Possible FCA merger...

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Possible FCA merger...

Yes, it's energy hungry... but so are batteries, when you analyse end to end efficiency.

(Environmental payback of BEV vs ICE can be anywhere between 5 and 20 years, depending on use and source of power to charge - and that's not taking into account the raping and pillaging of the developing world and child labour to produce batteries...)

However, the key thing is convenience. Are we willing to balance convenience vs efficiency? Linde reckon they've cut the energy cost of electrolysis by 50% in the last 10 years, too.
 
Liquefying any gas uses a lot of energy.

My dealings were with Helium (a finite resource)

The drive motor was the size of a 60's
Fiat 500. When it failed it took out the 3x600A breakers.

Was off line for a while..

TBH the process - transferring liquid to Dewars for delivery- scared me.
 
Yes, it's energy hungry... but so are batteries, when you analyse end to end efficiency.

(Environmental payback of BEV vs ICE can be anywhere between 5 and 20 years, depending on use and source of power to charge - and that's not taking into account the raping and pillaging of the developing world and child labour to produce batteries...)

However, the key thing is convenience. Are we willing to balance convenience vs efficiency? Linde reckon they've cut the energy cost of electrolysis by 50% in the last 10 years, too.

Hydrogen creates another unnecessary step in the process. You make electricity to split water and oxygen, you pump the gas all over the place move It in tankers and so on, put it in a station, pump it into a car then either burn it which as with all ice engines is horribly inefficient, or you use a fuel cell to make it back into electricity to power the car.

The fuel cell car still needs a battery to store any excess power.

Or you put a battery in a car and us the electricity generated from the grid to power it, non of the complexity of hydrogen matters.

Hydrogen is not going to be the fuel of the future, the only people who think it will are those who have already sunk billions into it, even Toyota who make the only commercially available hydrogen car say it’s not going to be the future
 
You don't tanker it these days. On-site electrolysis is the way to do it. And burning H2 in ICE was a very short-term thing, it never made sense.

We need something which can bridge the gap between the convenience of fossil fuels and the environmental advantages of BEV. This is where H2 sits. For drivers covering long distances day in and day out and for goods transport, H2 can work where BEV can't.

There are currently 4 'mass produced' FCEVs on the market - Toyota, Honda, and 2 from Hyundai / Kia.
 
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There are currently 4 'mass produced' FCEVs on the market - Toyota, Honda, and 2 from Hyundai / Kia.

The Honda plant in Swindon has a hydrogen filling station. I've no idea how many hydrogen cars might exist in the Swindon area, but when the plant closes in 18 months time any hydrogen cars in the area will probably becoome scrap.
Only a short future then?
 
We are building 2 new electrolysis stations this year, to bring us up to 4, with another 2 planned for central London.

Our current partnership with ITM runs for another 5 years.

Germany will have 100 active H2 stations by the end of the year (70 currently active. Mix of tanker and electrolysis)
 
The nuclear power plants being prepared right now will cost less than the equivalent CCGT gas fired plant. That is a huge win for nuclear as to date nukes have cost at least 5 times that of a gas fired plant. When they go to factory production these modular plants will undercut coal on build costs and have extremely low running costs. The one at New Brusnwick in Canada cuts costs even further by burning the stored waste fuel taken from the water cooled reactor next door. They will be paid to take the used fuel away.

In most of the world coal is ridiculously cheap but as we know it's filthy stuff even before CO2 emissions are considered. But the high output temperatures allow the turbines to be cheap or the heat to be used for (such as) cement and ammonia production. To date all the nukes could do was make (expensive) electricity from bespoke low pressure turbines. The new molten salt nukes are hot enough to do the jobs currently dome by oil/gas and coal.

Ammonia production uses massive volumes of natural gas but ammonia is also a great diesel fuel and it does not have the NOx problems of petro-diesel. If it's hydrogenated you get an ester fuel which is even better. All of those processes use energy so are pointless when costs are high and/or you are burning much the same stuff you are making. But things change when you have a safe, reliable, low cost, zero CO2 energy source that delivers high temperatures.

The mega project PWR being built in Somerset has numerous areas that need special equipment and layers of controls to ensure safety. For sure it will be ultra safe but the costs to achieve that are huge. You can google the list of potential hazards that PWRs have to deal with.

The new molten salt reactor going into Canada obviously needs biological shielding (thick concrete) but cutting out the need for active safety hugely cuts costs. Everything has been designed to avoid stuff that needs engineered active safety systems.

It can even lose all cooling at full load and not overheat. It gets hotter but that just shuts down the nuclear reaction. All that dramatically cuts costs and delivers an intrinsically safe power plant. Even in a worst case scenario, it basically can't do anything nasty.

The big question is why can't we have these things right now. Obviously, being nuclear it needs to meet stringent safety rules, but the glacial slow pace of nuclear regulation is preventing any real change.
 
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The nuclear power plants being prepared right now will cost less than the equivalent CCGT gas fired plant.

The mega project PWR being built in Somerset has numerous areas that need special equipment and layers of controls to ensure safety. For sure it will be ultra safe but the costs to achieve that are huge. You can google the list of potential hazards that PWRs have to deal with.

The new molten salt reactor going into Canada obviously needs biological shielding (thick concrete) but cutting out the need for active safety hugely cuts costs. Everything has been designed to avoid stuff that needs engineered active safety systems.

It can even lose all cooling at full load and not overheat. It gets hotter but that just shuts down the nuclear reaction. All that dramatically cuts costs and delivers an intrinsically safe power plant. Even in a worst case scenario, it basically can't do anything nasty.

The big question is why can't we have these things right now. Obviously, being nuclear it needs to meet stringent safety rules, but the glacial slow pace of nuclear regulation is preventing any real change.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading around molten salt reactors, and if you read all the stuff coming out of companies like moltex on paper they sound fantastic, if you however look at journals and other information from physicists, you’ll see they have a lot of unsolved problems, they have some very serious and complex issues that make them potentially unsafe and thought they burn up their own fuel they still produce large amounts of nuclear contaminants that need to be processed and stored, one of which U233 is highly gamma active, needs to be removed from the live reactor and we have no safe means to reprocess it, currently out of the reactor. They need to develop new alloys to cope with problems like corrosion, and the high temperatures, you can’t use graphite moderators at very high temperatures without seriously limiting the life of the reactor <10 years.

These are very much a theory's and experiments at the moment and while have the potential to be better they are 70 years behind the level of research and development put into PWRs. And this is why no one is rushing to build these to replace the world’s current nuclear reactors
 
The Honda plant in Swindon has a hydrogen filling station. I've no idea how many hydrogen cars might exist in the Swindon area, but when the plant closes in 18 months time any hydrogen cars in the area will probably becoome scrap.
Only a short future then?

Castrol have fuelled a hydrogen taxi fleet for years ;)

Local BBC tv news have covered it many times.
 
Hydrogen has poor energy density compared to petroleum fuels so needs big tanks that are better suited to big vehicles.

The problem is poor energy transfer. Electrolytic water cracking has considerable losses and heat engines will all struggle to beat 40% efficiency. More like 25% for spark ignition.

Lithium batteries have a 99% efficiency on charge and discharge losses at normal rates are very low. Rapid discharge (as in "ludicrous mode") does drop the charge available by a lot more than the actual power taken.

On that basis what is the point of hydrogen as a fuel? OK, it can be more quickly filled but the high end to end losses make it far from the greenest option.

The high neutron flux inside a nuke reactor will happily crack water (ask the Fukushima staff) but good luck with the safety and regulatory issues!
 
The point is convenience and not having to install hundreds of charging points at the pinch locations on our road networks.

As a compact country, EV makes more sense here than it does worldwide, but still comes with massive capacity issues which are difficult to solve.

H2 can be stored in tanks so the plant runs continually until all capacity is filled. Meaning you require less peak capacity per site... to smooth this with BEV you need to install battery packs to charge batteries... hardly a great use of rare resources.

And don’t forget the elephant in the room. Mining for rare earth metals to make batteries for BEVs is really bad for the countries with those resources. Massive environmental impact, slave and child labour, this will be this stick used to tax BEV in the future.

Once BEV loses the tax benefits, demand collapses because they’re actually really inconvenient things at the time where convenience is vital.

The future is a blend. BEV for cities and shorter distances backed up by H2 for long distance travel and haulage / mass transport.
 
Castrol have fuelled a hydrogen taxi fleet for years ;)

Local BBC tv news have covered it many times.

Nothing coming up on Google!

An article in the Swindon Advertiser dated Nov 2017 says only a handful of cars use the Swindon hydrogen facility each year. Facility has been there since 2011, so not caught on there yet.
Apparently solar powered, so potentially a great idea, but not working. It's future will be uncertain when Honda closes.
 
The high neutron flux inside a nuke reactor will happily crack water (ask the Fukushima staff) but good luck with the safety and regulatory issues!


The hydrogen explosions at Fukushima where caused by a relation between the meeting down core of the, of which the fuel rods were coated in zirconium alloy and steam, so what you’re saying is it’s easy to make plenty of hydrogen as long as we melt a few reactor cores..... you’ll need more than luck to get that one past the regulators, not to mention the millions of gallons of highly radioactive water that where a left over from that disaster....

I’m beginning to think you don’t get science
 
Oh here we go. Don't like what someone says so lets make it personal.

Fukushima was indeed killed by hydrogen created by the steam/zirconium catalyst reaction, but that's a separate issue from normal operation neutron radiolysis.

All light water reactors have to deal with hydrogen created by water impacted by neutrons in the core. Fukushima had nothing like enough recombining capacity to cope with a core meltdown and steam/zirconium catalyst reactions.

It would be technically possible to use a high neutron flux to crack water. Cost, practicality, safety, etc. would have to be dealt with. Highly unlikely to be a practical option.
 
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Oh here we go. Don't like what someone says so lets make it personal.

Fukushima was indeed killed by hydrogen created by the steam/zirconium catalyst reaction, but that's a separate issue from normal operation neutron radiolysis.

All light water reactors have to deal with hydrogen created by water impacted by neutrons in the core. Fukushima had nothing like enough recombining capacity to cope with a core meltdown and steam/zirconium catalyst reactions.

It would be technically possible to use a high neutron flux to crack water. Cost, practicality, safety, etc. would have to be dealt with. Highly unlikely to be a practical option.

Nothing personal, I don’t get what the obsession with nuclear energy is and why you keep bringing it up, and yes if you buy into the hype I can see why you think it’s the answer to everything, but is is far more complex than that.

If you’re then going to say it would never be a practical option then why even bring it up?

Making hydrogen using heat from a nuclear reactor is technically possible, but it produces a lot of by products as well which cause corrosion and damage, like hydrogen peroxide, it’s not feasible so why even bring it up?

Why talk about nuclear a power on a thread about Peugeot and fiat merging.
 
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This is the Renault/Fiat thread Andy apparently FCA is putting it about a bit!

Having said that read a story on the BBC that the deal is off after Renault didn't reach a decision.

My mistake but fiat have been putting it about, it wasn’t that long ago VW were rumoured to be looking at buying fiat and other such mergers.

The way things are going I’d put money on a Chinese company taking it over, someone like geely.

It’s no surprise the deal has already fallen through on this.
 
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