Hydrogen Toyota. is here

Olddude- The problem isn't that it can't be done, the problem is who would foot the bill creating the infrastructure so people can fill their cars, even if everyone was on board to do so (which they aren't)??

How long and expensive (and in a much simpler time) did it take to create a gasoline and diesel delivery system to the ordinary person? And would fresh water be the major feed stock?? People already whine about converting corn to fuel, in another 30-50 years fresh water will be worth a lot more than #2 yellow corn. I'd rather see ultra efficient gas/NG powered vehicles that can still do the same things they do now using gas or diesel rigs getting 10-20 mpg. The rub is that making such beasts will be costly as well and probably still going up stream against the entrenched big interests. If people want to make their own hydrogen powered cars on their own and figure out how to fuel them go for it. Just like the few who have converted some the diesels to run on used deep fat frying oil but I think scaling up to a national level would be difficult (not enough french fy oil out there). Is Japan really converting over to hydrogen on a national scale? Maybe they're already anticipating when their country has half the population than it does now (they simply aren't reproducing many Japanese anymore and their population is already starting to shrink)??

That is true that Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are fresh water but they calve into the ocean and eventually melt into the salt water. All the major sources of frozen fresh water if melted will not change the salinity of the oceans much, way too little volume compared to what's already there. Maybe hydrogen for vehicles can be done just fine with desalination of sea water (more costs), I don't know?? Now maybe in the future, instead of oil tankers, there will be the same sized vessels that go and capture glacier melt in Greenland or process freshly calved ice burgs off of Antarctica. Who knows??? But water will be an issue in the future. Just go ask a good number of your fellow Floridians, especially on the coasts, how much their water bills have gone up over the last 30 years as the increased population overdrafts the Floridian aquifer in some areas and wells face salt water intrusion. Just a sampling of some potentials to come. Water will not remain cheap deep into the 21st century...

Now I'm going to go work on cleaning out my garage.

Lots of thoughtful comments miked, nice job. I don't have time tonight (maybe tomorrow from work because its part of my 9 to 5 job that I do) but there are a lot more variables involved with overall use of corn in the US and the world than just the changes in more of it used to make ethanol (and about a third of the corn used in EtOH production comes back into the animal feed sources as DDGS in various forms). That's just one example of how more complex corn use than what the talking heads can say in 30 seconds or so.

I'm curious about

On to the use of corn to supplement gasoline as a way to reduce pollution seems to me to be a bit foolish since it added other equally dangerous pollutants

. When ethanol replaced MTBE (truly a dangerous ground water polluant) as the major ozone reducing agent in gasoline in big metro areas, what extra "pollutants" did ethanol bring to the table?

More on corn use tomorrow on the government's dime, not mine. Later...

As promised:

As I’ve said in other thread, people could certainly eat field corn and soybeans but in the North American culture we have chosen not to in a vast majority of the cases. And this isn’t anything really new. The term “Corn Belt” came to be in the 1890s and was well established as a regional term by the 1920s. The primary production was to fatten livestock (hogs and cattle) with high inputs of corn in the finishing process. Beef cattle could be finished solely on grass and legume fodder but it would typically take a longer time and the taste is different than what we’ve become accustomed to with corn-fed beef (for example, my wife doesn’t like grass-finished beef or bison—she thinks it’s too “gamey”). Corn as grain is not a natural food for cattle (care must be taken to keep it in balance in a ration or the animal will become sick). This is not a factor for hogs and poultry because they are omnivores and can handle corn better (pigs have stomachs like us and poultry a gizzard for grinding their food before digestion). Soybeans started off as straight animal fodder in the US but its oil properties soon found its way into direct human foods. Soybean meal is still used in various livestock feed but not to the degree of corn. Over the past 80 years, especially after WWII, more and more broken down components of corn and soybeans have been used in packaged food we buy at the grocery stores to the point now that just about any manufactured food we buy has some sort of corn or soy element to it. So, we have decided by our collective actions over time that we want to eat corn and soybeans through our meats and our manufactured foods. If North Americans truly want to stop complaining how different uses of corn may affect the price of our foods (usually when prices go higher—sort of amazing that the prices rarely come down when corn or soybeans prices that farmers get head south and bottom out), then they should stop buying grocery store food, buy bulk corn and soy from an elevator or wholesaler, get a grain grinder, and spent a lot more time in the kitchen cooking. A couple bushels of corn and a bushel of soybeans would last a family a long time providing base calories and protein. But of course time is money and we prefer spending our money on store bought food (in the typical case).

Ethanol as a vehicle fuel is also not a recent invention. Grain alcohol as a gasoline additive or straight use was first used when automobiles were created but lost favor to gasoline but became wide spread during WWII as a gas extender when the military got first shot at the oil production but soon after the war, the crack down on home or small scale ethanol production to add to gas was done by the various governments because it was feared that a certain amount of hooch would be used for tax-free drinking and they would lose tax revenue from booze. Not much interest for ethanol in the 1950s and 1960s with a stable and ample supply of cheap oil. That started to change in the 1970s because of increasing volatility in global oil supplies/distribution and that lead was being phased out of gas in the US. Lead had been used as way to reduce engine knocking and increase the octane in gas. “Gasohol” appeared around the second economic shock of the 1970s (late 70s) and one of the “cultural hearths” of modern vehicle ethanol fuel was in southeast South Dakota where our corn tended to get the lowest price per bushel vs. other regional corn areas because we were furthest from corn using manufacturing or export via the New Orleans area ports. And we didn’t produce enough corn then to fill many car single commodity “unit trains” such as they could out of downstate Illinois or from Iowa and run them to West Coast ports to sell to Japan and S. Korea (China at this time wasn’t a corn or soybean buyer of US production). I started using 10% ethanol by at least 1981 and have used it ever since.

Ethanol use increased as it was used as a gasoline oxygenator, especially in big metro areas that had high amounts of “smog”. By the late 1990s, the first major gas oxygenator, MTBE, was becoming a failure because it was a significant polluter of ground water as it leaked from underground tanks and spills. Ethanol was a potential replacement and became more widespread in usage, especially in non-corn producing regions such as the Northeast and Pacific Coast. Ethanol became more entrenched in the 2000s as laws were passed in 2005 and 2007 that “mandated” more renewable fuels although the mandates have very little overall teeth to them (unless you’re the specific company that gets singled out for intensive review) because the E10 market is now basically saturated, there are not a lot of vehicles that can burn E85, and the mid-range blends of E15-E30 have struggled to get EPA (and automotive maker) approvals. Ethanol for fuel production has stayed pretty flat-lined the last few years as opposed to the big run up in production in the decade 2000-2010 or so.

Ethanol isn’t perfect but there’s a lot of piling on trying to show its faults. One colleague of mine says it’s an “unholy” alliance of big oil, big beef cattle finishers, and the EPA that come together against corn-based ethanol. One cry is that ethanol is subsidized and the industry couldn’t stand on its own. Well, the federal government has been subsidizing most farmers in the US for 80 years now in one form or another. Is ethanol more egregious in cost than other big ones, such as direct payments when commodity prices are below the cost of production (which happens more than farmers would like)? Or the wide spread use of fed backed crop insurance? Or whatever else they want to name? Production agriculture for general markets has always been a risky adventure in the US and has become an increasingly highly capitalized venture (a trend that has been ongoing for a long time). Farmers can make nice money when the prices are high (typically for a number of reasons) and production optimal. Farmers can also lose money fast when markets and/or production tank and the input costs are already spent. Have that happen over several years in a row and trouble brews fast. Could the typical farmer of today weather all the downs over a 40-50 year career without government subsidies? Doubtful. Does this mean that people haven’t figured out all the angles to play to make the most money off of the government and that programs don’t have various of levels of “waste” in them. Absolutely not. Is there a way to make US farm policy better? Perhaps, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that. Too much money involved and reformers get eaten. And most North Americans won’t change their ways unless really forced one way or another. Farming and food production to most is background noise of life.

Another way ethanol is criticized is that it’s not energy efficient, that it costs more in energy to make than it produces. Caution on several fronts. Some of the earliest studies of this used the assumption that all (most) corn grown for ethanol was irrigated. But with the exception of NB and KS, the other main Corn Belt region where most of the ethanol plants are still located, most corn is rain fed. Another major assumption in such modeling is that if it weren’t for ethanol Corn Belt farmers wouldn’t grow corn. This is not reality. In spite of its faults, corn generally has the most revenue producing potential of the leading crops in an average year because people (especially the chemists) have been busy creating products. There are at least 7 leading markets for US corn that I can account for (livestock feed, ethanol for fuel—and some of this back as livestock feed, components of manufactured foods, export markets, sweeteners, plastics, and other industrial uses) compared to say wheat which does not have as many non-direct food usages (but the Russians certainly have made alcohol from it over the years!). Most North American farm commodity production is not energy efficient. But unless we all plan to go back to growing our own food or force changes by redirecting how we spend our money on food, things will probably not change much. For better or worse, ethanol as a certain percentage of our vehicle fuel is probably here to stay. And corn (either as grain now or a combo of grain and cellulosic from corn residue in the near future) will be either the significant or a substantial player in its production for a long time. And so it goes…

Originally Posted by DakotaRog

Lots of thoughtful comments miked, nice job. I don't have time tonight (maybe tomorrow from work because its part of my 9 to 5 job that I do) but there are a lot more variables involved with overall use of corn in the US and the world than just the changes in more of it used to make ethanol (and about a third of the corn used in EtOH production comes back into the animal feed sources as DDGS in various forms). That's just one example of how more complex corn use than what the talking heads can say in 30 seconds or so.

I'm curious about . When ethanol replaced MTBE (truly a dangerous ground water polluant) as the major ozone reducing agent in gasoline in big metro areas, what extra "pollutants" did ethanol bring to the table?

More on corn use tomorrow on the government's dime, not mine. Later...

Ummm .... i look at it the history of ethanol as failed public policy and poor governmental decision making.

In the beginning gasoline was much lower in octane and didn't need the anti knock additives. As engine designs advanced in the 1920's they started upping compression ratios to get better engine performance and this necessitated the need for tetraethyl lead (TEL)to be added to the fuel.

By the 1970's there was a growing awareness that these lead compounds really needed to phased out because they pose a public health hazard.

This is where the guvmin't really started messing up. The EPA mandated that TEL be phased out in favor of MTBE. All of the harm caused by MTBE can be directly attributed to the agency tasked with protecting the environment ! It finally dawned on them that they had made a big mistake so they mandated that MTBE should be phased out in favor of Ethanol.

The thing is that it isn't necessary to use anywhere near a 10 % blend if you're using it strictly as an anti knock additive.

The idea of a 10 % blend goes back to the days of "Gasahol " . It was tried and failed by the free market in the 70's and by the early 80's was all but abandoned simply because it wasn't a very good idea. There are a lot of problems with it as a fuel.

I'll never forget that cold winter's day back around 1981. Something happened in the tank at our gas station and our gasahol went bad. We had 20 cars strung out along Route 1 ... all with damaged motors caused by bad fuel. The company had to make good on all of the repairs and the product was discontinued within a week.

The main reason the idea of blended fuel was ever resurrected from the grave was because the EPA forced it on us. It was sometime back around 2004 during the first GWB administration. They didn't say that an individual had had to use it but rather that increasing quotas of ethanol had to be blended into the nation's fuel supply.

The main reason that it's flatlined over the last few years is because most of the vehicles on the road aren't designed for flex fuel. Don't quote me on this but i believe that e-85 has an octane rating of around 95 - 100.

Consider the impact of the ethanol fuel mandate:

1: We live in an overcrowded world. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. We export a lot of grain to developing nations. Diverting corn to fuel raises food prices and shortens supplies.

2: There aren't as many BTU's in a gallon of ethanol as there are in a gallon of gasoline. You get worse gas mileage with this blended fuel.

3: It's an unstable blend and can begin phase separation in as little as 30 days. If you talk with mechanics it's a real problem to get rid of a tankful of fuel that's gone bad. It's not uncommon to dump it out in the woods or down a drain somewhere.

4: It's quite corrosive ! Automotive fuel tanks and fuel systems had to be specially designed to carry this fuel. Gas stations had to replace their storage tanks and underground fuel piping. Refineries and storage depots had to replace tanks, pumps, piping, and other handling equipment.

The cost to retrofit imposed on society by the EPA has been phenomenal.

5: While most newer cars will tolerate the blended fuel okay it rendered millions of older carbeureted cars that were otherwise serviceable as obsolete. This created a lot of junk and when you think of all of the energy it takes to make a new car it really makes you wonder if ethanol was a good energy choice.

6: Blended fuels are really bad for small engines. It's destroyed a lot of equipment.

7: It's not a good choice as a fuel for marine or aviation applications. Whether you are up in the air or fifty miles out to sea an engine failure due to fuel problems can be deadly.

Nuff said ?

Originally Posted by olddude

OK not going to say much but. did any one else notice the pace car for the Richmond 400 is a hydrogen powered car ? lets see how much publicity this gets or how long before it disapears.

Why Japan? Why not us.

We need to look at this as possibly being our future. It would resolve a lot of environmental problems. When you burn hydrogen as a fuel it combines with oxygen to make water. No Co2 emissions. No toxic emissions.

We did completely overhaul our nation's infrastructure to embrace ethanol blended fuel. It could happen with hydrogen as well.

Just some odds n ends:

1: I'm not sure about the other manufacturers but Ford has a system in use that burns a mix of hydrogen and gasoline. Been on the road for awhile now ? They're really serious about reducing emissions and getting better gas mileage. It's well ahead of the government mandates.

2: They already resolved the problem of hydrogen fuel tanks for cars. They don't blow up in a crash.

3: The single greatest threat to national security is our dependence on imported oil. We've known it's a problem since the Arab Oil Embargo of the 70's but haven't figured out a way of fixing it. ( Failed national energy policy. )

You could use almost any kind of electric producing facility to make hydrogen fuel. That could be natural gas,hydro,coal,nuclear, solar, wind, etc. We could be energy independent.

4: You wouldn't need any kind of emissions equipment on your car. Not catalytic converters and smog pumps. It might lower production costs significantly.

5: You wouldn't necessarily need clean potable water. Sea water might be better because the salt could act as a catalyst to speed up the electrolysis process.

~ For whatever it's worth. ~

Glumpy- I always find your posts entertaining. Keep on keeping on!!!

Originally Posted by DakotaRog

Scrappah- Interesting how things and perceptions can vary from place to place such as South Dakota and Maine. Here, in my little sphere, 10% ethanol has always been available since at least 1980 onwards. Day in, day out. It’s never been "resurrected from the grave" in this state.

Here are the vehicles I've owned since 1978 when I turned 16: 1966 Dodge Monaco, 1971 Dodge PU (as a secondary vehicle owned for only a short time-a POS from the get go), 1974 Pontiac Catalina, 1974 big Plymouth wagon, 1978 Pontiac Lemans, 1986 Old Cutlass Supreme, 1987 Dodge D-150 PU (secondary hunting vehicle owned 12 years), 1991 Toyota Camry, 1996 Honda Accord, 2003 Buick Regal, 2003 Honda Odyssey van (wife’s car). The van was the only one I ever bought new. Most of the others had higher miles on them (80K and above when bought). None of them ever sh** out because of fuel issues and I’ve always run E10 in them since whenever it was available here. Of the old carburetor cars, sure there were carb kits installed because carb parts wear out after how many 10s of thousands of miles?? I’m sort of least maintenance type of guy when it comes to vehicles and things have held together (never replaced an engine, never replaced a tranny). I must be lucky because the evil ethanol never has killed one of my rides. Maybe now it will or maybe they just sold sh***y gas in Maine in the early 1990s. I don’t know. I can only go with observed data and that’s my personal story.

I agree with some of your numbered pointed but I would also like to see actual documentation (such as #4) that would stand up to peer review standards. Maybe there are real reports from a federal agency that monitors motor fuel infrastructure that list such retro fitting was needed. And maybe it’s just internet dross. Buyer (user) beware. I haven’t published on ethanol yet but it’s one of my goals a few years hence when the 10-year anniversary of EISA has happened and the then current data on how much cellulosic ethanol is being produced is available. But I have gone through the peer review publication process. More than once…This doesn’t mean you’re not a smart guy and are very knowledgeable on many things. But getting a manuscript through peer review takes a critical review of the sources and data used. If you want to flesh out your essay into a manuscript and submit to a journal, more power to you and I can certainly suggest some journals you can try. But as of right now both yours and mine are just opinion pieces. The timing for me isn’t right to take it to the next level of publication. We’ll revisit in 3 years to see if my 2018 plans go forward. Meanwhile I have lots of other irons in the fire to work on.

Nuff said.

Rog,

I'll try to address it point by point as best i can.

It's very different here in the Northeast. I should probably provide more detail because context is everything. Just shortly after dropping out of college i went into the workforce and bounced around from one thing to another for awhile. Bear in mind .... i grew up in Massachusetts. Didn't move to Maine till 1983.

With one of my jobs i was working for Gibbs oil company which was based in Chelsea Ma. I guess you would best call it a mid-sized oil company. They had a large tank farm and around 120 gas stations spread throughout NewEngland. I used to cover five different stations in the greater Boston area. The place where i witnessed the Gasahol failure was at the full serve station on the southbound side of route 1 in Saugus Mass. It was a busy,high volume station so they were moving lots of product. I can't tell you with a certainty why it failed but it did in a big way. It wasn't very long after that happened that Gasahol completely disappeared from the market here.It was never a big seller anyway. The lion's share of demand was for regular leaded which eventually transitioned into regular unleaded.

I really didn't see anything for blended fuel here in Maine till sometime after y2k. We live by the seasons. The spring,summer and fall are the times we work hard to put up enough supplies to carry us through the hard winters. Extended power outages are fairly common so you really have to think about of ways of safely storing enough fuel to run the generator for extended periods of time. This has been a trial and error thing for me that's been evolving since the late 1990's.

We started out with regular unleaded gasoline. I had a 275 gallon storage tank with a 12 volt pump mounted up on top. Where i was storing for extended periods of time (over 3 mos) I always used the red colored Sta-Bil which is intended for regular unleaded gas. That worked just fine. If it ended up that it was being stored for over a year all that was needed was to re-treat with another dose of stabilizer and cycle it through.

The introduction of blended fuel changed all that. I tried shifting over to Sta-Bil blue which is intended for use with blended fuels but the gasoline just wouldn't keep for any amount of time. Up against a problem ... i researched the heck out of it and learned a few things in the process.

When you said we have poor gas here in Maine you were right .... just not in the way you intended. You see ... the Maine State legislature MANDATED that the only gasoline that can be sold here must be a minimum 10% blend. The free will choice for me not to use a fuel that isn't working out was taken from me. Kinda sucks and i resented that.

The best solution that i could develop was to convert my generator over to dual fuel and reduce my gasoline storage to 25 gallons. Propane served well as the primary fuel and i kept the gasoline for times when demand was especially heavy on the generator as petrol has a bit more oomph.

Eventually i was able to save enough money to phase into a diesel generator and did away with both gasoline and propane. IMO, it's about the best overall solution. Your generator is just like a fire truck or any other kind of emergency equipment. When you need it you need it and it has to run flawlessly after months of laying idle.

Anyway ... looooong post. Good for you if you had the patience to follow it through.

If i had to gel it all down in regards to ethanol blended fuel i would say this:

1: For best results your motor must be specifically designed for the kind of fuel you have available. If you look at the history of blended fuel you'll see how the auto manufacturers re-designed their engines to run on it. Take an even closer look and you begin to appreciate just how sophisticated and technologically advanced they are. The ECU is pulling sensor readings off the engine and adjusting timing and air / fuel mix at a rate of a thousand cycles per second. The average daily driver on the road today can handle this.

Your average carburated small engine handles this fuel only marginally well. If it's a two stroke oil mix small engine the problems are even worse and often result in a blown piston/cylinder assembly if the fuel has begin phase separation.

2: Phase separation is well documented. There are commercially available fuel testing kits so you can see how far along the breakdown process is with your fuel.

===========

As for peer review ...i barely even know what that is. If you like ... i should be able to dig a list of source materials out of the weeds for you. I rely more on practical hands on learning but i've done some research on the issue as well.