol Retailers Association I attended recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/sales-hybrid-cars-diesels-environment-tax

I have also pasted directly from the SMMT site, figures which show 2018 market share for BEVs to be 0.7%. That's just 13.8% up on 2017 figures.

Because figures are so low, short-term manufacturer promotions have a large % impact on the YOY figures when comparing shorter timescales.
 
Fuel isn't really that big a problem. Petrol is basically a volatile long chain Carbon molecule that is liquid at ambient temperature and can be made from anything (E85 for a start) and my old Fiorino used to run happily on Rape Seed oil.

Sure more agriculture would have to be dedicated to fuel production. Less food production but the world is already overpopulated.

Silicone based oil for lubrication could be worth looking into as a viable alternative. :)
 
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