| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
‘Fueled By Bullsh*t’: Toyota’s Video Defending Hydrogen Cars Is Funny But Misleading
First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.
Toyota’s new video, “Fueled By Bullsh*t,” responds to skeptics of its hydrogen fuel cell cars.
Toyota has launched a new video series, “Fueled By Everything,” attacking critics of its hydrogen fuel cell cars, which include Tesla CEO Elon Musk and myself. Episode 1 is actually titled “Fueled By Bullsh*t” (and directed by Morgan Spurlock!) and is about how you can literally run Toyota’s new hydrogen car, the Mirai, on cow manure.
Well, as Toyota admits online, you could run your car on hydrogen from cow manure, except “it’s not commonly used in the US to create a biogas needed for this process.” D’oh!
Actually the whole ad, while amusing, is so misleading as to qualify as BS itself. Hydrogen is one of the worst possible energy carriers imaginable to run a car on for several reasons, as I and others have explained repeatedly — today, 95 percent of hydrogen comes from natural gas (in a process that emits carbon dioxide); carbon-free hydrogen is quite costly; carbon-free hydrogen fueling stations are even more incredibly expensive than regular hydrogen fueling stations (which is why so few have been built); hydrogen has unique safety issues that necessitate specialized handling; hydrogen is incredibly difficult to store; and making hydrogen from renewable electricity is wildly inefficient.
But instead of actually replying seriously to the critics, Toyota unloaded this cowpie:
It is beyond embarrassing that a company as serious as Toyota would begin such a video defense of hydrogen as a car fuel this way:
“Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It’s in almost everything, from trees to water to grass. That’s what makes hydrogen such an exciting fuel.”
That is pure, unprocessed BS.
Hydrogen is most certainly not an “exciting fuel” for cars because “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.” Seriously, Toyota! We don’t drive in outer space. We drive on the Earth.
Yes, the universe has a whole lot of stars, which are mostly made up of hydrogen. And “empty” space also turns out to be filled with hydrogen — estimates put the density at between 0.1 and 1 atoms per cubic centimeter. Since space is so friggin’ huge, that, combined with all those stars, makes hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe by far (and conceivably useful for interstellar travel).
But stellar and interstellar hydrogen can’t fuel earthbound cars. There is virtually no free hydrogen gas on Earth because, as the lightest gas, it just floats away. Hydrogen is not even close to the most abundant element on earth. In fact, it comprises less than 1 percent of the mass of the Earth.
Hydrogen is most certainly not an “exciting fuel” for cars because “It’s in almost everything, from trees to water to grass.” First off, it’s not in almost everything. It is primarily in two things — water and hydrocarbons. Second, both of those sources are extremely problematic for people who would like to own a car that cuts carbon pollution.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of hydrogen is made from hydrocarbons, particular methane (CH4) with its 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom. The bad news is that while it is relatively cheap and easy to reform CH4 into hydrogen (H2), you are left with the CO2, which ends up in the atmosphere, where it is in the process of destroying the one livable climate we know of in the universe.
Yes, you can get some H2 from biogas (which is mostly CH4 and CO2 from organic waste and hence “renewable”), but that isn’t practical at a large scale, and even Toyota is forced to admit that the example it chose, biogas from bullsh*t, is “not commonly used in the US to create a biogas needed for this process.” The fact is, if we set up a large-scale system to make H2 from CH4 for cars, the overwhelming majority of it would come from natural gas because of price and convenience. And let’s not even get into the methane leakage issue, which probably wipes out whatever tiny benefit there is from running a fuel-cell car on H2 from CH4 compared to just running a Prius on gasoline.
That leaves get H2 from H2O using an electrolyzer, ideally one running on renewable power. Certainly there is a lot of easily accessible H2O on Earth. But the monumental inefficiency of converting it to H2 (and running a car with it) is one of the primary reasons against using that process as part of an affordable and practical carbon mitigation strategy for cars.
Water is a famously stable and unique molecule, in part because it has a high number of hydrogen bonds “relative to its low molecular mass. Owing to the difficulty of breaking these bonds, water has a very high boiling point.” Also the “nearly universal solvent properties of water are also due to hydrogen bonding.”
You don’t extract energy when you split water into hydrogen and oxygen — you consume energy. You extract energy when you make water from H2 and O2. Water is the end state of generating energy by combining hydrogen and oxygen (in a fuel cell or by combustion). Water is basically a waste product, like carbon dioxide, though a remarkably useful waste product.
On its website, Toyota acknowledges that its critics are saying “Hydrogen is inefficient.” But the company doesn’t respond to the charge here. Instead, it “responds” here to the charge Elon Musk, CEO of the electric-car company Tesla, made back in 2013 that hydrogen fuel cell cars “are so bullsh*t.” Except Toyota doesn’t respond to a single one of his specific arguments.
The fact that Toyota can run its Mirai on hydrogen from cow manure doesn’t mean that the whole system makes any sense whatsoever from the perspective of delivering an affordable and practical mass-market car, let alone one that could provide cost-effective CO2 reductions.
For those who haven’t heard the inefficiency argument before, a 2006 Scientific American article I wrote with advanced-hybrid guru Andy Frank explains that “the entire process of electrolysis, transportation, pumping and fuel-cell conversion would leave only about 20 to 25 percent of the original zero-carbon electricity to drive the motor.” But in an electric vehicle (EV), “the process of electricity transmission, charging an onboard battery and discharging the battery would leave 75 to 80 percent of the original electricity to drive the motor.” So the hydrogen car is more like one-third as efficient as the EV.
Put in more basic terms, the plug-in or EV “should be able to travel three to four times farther on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity than a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle could”! Here are some numbers from the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine:
The situation is even worse for fuel cell cars, or what the figure calls Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs). The two best cases for FCEVs in the chart — a hydrogen pipeline system from central station renewable generation and onsite renewable generation and electrolysis — are wildly implausible for many decades to come, if ever.
In any case, we have this huge global warming problem going on right now. We aren’t going to go to all the trouble of creating a premium solution — zero-carbon electricity — only to throw away most of it as part of some elaborate hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle scheme, a scheme that also requires the creation of an elaborate and expensive new system of green hydrogen production and/or delivery infrastructure. That’s particularly true when we can just run EVs on the premium carbon-free power directly (or, for that matter, simply continue to slash vehicle CO2 emissions through the straightforward continuation of fuel economy improvements).
So Elon Musk was right when he called hydrogen “bullsh*t” in 2013 and “an incredibly dumb” car fuel as he did in February. That’s especially true if you are concerned about global warming.
The post ‘Fueled By Bullsh*t’: Toyota’s Video Defending Hydrogen Cars Is Funny But Misleading appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/28/3651666/fueled-by-bullsht-toyota-hydrogen-cars/
