Re: Electrification: Bad Idea?

allan tracy wrote:
Exactly, all that pre-planning takes away considerably from the whole
point of a car.

Top Gear, earlier this year, featured an electric car running on fuel
cells, fuelled by hydrogen (by product water) and refills in the
conventional way, that seemed to be the way forward.

No real discernable differences from a conventional car, even
performance, though I accept there are issues concerning fuel cell and
hydrogen production but are these really so insurmountable?

Methanol would be a better energy carrier than hydrogen for off-grid use. Methanol can be made efficiently from any carbon-containing feedstock (including natural gas, heavy residues from oil refining and coal, as well as renewable materials such as wood): the feed is converted to carbon monoxide and hydrogen by controlled reaction with steam and/or oxygen, and the resulting gas mixture is reacted at high pressure over a catalyst to make methanol. If you want a carbon-neutral fuel, you use a carbon-neutral feedstock (such as renewable trees) to make the methanol.

There are already fuel cells that will run on methanol, and these will improve with further development.

Also, petrol engines can run on methanol with minor modifications, so you could have a transitional period while petrol stations introduce methanol, without making existing vehicles redundant overnight.

The existing fuel distribution system is set up for liquid fuels, so the transition to providing methanol would be relatively painless.

Elsewhere in the thread, someone pointed out that hydrogen manufacture by electrolysis is not usually done because of the economics. The underlying scientific reason for these economics is thermodynamic: the electricity you use to create hydrogen is of a higher usefulness per energy unit than the chemical energy that can be obtained by burning the hydrogen. (For instance, a conventional power station can only convert 30 to 40% of the chemical energy of its fuel to electricity, and even modern gas-fired combined cycle power plants can only get to around 50% or so).

You can make hydrogen from any carbon-containing feedstock: the first part of the process is the same as making methanol, but then you use a catalyst to "shift" the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, and then wash it out of the gas stream (the CO2 can be vented to atmosphere, or recovered and captured). If you are starting from a carbon-based fuel, this will approach always work out cheaper than making electricity and electrolysing water. On the other hand, if you have cheap electricity from non-carbon-fuel based sources, making hydrogen by electrolysis becomes attractive.
--
Jeremy Double <jmd.nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> {real address, include nospam}
Rail and transport photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmdouble/collections/72157603834894248/
.

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