No more electric

[Paul Taylor]

This looks less complicated

[Robert Zambelli]

Gee, that appears to be so simple!
Must be ultra reliable.

[Will Hinton]

Could I fit that in my MG?

[Jim Svitko]

At first, I thought it was something from the Borg.

[Dennis Toth]

Hey, Ya got a HEMI in that thing?

Don't know why they had to solve the H2 engine problem, it would great in fuel cell systems and in any engine designed for propane, which has been around for years. Also, any gas turbine engine can be adapted. The main issue with H2 power for cars is infrastructure. This was what killed the compressed natural gas (CNG) cars, couldn't get a significant number of filling stations. It is also why electric has succeeded; it is very easy to drop a powerline to a charging station or have the 220 system in your house.

The real place for H2 is power generation stations. They have the room for the needed on-site process equipment and can use it in existing steam plants (with some modifications) and gas turbine plants. This would not only help the environment but also keep price pressure on the natural gas market, just like the electric cars are putting pressure on the oil market to keep it from going through the roof.

Best,    DennisT

[John Rist]

Hydrogen as a fuel source may well be the answer.  A Hydrogen powered car is really an electric car that is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.  Right now to initial cost of the car is insane making for the rich only.  The real problem with hydrogen
power is  generating the hydrogen.  it takes heat or electricity to manufacture hydrogen. If the heat source or electric source creates pollution you are right back where you started.  Why it will probably work in the long run is that hydrogen becomes the battery (energy storage device).  Wind & solar power comes and goes with time of day and time of year.  Massive hydrogen generating plants can be built that generate massive amounts hydrogen when it can.  The Hydrogen is then stored in storage tanks and shipped all over the USA in existing pipe lines.  It could work.  But it is years away.  I am too old (84) to ever  see it come to pass             

[Colin McRae]

The real place for H2 is power generation stations. They have the room for the needed on-site process equipment and can use it in existing steam plants (with some modifications) and gas turbine plants.

Best,    DennisT

This also a fuel supply infrastructure (and related cost) issue. Need 'lots and lots' of H2.

A modern utility grade combined cycle (gas turbine and heat recovery steam turbine) power plant, say rated at 500 megawatts would consume close to 12 million standard cubic feet of hydrogen gas per hour at full load. That's every hour or, 288 million scf/day.

It would simply be uneconomical to use H2. Utilites would love to use H2 as a fuel source since no carbon related pollution. But just not economic or they would already be using it.

And if H2 is burned in a gas turbine, there will still be oxides of nitrogen (NOx) pollution which is still a big issue for utilities.

[John Rist]

This also a fuel supply infrastructure (and related cost) issue. Need 'lots and lots' of H2.

A modern utility grade combined cycle (gas turbine and heat recovery steam turbine) power plant, say rated at 500 megawatts would consume close to 12 million standard cubic feet of hydrogen gas per hour at full load. That's every hour or, 288 million scf/day.

It would simply be uneconomical to use H2. Utilites would love to use H2 as a fuel source since no carbon related pollution. But just not economic or they would already be using it.

And if H2 is burned in a gas turbine, there will still be oxides of nitrogen (NOx) pollution which is still a big issue for utilities.

The problem is H2 doesn't exist in natural form.  You have to manufacture it.

[GERALD WIMMER]

Hello

Lots of video's on you tube about hydrogen vehicles and conversions of diesels like JCB are doing in the UK.
Here's a short video induction:
https://youtu.be/tsDW5r8e48g?si=FuPbNk3lX9oqWG7e

Personally I like PAW diesels on model planes

[katana]

The problem is H2 doesn't exist in natural form.  You have to manufacture it.

You can't 'manufacture' hydrogen - its an element, its actually the first element on the periodic table ie, the building block from which ALL other elements are derived!

If you mean hydrogen as a free substance in nature you are partly correct as it is reactive and needs to bond with something to exist in a free state. This it does with many other elements
but for us generally this involves water H2O - and spliting the Oxygen off is the labour / power intensive bit.

Power is expensive to produce and to store cheaply - hydro is probably the best, cheapest power method and when demand is low, excess capacity can be used to pump water back to
reservoirs to be re-used. This excess could be used to split water to obtain Hydrogen and Oxygen but then power is again required to cool it to liquify it to near absolute zero
(-250+ C / -425 F) or huge pressure vessels required to store as a gas (5 - 10,000psi) There are other sources but extraction costs go up in orders of magnitude so become uneconomic.

Hydrogen maybe good but its not necessarily the answer to everything!

[Joseph Lijoi]

Could I fit that in my MG?

You can make it fit. It just won't start. Lucas....the prince of darkness.

[Joseph Lijoi]

Could I fit that in my MG?

You can make it fit. It just won't start. Lucas....the prince of darkness.

[Jim Svitko]

Switches made by Lucas have three positions:  dim, flicker, and off.

The British drink warm beer because Lucas makes the refrigerators.

[Colin McRae]

You can't 'manufacture' hydrogen - its an element, its actually the first element on the periodic table ie, the building block from which ALL other elements are derived!

Hydrogen can be manufactured. It is made today via various chemical process using fossil fuels, mainly natural gas. One example is liquid hydrogen used to power some modern rocket engines. Another example. It is used as the main coolant for large utility scale electrical generators.

The problem comes back to cost. It is just not economical to manufacturer and use as an everyday fuel.

[Robert Zambelli]

Will - which MG do you have?

Could I fit that in my MG?

[Steve Fitton]

That original "BMW" picture looks like somebody asked AI to "make a complicated engine"

That said, it is possible Germans overengineered it that much.

[Arlan McKee]

This would not only help the environment but also keep price pressure on the natural gas market, just like the electric cars are putting pressure on the oil market to keep it from going through the roof.

Best,    DennisT

You have to be joking. They can't hardly give away electric cars and you think they put pressure on the oil market? That's hilarious.

[Jim Svitko]

That original "BMW" picture looks like somebody asked AI to "make a complicated engine"

That said, it is possible Germans overengineered it that much.

I will never understand the German engineering process.  At times, they can come up with some really nice products.  Well made and functional.  Then, they seem to go overboard and look for solutions to non-existent problems, with some components having frequent failures.  And when that happens, they will not admit to a poorly engineered and manufactured product.

I have had BMW motorcycles.  The ones I like the best were the old, air cooled, carbureted boxers.  Simple machines, usually easy to fix, and run forever.  But even those had their weak points that were never fully addressed and improved.  You just put up with that because other features were so desirable.

On one of their latest models, with fuel injected engines and a multitude of other gadgets, changing the headlight bulb was an ordeal.  Something like that should not take half a day and cause so much frustration.

[Colin McRae]

This looks less complicated

H'mmm, let's see.

A McCoy 35 has 4 moving parts. This thing 857,024 moving parts.

I think I'll stay with the McCoy 

[Brian Hampton]

That so-called BMW engine is obviously AI generated but the problem with hydrogen is that virtually all free hydrogen on Earth has long ago been locked up in other elements (mainly with oxygen to form water) as has already been mentioned. There's still a tiny amount of free hydrogen being released from deep inside the Earth but when it leaves the surface it begins to move upwards gaining speed until it's moving faster than escape velocity so it's lost forever. Jupiter though is about 75% hydrogen but its surface gravity is high enough to trap the hydrogen below its escape velocity. An even more extreme condition is the sun itself which is almost entirely hydrogen.

With all that said, as a kid I used to make hydrogen to fill balloons simply by dissolving caustic soda crystals in water then dropping small chunks of aluminium into the solution. When I could see bubbles forming on the aluminium I'd tie a balloon to the neck of the bottle and leave it until the balloon was full almost to bursting then tie off the neck with some string. This was fun to do at night because I would set fire to the string then let the balloon loose to fly up in the sky. The string would burn up to the balloon which then burst and set fire to the hydrogen and end up with a a ball of burning free hydrogen gas . This probably wasn't the most efficient way to make hydrogen commercially but it worked for me in my back yard .

[Steve Helmick]

Hahahaha! We used weather balloons, from 2' to 4' diameter. Our hydrogen generator was a gallon A&W Rootbeer jug, and a 4" length of SIG DT fuse taped to the balloon worked perfect. We were amazed that our efforts never made the headlines of the local newspaper, since they made a huge fireball at night. 

Regarding the complexity of the H2 engine pictured, I always said that any nit can design something complex and make it work, but designing something simple, easy to produce, plus reliable, takes a lot more engineering.    Steve

[John Rist]

Looking at the picture I am not sure what is going on.  Is that what it takes for a hydrogen battery?  Is that the battery and motor all in one?              I thought that was just an electric car that runs on a hydrogen battery.

[Brett Buck]

Looking at the picture I am not sure what is going on.  Is that what it takes for a hydrogen battery?  Is that the battery and motor all in one?              I thought that was just an electric car that runs on a hydrogen battery.

   It's fake. There are two ways to make a car run on hydrogen, burn it in an engine which is pretty conventional except for the fuel supply system, or run it in a fuel cell, which takes hydrogen and air to make water and a lot of electricity, then use the electricity to charge a battery or drive an electric motor directly.

  Neither method is particularly practical for a passenger vehicle, and as far as I know there are only a free hydrogen fueling stations, all in California to supply a few  Toyota Marai. They are shutting down them down due to nearly non-existent demand.

     Brett

[Jim Svitko]

Back in the early 80s, I came across some articles about a company doing experimental work to use hydrogen instead of gasoline in conventional internal combustion engines.  I do not remember the details but I suppose the fuel delivery system was similar to using propane or natural gas.  I sometimes see city buses here that are powered by CNG and also some other vehicles converted to propane.

I remember something about the hydrogen tank being of special construction.  And, producing the hydrogen was a problem.  I think the idea of these experiments was to see how much emissions reduction was possible and to prove that hydrogen would work.  But the technical hurdles and associated costs were too great.

[Paul Smith]

Coal, the rock that burns, is the world's universal sure-fire energy source.

Detroit Public Schools all had a coal pile and a powerhouse that turned coal into heat and electricity.  We NEVER had a power outage.

In my student days at GM I spent a month in the powerhouse.  We turned coal into stream, electricity, compressed air, and deionized water.  We never had a lost day of production due to an electric company failure.  There was NO lost energy due to transmission losses.  With a pressurized boiler room the coal burned totally clean and pollution free.

The war on coal leads back to the electric monopolies via a very obvious money trail.

[Brett Buck]

Back in the early 80s, I came across some articles about a company doing experimental work to use hydrogen instead of gasoline in conventional internal combustion engines.  I do not remember the details but I suppose the fuel delivery system was similar to using propane or natural gas.  I sometimes see city buses here that are powered by CNG and also some other vehicles converted to propane.

I remember something about the hydrogen tank being of special construction.  And, producing the hydrogen was a problem.  I think the idea of these experiments was to see how much emissions reduction was possible and to prove that hydrogen would work.  But the technical hurdles and associated costs were too great.

    One of the many problems with hydrogen is that it is so light that the tanks tend to be extremely large, or, they become prohibitively heavy/strong/dangerous to compress enough mass into a small enough space. Natural gas is something like 5x as heavy and can be compressed to a liquid at room temperature. Hydrogen has to be cooled to extremely low temperatures to be liquified and is impractical to try to store it that way for any period of time in a car, and it is still only something like 4.5 lb/cu ft. So while it is very powerful per unit mass, it's is nearly the worst thing available for power per unit volume. Even in rocket applications, the high specific impulse is generally outweighed by the difficulties of storing it for any length of time, or the large weight of the tanks, and only makes sense in limited applications.
 
     Note that the Apollo Service module ran using fuel cells to generate electricity, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen reacting to generate electricity. This was the first notable use of a Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cell. The oxygen tank for this system is what exploded on Apollo 13 and took out the redundant unit via fratricide. The redundant unit was *inches away from the primary*. They later added a 3rd system that was all the way on the other side of the SM (which had plenty of space to put such things, being drastically oversized for an LOR mission).    This was in leiu of a few huge batteries that could run the entire mission for 10-ish days required. The LM did run entirely on batteries.

    Brett

[Colin McRae]

Hydrogen fuel cell technology is available to generate electricity today, but it is just too expensive on a first cost basis.

The largest hydrogen fuel cell power plant in the world today that I'm aware of is in South Korea and is rated at 78 megawatts (78,000 kW). It was installed for $292 million dollars. That's an installed cost basis of $3,750/kW.

There is a 500-megawatt (500,000 kW) natural gas-fired gas turbine peaking power plant in Arizona. That plant was installed for close to $400 million dollars. An installed cost basis of $800/kW.

So private or public utilities are not going to install the fuel cell technology unless it is cost subsidized by the government (that's all of us as taxpayers)