Archive for January, 2009
Greg Blencoe, another one of our loyal readers, has a creative idea to solving the chicken and egg dilemma of the hydrogen infrastructure and fuel cell car. You can read all about it by downloading the PDF.
Greg is the CEO of Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc., which is a hydrogen pipeline start-up company that is based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He also publishes the very active “For hydrogen advocates only” blog. Thanks Greg!
The following commentary was submitted by one of our readers, John Trocciola, on an article claiming fuel cell cars aren’t feasible. If you have a piece you’d like to share, please let us know. Thanks John!
While I frequently send out articles on fuel cells with no personal comments I thought some comments were necessary on this article.
The author claims that the issue with fuel cells in cars is the availability of the noble metals, platinum, palladium etc, used in the fuel cells. In my discussions, several years ago, with one of the world’s largest producer of platinum it was said “If you need more platinum we will just put another ‘hole’ in the ground,” ie demand drives availability.
Plus some of the platinum needed by cars can be supplied by recycling the platinum from “scraped” cars. Think of all the recycled aluminum from beverage cans. If we can recycle cans why can’t we recycle platinum?
In my opinion the author of the article ignores or is unaware of the real issues with fuel cells in cars:
- Cost: at present large fuel cells cost $2,000-3,000/hp. A car requires $30/hp; volume will drive down the cost
- H2 infrastructure: IE as many or more H2 refueling stations are required as we have gasoline stations. If we built the interstate highway system and railroads in all of the US then surely refuelling stations are possible
- H2 storage on the vehicle to get acceptable range. Acceptable range is just a function of refuelling station availability
While I believe those three issues are inherently solvable given sufficient resources and technical talents I don’t believe platinum availability is a real roadblock.
But that is my opinion and thanks for “listening.”
Read the original article here.
John Trocciola is a private consultant specializing in fuel cell technologies, their applications and the impact of Public Policy on their deployment. He was employed by United Technologies for 43 years where he Managed the development and deployment of all fuel cell technologies and has been granted 43 US patents on fuel cells, hydrogen production and gas pretreatment.
