Business could soon be getting awfully rough for electric (battery) car technology manufacturers.
For example, German online newsweekly FOCUS here reports how the Singapore government “does not want electric cars” and even “is blocking electric cars.”
E-cars dirtier than claimed
According to Minister Masago Zulkifli bin Masagos Mohamad, who is responsible for the environment and water supply, Singapore has “no interest in a lifestyle, that is being promoted by Tesla’s Elon Musk.
“We are interested in clean solutions to get climate problems under control,” said Zulkifli.
FOCUS adds that Musk’s e-car strategy has been “met with massive criticism” in Singapore.
In fact, the Singapore government also had previously decided to impose a CO2 tax on e-cars because the fossil fuels used for generating electricity for the e-car needs to be taken into account.
E-cars have environmental drawbacks
Singapore has strong arguments against more e-cars, FOCUS adds. One reason is that the country relies on a dense public transport network of bus and rail, and so throwing e-cars into the mix would only lead to congestion.
The forward-looking Zukifli is clearly placing bets on hydrogen propulsion for the future.
This may explain why a number of countries (e.g. Germany) have been stalling when it comes to investments in electric car infrastructure. Why invest tens of billions in an electric car infrastructure when it may be obsolete in a decade or less?
According to FOCUS: “This [hydrogen propulsion] has a particularly low CO2 footprint, given that rare metals are required for the manufacture of electric car batteries and it has not yet been clarified how they can later be disposed of safely.”
Asia going full throttle to hydrogen
Reuters here reports that China, Japan, and South Korea “have set ambitious targets to put millions of hydrogen-powered vehicles” – hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) – on the road by the end of the next decade.
According to proponents, hydrogen FCVs are clean, the gas is plentiful in supply, offers distance ranges similar to gasoline cars and are free of battery-manufacture and after-life disposal/environmental issues.
According to Reuters: “Many backers in China and Japan see FCVs as complementing EVs rather than replacing them. In general, hydrogen is seen as the more efficient choice for heavier vehicles that drive longer distances, hence the current emphasis on city buses.”
Read more at No Tricks Zone
Good for Singapore. They have some laws there that the some Americans would find oppressive – forget recreational drugs for instance. Laws are enforced. In the 1960’s, police rode four to a car. Between them they could speak any of the languages used on the island.
Say, that American youngster who was caned for damaging a motor vehicle – did he ever get caught committing another crime after he came home?
Yes, hydrogen is plentiful but is found tied to other elements such as water or hydrocarbons (aka fossil fuels). So to have free hydrogen needed to “burn” by combining with oxygen it must either be split from the oxygen (that’s how we got the oxygen we breathed in subs when we were submerged (which was 99% of the time while at sea) or it has to be stripped from fossil fuels, almost solely from natural gas. Would there be the capacity to generate large amounts of free hydrogen if we tried to move to such an environment? It is one thing to do it for a small number of vehicles but adding hundreds of thousands or even millions of such vehicles–a very large infrastructure would need to be built. And hydrogen is a bit trickery to transport as compared to gasoline and diesel fuels. There was a reason our oxygen generator was called “The Bomb”!
Bad news. A headline from yesterday: A deadly blast hampers South Korea’s big fuel cell car bet. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-hydrogen-southkorea-insight/hydrogen-hurdles-a-deadly-blast-hampers-south-koreas-big-fuel-cell-car-bet-idUSKBN1W936A
Hydrogen (H2) is completely man made and doesn’t really exist in nature. There’s no hydrogen well, etc. You have to already have energy to make hydrogen.
You read my comment above? Although I hadn’t heard about the explosion in South Korea I wrote above that H2 is not a friendly neighbor, not easily stored and transported like oil, gasoline and natural gas.
A major problem exists for Hydrogen power – nowhere on Earth can you mine Hydrogen – so you have to synthesise it – first method is electrolysis – fairly efficient (80%) – but then you have to compress, cool, store, transport etc. etc. so you are better off going directly to electrically powered cars and skip out all those energy spendthrift transformations in-between the energy source and your car. (At present the only advantage to Hydrogen is that you can fill’er up – as opposed to a lengthy battery recharge.)
Guess what ? Commercially manufactured Hydrogen is produced by reacting Methane and Steam vis :- CH4 + 2H2O = H8 + CO2 well I’ll be hornswoggled – A Hydrogen powered car produces CO2 (in its supply chain – at least) bet you didn’t see that in the brochure. There’s inconvenient truths everywhere.
What should be obvious is that you would be far better off burning the methane directly in an internal combustion engine – thereby eliminating all the energy spendthrift transformations. The alarmists would argue that burning methane still produces CO2 – but from the above it is equally obvious that using Hydrogen will (for the same amount of deliverable energy from methane) actually manufacture more CO2.
So since you can “fil’er up” with methane – that negates the only advantage of using Hydrogen.
Third problem – Does the word Hindenburg mean anything to you ?
(The Hindenburg did not blow up it burned – rapidly – the Hydrogen did not get the opportunity to mix with air {other than at the flame front} and thus remained unable to explode.)
We have not yet had a major Hydrogen disaster but given that it is explosive in almost any concentration (4% to 74%), it’s going to happen.
Leeds in the UK is laying down hydrogen supply infrastructure in a test area of the city – I predict a future disaster – we have all seen the damage done by natural gas explosions from leaking infrastructure – hydrogen will be worse and much more likely because of its propensity to leak and its wide explosive limits. It’s only a matter of time.
Oops it already happened 13 June 2019 :-
https://climatechangedispatch.com/hydrogen-fuel-station-explodes/
I predict a lot more and a lot worse will follow.
It once was my belief that Hydrogen was the fuel of the future but the technological problems piled up against Hydrogen keep piling up with no solutions in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
For me the final nail in the coffin of Hydrogen is the problem of leakage – something engineers have been unable to solve. It is a very small molecule and leaks through most seal materials, some metals and microporosity in welds etc.
The problem: if we start to use Hydrogen as a world wide portable fuel (to replace petrol, diesel & LPG) will be that the loss of Hydrogen through leakage will be appreciable.
Also “unburned” hydrogen on misfires or “rich” running will also be “leakage” to the atmosphere.
Cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen – typically stored in thermos flask type vessels is initially cooled and then kept cold by evaporation – another major source of “leakage”.
Losses to leakage, cryogenic evaporation, coupling & uncoupling etc. can be from 1% to 10% most knowledgeable sources say the 10% end is more realistic.
Hydrogen manufactured by electrolysis is nascent Hydrogen H+ not H2. This is such a small molecule it dissolves into steel (causing hydrogen embrittlement) forming a solid solution – it literally can go through metal walls. It eventually stabilises to H2. But is problematical in production and leakage is unavoidable.
Leakage Hydrogen will rise rapidly through the atmosphere, through the stratosphere and eventually meet the Ozone layer – there it will react with the Ozone to produce water vapour. (6H+O3 = 3H2O)
Even an extremely optimistic 1% loss, if Hydrogen is adopted as a large scale portable fuel replacement, will release sufficient free hydrogen to be extremely damaging.
This will be bad for two reasons :-
Firstly the damage to the Ozone layer – by depleting it will bring about greater UV exposure.
Secondly this water vapour above (and within) the Stratosphere will produce (previously rare) noctilucent clouds which will drastically increase the Earth’s albedo (reflectiveness) thereby causing a significant Global Cooling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud
So my current position is that Hydrogen will not solve our energy problems principally because it is dangerous, grossly inefficient (overall) and a pollutant with real and serious consequences for global climate.
So Ken, what you are saying is that Hydrogen is no nirvana energy source?
You laid out in much greater detail than what I said above and gave many additional reasons why this is a dumb solution. Thing is no matter what we use as the “feed stock” to give us elemental hydrogen costs energy. I knew that the major feed stock was natural gas (aka methane) but wasn’t aware that they used steam where the process removes the carbon but attaches it to oxygen giving us that supposedly earth destroying gas CO2! Kinda defeats the whole reason they say we need to stop burning fossil fuels!
Thanks for the additional details. Hydrogen fuel cells are not quite as benign as certain people want us to believe.
Hydrogen boils at 423.2 F below zero. To use the cryogenic means of storing it requires a lot of energy to cool the hydrogen and then to keep it below its boiling point. I know that some systems for hydrogen cars use an alternate method of storing the gas at 10,000 psi. Does anyone see a problem with that? (Rhetorical question)
Thanks much to all the above commenters, between you all objections have effectively been explained. Considering that carbon dioxide emissions are no problem whatsoever and that fossil fuels never did come from “fossils” but are constantly being produced within the earth’s crust, there is no issue anywhere other than with dumb politicians and grant-hungry zombie scientists. Keep on rocking!!!