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horseandcart December 4, 2008 11:05 AM

'Driven by a 73Kw fuel cell'

- sorry to be a stickler Hilton but kilowatt is kW not Kw.

As to whether this hydrogen thingy will become mass in decades to come, no. Did you ask the GM people how the hydrogen is generated? How much it actually costs, rather than the subsidized rate?

The best bet for mass private transport at the moment and into the foreseeable future is smaller, lighter vehicles powered by small, efficient diesels or petrols routinely returning better than 60mpg or less than 4L/100km. The supply of oil is nowhere near exhausted; don't believe the 'peak oil' BS. The problem for the immediate few years to come is world-wide economic slump driving oil down to around $30/barrel meaning competitng fuel sources must be massively subsisdised. Who wants to pay for that when unemployment becomes mass? The problem with crashing oil prices is the incentive to explore and develop new oil fields goes away. If and when there is a recovery the price of oil will shoot up again. In the meantime let us not forget that in Britain at least, as much as the CO2 nuts hate to admit it, there is a several hundred year supply of coal in the ground which if necessary can be turned into coal-gas to fuel vehicles as well as fuel powerstations.

horseandcart December 4, 2008 1:24 PM

' there are two hydrogen pumps, one which re-fills at 350psi and the other, for the Traverse, re-fills at 700psi.'

'350psi/700psi'. I think you misread/misunderstood the GM blurb. It is 350 bar/700 bar, somewhat of a difference. This extreme pressure is necessary to achieve the required minimal energy density that only hydrogen in its liquid state can deliver.

horseandcart December 4, 2008 1:48 PM

'The receipt makes interesting reading. 1.52kg of Hydrogen, sold at a (subsidized) 8 Euros per kilo.'

according to this Der Spiegel article:

www.spiegel.de/.../0,1518,448648,00.html

from 2006, on the then launch of the BMW Hydrogen 7, a litre of hydrogen from a filling station in Berlin then was 57 cents. A kilogram of liquid hyrdogen has the volume of about 20 litres. So using the 2006 Spiegel figure your 1.52 kgs of hydrogen would cost 1.52x20x0.57=€17.3.

According to the official GM press-release on the HydroGen4:

www.autobloggreen.com/.../gms-fuel-cell-hydrogen4-hits-the-streets-in-berlin

"The three carbon-fibre composite tanks hold 4.2 kg of hydrogen at a pressure of 700 bars, sufficient for an operating range of up to 320 kilometres."

your 1.5kg refill was only about one-third of the total tanks volume. So for a full 320km range the cost of a fill, at 2006 prices, would be around three times the €17 figure or say €50. So €50 for 200miles range. A standard Opel Astra petrol would do 40mpg comfortably. So five gallons at 90p/litre would cost £20 or so, or €23. So less than half the cost of the hydrogen for the fuel cell vehicle. It is no wonder that the hydrogen 'you' bought needed/needs to be subsidized by at least 50%.

HiltonH December 5, 2008 12:34 AM

Horse - quite right, I should stop writing in the early hours....it was bar.

I took a picture of the pump, so should have looked closer.

Interestingly, the Total station hosted a mini reforming station, which was turning LPG into Gaseous Hydrogen. Though I should say that the little chemical factory also straddled the Berlin bus depot, so it's also for use by Hydrogen-powered public transport.

Interesting stuff on the subsidised fuel costs.

One thing I haven't managed to write about yet is GM's assumptions on switching to a Hydrogen economy, using most of the petrol/diesel infrastructure.

Their boffins reckon that it getting 85bn barrels per day of oil out of the ground will be hampered by costs - they estimate 4.5 Trillion Dollars, and argue it would be ultimately easier/cheaper to plan to shift to Hydrogen, with mass adoption ramping up beyond 2025.

HiltonH December 5, 2008 12:35 AM

Sorry, should have written that the 4.5 Trillion Dollars extraction cost is between now and 2030....

horseandcart December 5, 2008 8:38 AM

Morning Hilton.

Sorry to be a pain again, but it's 85 million barrels of oil, not 85bn, produced a day.

Interesting to note that $4.5 trillion cost for 22 years of oil extraction worldwide is only half the cost to the US taxpayer on extra national debt, to be paid by them and their descendants, spent by the US Fed & US Treasury, bailing out the bankers of Wall St. essentially, in the last 12 months alone. We live in mind-warping times and quite possibly during the biggest heist in history.

As to the Berlin Total hydrogen filling station Total have some informative blurb on this project on their website:

www.total.com/.../Total_Hydrogene_EN_sept2008.pdf

I made a mistake with my earlier comment. You are right. The hydrogen you filled with was in gas form not liquid, albeit mightily compressed. The general thrust of the amount of hydrogen needed to fuel the HydroGen4 fuel cell vehicle and the cost in comparison to a conventional economical internal combustion engined vehicle still holds though.

stagg December 22, 2008 10:40 PM

I seem to remember reading in the magazine a while back, that if you leave a car parked with a tank full of hydrogen, it will eventually empty itself, or somehow "disappear".  Is this correct?  Or am i thinking of something else altogether?  (this is very possible!)