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Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Technical issues not related to a DLOC car marque, eg tyres, ethanol, other car makes, etc. and legal, political and insurance
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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by John-B »

Hydrogen power is my favoured fuel, simple alterations to a petrol engine and no range anxiety.

Hydrogen is expensive to produce and uses a lot of electricity, so one answer would be to use off-peak electric power produced partly with fossil fuels and mostly green energy and store it before distribution to service station pumps.

A byproduct is oxygen to restore the O2 / CO2 balance in the atmosphere, assuming a really large switch worldwide to hydrogen power.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by grahamemmett »

I asked Mr Google "What Hydrogen cars are available in the UK?"
and got this reply:
Firstly, their technology makes them expensive: the only hydrogen cars currently on sale in the UK are the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo, which both cost over £60,000 after the government's £3,500 grant. Then there's the issue of refuelling, as there's only a handful of hydrogen stations dotted around the UK
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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by John-B »

grahamemmett wrote: Tue Feb 04, 2020 5:28 pm I asked Mr Google "What Hydrogen cars are available in the UK?"
and got this reply:
Firstly, their technology makes them expensive: the only hydrogen cars currently on sale in the UK are the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo, which both cost over £60,000 after the government's £3,500 grant. Then there's the issue of refuelling, as there's only a handful of hydrogen stations dotted around the UK
Yes, I realise all that, but once economies of scale work their magic, those costs would come down, and total costs have to be compared with the cost of producing vastly more electricity supply charging points and the electricity itself for electric cars.

London taxis use hydrogen have all sorts of benefits. I was under the impression that conversion of existing cars involves a change to a pressure tank and some carburettor alterations, but not much else, so could be useful if the supply problem is sorted. Because hydrogen can be got from a pump in a few minutes and a car has a long range, it would require much less cost to set up than setting up charging points for electric cars because each car has to wait 30 or 40 minutes, so more charging points are required (or fast charge doesn't give you such a big charge).

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by Chris_R »

If you read up on it, Japan has a strategy to go to a hydrogen economy, their geography does not lend itself to generating electricity by renewable means. They plan a network of hydrogen fuelling stations. Imagine if you will, a line of cars belching out exhausts but the air is perfectly clean because the only emission is water vapour.
The Japanese want to reduce their dependence on foreign oil and gas imports so their plan involves gasifying Australian brown coal and transporting the hydrogen to Japan by tanker for distribution to their fuelling stations.
I think there is a flaw in this plan but I can't quite work out what that might be.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by Sydsmith »

The way I saw it was that although hydrogen production consumes loads of electricity, there is also a problem with surplus electricity when winds are high or the sun is strong and that coincides with low demand, what better way to store the surplus but by converting it to hydrogen which would then fuel generation for the times when eco electric is not available but demand is high.

The imbalance between too much electricity and not enough is likely to increase as the cost of and installation of more and more eco energy supplies takes hold.

Australian brown coal has a very high moisture content which makes it heavy to transport and uneconomical to ship world wide. They have tons of the stuff in seams up to 100 meters deep, it is easy to mine and cheap to produce, but it produces a lot of nasty gasses when burned, no one except the Australian energy producers will go near it. Hence the Japanese plan to produce electric in Australia turn it into hydrogen and ship it home. Understandably the recent fires and drought has raised a lot of objections to the plan from the eco folks in Australia.

I am no economist but surely, if there were half the effort poured into development of hydrogen vehicles that has been poured into electric, there surely would have been more progress both in cost and production development.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by Chris_R »

I'm no scientist, economist or engineer but it seems to me logical that solar and hydrogen is the way to go. There is enough energy from the sun to generate all the consumable energy the earth needs. Except a lot of it is in the wrong place.
If we could harness the power of the sun in the sunniest places next to the sea we could generate vast quantities of solar electricity, build massive electrolysis plants by the sea to extract the hydrogen, access to the sea for transportation of the hydrogen around the world where it will provide the portable energy source which when burned produces water which will find its way back to the sea.
But it won't happen because the USA and Europe which is where the vast wealth is located, with China now coming up as well, don't have the right locations and there is not the political will to put these kinds of investments into parts of the world which are politically unstable but which would be better suited geographically.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by A.N.Other »

It is not always the best solutions that win through but usually the one that have the best backing to shout the loudest. In big business and politics that usually means who stands to benefit the most. A cynical view of the future would be to ask who is going to make the most out of it. The normal way to generate backing for large schemes is to make us the general public think that we are to blame for everything that has gone wrong. Once we are convinced by the backers of the Greta Thunberg’s of the world then present day knee jerk reactions of the modern world takes over due to the manipulation of a misinformed Jo public. How long before we’re all led to believe that going electric was the wrong route.
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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by John-B »

I would like to see a proper comparison between hydrogen powered vehicles and electric ones, from start to finish.
I realise that hydrogen needs electricity and plant to manufacture and store it, whereas electricity power stations already exist, but we would need more of them for hydrogen or electrically powered vehicles.
Consider the distribution - if a huge number of vehicles are electrically powered, there would be a lot of loss in the grid transmission, whereas hydrogen could be transported in road tankers like liquid gas and those tankers could be hydrogen powered. (On the Transmission network, the percentage of network losses is lower than on the distribution network. Citizens Advice suggests that about 1.7% of the electricity transferred over the transmission network is lost, and a further 5-8% is lost over the distribution networks.)
I'm sure there are already some hydrogen powered buses in a south west town.
Add to the costs of electric vehicles a cafe or rest room for drivers while they wait for the charging period to finish, and consider the annoyance of those waiting in a queue to start charging!
However, engines for hydrogen powered vehicles are more complicated than electric engines and require more maintenance.
A lot of pros and cons.

My brother bought a new Volvo hybrid car last Friday and yesterday it wouldn't start. After several dud attempts and a message to press the start button, which he had many times, we got out, shut the doors, got back in, rebooted unsuccessfully, it then started but said there was a hybrid system failure and he had already noticed the charge had dropped almost to zero after only eight miles. Luckily we were in a town car park and it had a direct call system to Volvo who contacted a recovery man who came within an hour to test the electronics. The recovery man could find no fault so my brother has hopefully driven home and has been asked to take it in for a more thorough check.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by Chris_R »

Both battery powered and hydrogen powered vehicles are electrically driven with electric motors. The difference is the power source. In the battery powered vehicle electricity comes from a store in the form of a battery. In a hydrogen powered vehicle the electricity comes from a hydrogen fuel cell. I found this article on a website called Anthropocene, a magazine published by Future Earth, funded by the National Science Foundation which is a US Government Agency.
DAILY SCIENCE
Battery vs fuel cell: Which electric vehicle is better?
Battery-electric cars would be better at cutting carbon emissions, and at a lower cost than fuel cell vehicles, too, researchers find.
By Prachi Patel
December 1, 2016
Electric vehicles can run on either rechargeable batteries or fuel cells that convert hydrogen into electricity. Both have zero tailpipe emissions. But when it comes to long-term sustainability, one is a clear winner, according to a new study.
Battery-electric cars would be better at cutting carbon emissions, and at a lower cost than fuel cell vehicles, too, researchers report in the journal Energy. That’s mainly because hydrogen fueling stations are much more expensive to install than battery-charging stations.
Carmakers seem to have taken sides in the EV debate. Battery-electric cars from companies like Chevrolet, Nissan, and Tesla are already on the market. Leading carmakers Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai, meanwhile, have been enthusiastic proponents of hydrogen fuel cell cars. Fuel cell technology has the advantage of a quick fill-up time of minutes as opposed to the hours-long charging time that batteries need. But the lack of hydrogen infrastructure is still a key hurdle.
Researchers at Stanford University and Technical University of Munich in Germany set out to analyze how large-scale adoption of both types of EVs would affect total energy use in transportation and buildings. They focused their analysis on Los Altos Hills, a California community of 8,000 residents that has one of the largest shares of solar power generation and EVs in the state.
The team considered various hypothetical test scenarios from 2025–2035. These scenarios assumed widespread adoption of EVs, as well as solar power and solar-generated hydrogen that are cost-competitive with the electric power grid.
The researchers used a computer model to assess the most cost-effective way to meet the community’s energy demands. They fed the model with data on the community’s daily energy needs, the cost of making solar panels, batteries, and producing hydrogen, and the expense of building energy infrastructure.
Battery EVs turned out to be the winners in the analyses. To be cost competitive, fuel cell cars would have to be priced significantly lower than battery-powered EVs, said lead study author Markus Felgenhauer, and that is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. “Investing in all-electric battery vehicles is a more economical choice for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, primarily due to their lower cost and significantly higher energy efficiency,” he said.

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Re: Sale of new Petrol & Diesel only cars to be banned from 2035

Post by John-B »

Chris_R wrote: Wed Feb 05, 2020 9:53 am Both battery powered and hydrogen powered vehicles are electrically driven with electric motors.
(from link below) Say you have a petrol vehicle and convert it to run on hydrogen, your vehicle will still be able to run on petrol. This means you will be able to fill up your vehicle with hydrogen and when your vehicle runs out of hydrogen, you just swap back to petrol fuel.
https://pureenergycentre.com/hydrogen-engine/ (No costs stated for conversion!)
I suppose it would run more inefficiently via a petrol engine than the way you describe for new cars, but it would help stop pollution.

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