CARazed

Have you seen the ads for the the fuel cell powered Honda FCX Clarity? I noticed one on YouTube this morning. If you live in Torrance, Santa Monica or Irvine, in southern California you might be eligible to lease one for $600 a month.

If you don’t live there Honda will have a home energy station for refueling the car in the near future. You see the main problem with fuel cell technology isn’t the technology, it’s the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure. To solve this big problem Honda has developed technology that makes hydrogen right in your own home from the natural gas you already have. In other words leverage the natural gas infrastructure. In fact I bet if hydrogen fuel cell cars become popular the energy companies would love to build new fueling stations directly connected to the natural gas grid and sell us natural gas.

Side Note: Conspiracy theorists think that the Bush Administration and the energy companies are interested in invading Iran because it is the second largest repository of natural gas in the world. In other words there is something very profitable under Iranian soil. Now back to reality…

It’s important to note that the car is a zero emissions vehicle but the home energy station will emit carbon dioxide when it makes hydrogen. SO the whole system is not zero emissions. It’s better than burning gasoline or diesel but most of today’s hydrogen still comes from fossil fuels, in this case natural gas. Now if renewable energy sources were used to generate the electricity needed for making hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, then we might really have a super low impact vehicle. Or better yet, just use the electricity for an electric car.

I don’t mean to dump on Honda, this car is amazing. I just think the right course of action is to focus on plug-in hybrids for the near term (next 10 to 15 years) needs and electric cars for the long term solution. Some peple will find electric cars useful today but I suspect until the range and recharging issues are resolved they won’t meet everyone’s needs.

We still need to source our electricity from lower impact technologies (solar, wind, hydro) but the infrastructure is here today making plug-in hybrids and electric cars perfectly doable. In the future I can see hydrogen being used for vehicles requiring a longer range since electric cars will be mostly good for local travel until rapid charging and battery efficiency make some big leaps forward.

Anyway… if you want to participate in this very historic lease program right now is the time to jump on board. Don’t delay.

In November 2007 Honda showed off their fuel cell production car at the Los Angeles Auto Show. This is a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicle based on Honda’s new V Flow fuel cell platform. This system give the car improved driving range, weight and power efficiency.

Honda also announced that some lucky Southern California drivers will be able to lease one this coming summer (2008) for about $600 per month for three years. The cost includes maintenance and collision insurance.

It seems Honda is limiting the initial lease to Southern California because the car needs specialized maintenance which requires that Honda set-up a service infrastructure to support the car. It also seems like a perfectly logical place to do a trial like this.

The V Flow system drives the car by generating electricity from a chemical reaction by combining air (atmospheric oxygen) with the hydrogen fuel cell stack. The exhaust is water. The electricity powers the drive system directly of in combination with a compact lithium ion battery pack. Regenerative breaking also puts electricity back in the batteries. The vehicles range is about 270 miles.

There are CO₂ emissions during the production of the hydrogen used to refuel the car. The emissions from this vary depending on the way the hydrogen is created. A common method of creating hydrogen is through electrolysis of water. As you know water is H₂O. There are two hydrogen atoms per oxygen atom. You can separate the hydrogen and oxygen easily by passing electricity through water, a.k.a electrolysis.

Unfortunately the most popular method of creating hydrogen comes from processing natural gas, a fossil fuel. Although this process creates about 50% the CO₂ emissions gasoline creates it still leave us dependent on fossil fuels.

Luckily Honda is clearly aware of this issue and has also been working on new photovoltaic solar cell technology designed to offer alternatives to the current preferred natural gas based method of creating hydrogen.

I personally think it’s ironic that a seemingly super green technology like hydrogen fuel cells actually still means we could be dependent on fossil fuels. If we could generate all our hydrogen without harvesting it from natural gas that would be great but it seems to me unlikely since all the production focus seems to be moving toward natural gas.

The top reserves for natural gas are in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United States, (see full list of countries with large natural gas reserves). In other words it seems that the current dependency on foreign oil problem could transform itself into a dependency on foreign natural gas if we’re not planning ahead now. Comments?