Why and how to joyfully move our butts around town, without mucking the place up.

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Pages with tag Fuel Cell Vehicles

  • GM outlines possibilities for flexible, autonomous fuell cell platform:

    Earlier this week GM announced a plan to transition to all-electric vehicles. Curiously the only vehicle mentioned in the announcement was a fuel cell autonomous vehicle platform, which is a non-electric hydrogen powered vehicle type. Here is the announcement concerning that fuel cell vehicle platform, and the fact that it's targeted at the military and heavy duty trucking sectors.

    The military faces a deadly problem with "regular" military vehicles, because of the necessity to deliver fossil fuels to the field. The delivery process exposes more soldiers to harm because delivering fuel to remote outposts requires driving convoys through possibly hostile territories. The military has been interested for several years in other energy systems if only to reduce the risk to soldiers. You might think that instead of invading countries willy nilly for unclear reasons and terrorising the population so badly they want to fight back, that the best choice would be to pull out and say we're sorry and try to make amends. But the political leadership we have instead wants to keep the war going and obviously I've flown off into tangent land.

    That tangent was meant to explain why the press release stresses "minimize logistical burdens and reduce human exposure to harm." Clearly this Association of the United States Army meeting will include some attention on the issue of mitigating risks from delivering fuel to dangerous territory.

    I don't understand why General Motors thinks this is a solution to the named problem. Fuel cell vehicles require pure hydrogen. Since it's difficult to deliver fuel to a remote outpost in hostile territory, how does switching to hydrogen fuel make any difference? The hydrogen still has to be delivered to the field.

  • Honda leads in fuel cell efficiency in latest U.S. EPA trends report
  • Hydrogen-powered passenger ferry in San Francisco Bay is possible, says Sandia study: Ferry boats, as are used around the world, can be powered by hydrogen fuel cells to dramatically reduce pollution, and the risk of diesel fuel spills. Research by Sandia National Labs show that it's feasible to build and operate a high-speed passenger ferry powered by fuel cells. The study focused on the Red and White fleet operating on the San Francisco Bay that serves commuters every day of the week. The conceptual specification was a ship carrying 150 passengers, with a 50-mile round trip, and at speeds up to 35 knots. Refueling would happen midday while the ships were less busy (outside commute hours). Both the American Bureau of Shipping and the US Coast Guard reviewed the plan and gave a thumbs-up.
  • Hyundai Motor Group's Executive Vice Chairman identifies Hydrogen as 'Sustainable Earth' solution ahead of G20
  • Hyundai Motor and Saudi Aramco to collaborate on Hydrogen, advanced non-metallic materials and future technologies: While Hyundai and its partner company Kia have some very well designed electric vehicles, Hyundai is also keen on fuel cell vehicles. In this deal they prove that the primary way to get hydrogen is by extracting it from fossil fuels. Therefore the claim that the hydrogen economy is super clean is largely a fiction. Unless the hydrogen is extracted from a clean source, like water, it is a fossil fuel masquerading as a clean fuel.
  • Optimizing hydrogen-powered passenger ferries focus of Sandia Labs study : Building on earlier research into hydrogen fuel cell powered ferries, Sandia National Labs scientists are working to optimize the design. The design in the previous phase, 150 passengers and a 35 knot speed, turned out to be an outlier compared to other passenger ferries used in the USA. This was both a faster-than-normal ferry, and carrying fewer-than-normal passengers.
  • Plug Power Signs Deal to Power StreetScooter Delivery Vans with ProGen Hydrogen Fuel Cell Engines
  • Sandia National Labs developing hydrogen fuel cell boat: Ships at sea no longer must be powered by Diesel fuel. Research led by Sandia National Labs shows that hydrogen fuel cells can be used instead. An accident need not necessitate spilling toxic polluting diesel fuel into the water, because spilled hydrogen cleans itself up automatically dissipating into the atmosphere with no harm, and the exhaust is not toxic but is instead pure water. The work at present is about designing research vessels that run on hydrogen, but the team is also interested in other vessels. An earlier effort had focused on ferry boats such as are used on San Francisco Bay to shuttle around commuters. The result is the Zero-V research vessel pictured here.
  • Toyota and Fenix demonstrate first hydrogen fuel cell UTR: At freight yards like the Port of Los Angeles, Utility Tractor Rig's are hauling containers back and forth. At that port there is a high concentration of these trucks, overwhelmingly diesel powered, which makes for a high concentration of horrid air pollutants. This hydrogen fuel cell truck is one possible solution to the problem. In this application a fuel cell does not have the disadvantages of their use for passenger cars - the UTR's do not travel far, and can therefore be refueled on site.
  • Toyota doubles-down on zero emissions heavy-duty class 8 trucks:

    Toyota is sticking with hydrogen fuel cells, this time for a class 8 heavy duty truck. The truck was unveiled at a meeting of the Center for Automotive Research, and increases the estimated range to more than 300 miles per fill. The vehicle operator has a larger sleeper cab than the previous iteration. The previous iteration began operation in April 2017 and has logged almost 10,000 miles of testing in real world service at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Toyota plans to put the new vehicle into operation this fall.

    The design uses the fuel cell drive train from the Toyota Mirai - two Mirai fuel cell stacks plus a 12 kiloWatt-hour battery pack.

    The described target is not long-haul trucking, but drayage trucking. That is, the trucks driving back and forth between cargo ships and train depots and warehouses. There's a large number of these trucks the vast majority of which are diesel powered and produce a horrid form of air pollution.

    Former Toyota business partner, Tesla, is targeting a different market with their battery-electric class 8 truck. Namely, the long haul trucking market.

  • Toyota drives the future of zero emission trucking:

    Toyota has long held off from supporting electric vehicles, instead relying on hybrids and fuel cells as their contribution to cleaning up the transportation system. In this project Toyota is deploying prototype fuel-cell class 8 big rigs in the Port of Los Angeles area. The task of drayage trucks is delivering containers offloaded from ships at the port over to rail facilities a few miles away. Traditionally this has been done with regular diesel-powered big rigs, and as a result the area around the Port of Los Angeles is horribly polluted.