Tim Worstall

Honda Cars

Buried at the bottom of this piece about Honda and the euro:

Honda’s president Takeo Fukui has threatened to cut off future
investment in Britain unless the country joins the euro, admitting that
the Japanese car producer had made an "error" building its car plant in
Swindon.

Fine, but no, we shouldn’t take the decision upon whether to join or not purely on the basis of how much FDI we get.

This is much more interesting:

"Hybrid cars alone cannot deal with global
warming. The ultimate solution is the fuel cell but our engineers are
struggling with this technical challenge and a breakthrough is not
going to be easy," he said.

"At the moment it uses a massive amount of precious metal [platinum] and I don’t think it’s realistic for the next 10 years."


Mr Fukui said the technology would not be viable until consumers could
re-supply the fuel cells at home from solar batteries that are carbon
neutral.

There are fuel cell solutions that don’t use platinum (they use scandium instead!) and no, they’re not ready yet although they work well enough in the lab and manufacturing costs are plummeting as people experiment with them. However, the bit that really interests me is that one about home refueling being necessary.

I agree absolutely, I think that is going to be the nut that, once cracked, will open up the hydrogen economy. I even know of an Australian research team who think they’ve got the right idea. There’s a well known reaction between titanium dioxide (the stuff that makes white paint white, so a fairly cheap item) and water in the presence of sunlight. It acts as a catalyst breaking the water into constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen.  Collect the hydrogen from the roof tiles that you’ve made out of TiO2 containing slag and pressurize it and stick it into the car or the home CHP system.

The US Department of Energy thinks that is such a system can be made 10% efficient then it would work in economic terms. The researchers are sure that they can get it to 15% efficiency.

Some years away mind. But wouldn’t it annoy all those deep greens if it in fact did work as advertised? A solution to climate change (at least in part) that didn’t require that we all give up personal transport?

In

14 responses

  1. Alastair Avatar
    Alastair

    “Mr Fukui said the technology would not be viable until consumers could re-supply the fuel cells at home from solar batteries that are carbon neutral.”
    The last paragraph of the quote is one that people often forget when they bang on about hybrid/electic power. Unless you are using carbon neutral elctricity generation, they are even worse in overall emission terms than petrol driven cars as you need to take account of the emissions produced by the power station. With transmission losses the overall emissions are surely higher? The TiO2 process sounds interesting.

    Reply
  2. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “Unless you are using carbon neutral elctricity generation, they are even worse in overall emission terms than petrol driven cars as you need to take account of the emissions produced by the power station.”
    No, not true at all. Quite the opposite in fact. See:
    http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/energy_efficiency.php

    Reply
  3. Kit Avatar
    Kit

    Using my crystal ball I think the “hydrogen economy” will never take off or drive off. I suspect the humble electric car will be the eventual winner. It has the technological lead, requires no new infrastructure, and it’s cheaper. Look at Kay Tie’s link if you don’t believe me;)

    Reply
  4. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    The only drawback to the Tesla sports car over the Elise I can see is the range (because of recharging times). This could be fixed if there was a standard design of battery pack and it could be swapped out (automatically by robot) for a charged one in a filling station.
    With a bit of IT the driver can sell his empty battery to the garage (at a price based on reasonable life left in the battery) and buy another charged one back (again at a reasonable price), so no-one has to worry about range. The garage can make a profit on the margins, the robots can handle the swapping and charging of the batteries, and the driver can pull in, swap out, and drive off within seconds.
    The cost ought to be comparable to the current petroleum costs (the electricity is a lot cheaper than refined fuel, but the amortization of the batteries is probably going to make up that difference).
    The electric approach works well because going forward battery technology is going to get better and better (some of the nanotech approaches are very promising) and electricity can be generated by non-carbon sources (workable fusion power really will solve this).

    Reply
  5. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    The battery swapping idea is not bad, but in a fast-changing technology with many different types of car and engine, I’m not sure how it could be standardised enough.

    Reply
  6. Zorro Avatar
    Zorro

    Kay-Tie,
    That is /one/ of the big drawbacks to the Tesla, another is price, it is /significantly/ more than an Elise.
    The main drawback however you’ve completely missed. It is that these /very expensive/ batteries, which make up around 1/2 the cost of the car, will need to be replaced every 3 years or so. (Oh and what about pollution caused when all those batteries are chucked away, aren’t they li-ion? Nice!)
    Fusion power? Way off commercial viability if ever!

    Reply
  7. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “That is /one/ of the big drawbacks to the Tesla, another is price, it is /significantly/ more than an Elise.”
    Give Tesla a bit of a break: they can’t amortize the R&D over quite as many cars as Lotus (a problem that is reduced in time).
    In any case, if we could solve the CO2 emissions issue and get the neo-communists (i.e. most of those claiming to be green) to shut up then the price is well worth paying.
    Not sure why the batteries would die so soon. Tesla claim (and warrant) they are good for 100,000 miles, which is better than you’d get from most conventional cars.
    “Fusion power? Way off commercial viability if ever!”
    Hmmn. “Space travel is utter bilge” said Astronomer Royal Sir Richard Wooley in 1956, just before Sputnik. Failure of imagination has a glorious history…

    Reply
  8. Roger Thornhill Avatar
    Roger Thornhill

    The battery swap out is not a good idea – who knows how knackered and mankey the ‘replacement’ will be.
    There has been progress in nanotech for lead-acid batteries. Good old lead-acid. The limit is on speed of recharging and discharging – too fast and they disrupt. It is a factor of surface area for collecting, holding and releasing charge. Nanotech has given us lead plates with 40x the surface area (and I am sure this will grow).
    I do suspect the good old lead-acid battery will be recharged in 5 mins for a 300 mile trip and store vast amounts of energy vs todays models. The biggest issue will be supplying filling stations with the multi-megawatt supplies needed to fast-charge vehicles.
    Once they do, await Government introducing a “high tension electrical consumption tax”.
    p.s. Unless hydrogen comes from carbon-free sources, it is not clean at all, but just a convenient storage of energy.

    Reply
  9. Roger Thornhill Avatar
    Roger Thornhill

    p.p.s. Fusion is the way. IEC from Bussard is very exciting.

    Reply
  10. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    How are you going to get your diffuse hydrogen bubbles off your TiO2 roof and into a reasonably convenient form, without using a lot of energy? Compressed hydrogen is a silly way to store energy.
    I can’t see why you’d do this to a perfectly good roof that could be covered in solar panels that already, ah, exist and could charge yr electric car.
    BTW, electric motors are dramatically more efficient than an ICE, and they don’t need a mechanical drivetrain. Grid losses are about 10 per cent @ 1000Km. Gas turbines in a power station are also damn efficient compared to the 1890s ironmongery commonly described as a “car”.

    Reply
  11. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    “Hmmn. “Space travel is utter bilge” said Astronomer Royal Sir Richard Wooley in 1956, just before Sputnik. Failure of imagination has a glorious history…”
    I wonder what the context of this (justly) celebrated quote is. If he meant travel, as in aeroplane and bus travel, then it wasn’t that idiotic a statement. If he meant travel as in exploration, then clearly it was.

    Reply
  12. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]…presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author’s insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished.” -Sir Richard van der Riet Wooley, British astronomer, reviewing P.E. Cleator’s “Rockets in Space”, Nature, March 14, 1936

    Reply
  13. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    Oh, and Time magazine actually has the original 1956 article from which comes the “utter bilge” quote:
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861825,00.html

    Reply
  14. Stephen Avatar
    Stephen

    Cars like the Tesla do lessen the reliance on oil if your power stations use a lot of coal, and to the extent that they use nuclear, also reduce carbon. But maybe we should be concentrating on using up the oil as quickly as possible. Let them try to sell sand!

    Reply

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