Cars could soon run on thin air

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 10:41
Cars could soon run on thin air - gramar

So says an article I found this morning on Yahoo News.

uk.news.yahoo.com/cars-could-soon-run-on-thin-air-...l

As my wife and I intend to keep our petrol cars (2012 Kia Rio and 2013 Suzuki Alto) for at least another 8-10 years maybe we will give electric a miss and go the thin air route.

What do others think?

Edited by gramar on 08/09/2022 at 10:42

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 12:03
Cars could soon run on thin air - Adampr

The problem is that it will need a lot of electricity to run it. That could make sense if we all start driving hydrogen fuelled cars and petrol stations switch to hydrogen (a possibility for the future). For now, though, it would require electric cars to either have batteries to run the on-board converter or to be plugged in at night to generate their own hydrogen.

I quite like idea of the latter, especially as the cars could presumably be topped up from hydrogen stations between charges.

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 12:16
Cars could soon run on thin air - mcb100
There is a deal of confusion out there regarding hydrogen use.
The hydrogen cars we’ve seen from Toyota are hydrogen fuel cell powered - they're electrically powered but instead of a battery they use a fuel cell stack that produces electricity via a reaction between oxygen and hydrogen.
The other hydrogen powered vehicles use hydrogen for internal combustion. I was talking to a couple of engineers from JCB at COP26 about their prototype yellow devices (though they were white in this case) - they were saying that from the top of the cylinder block down their hydrogen engines are pretty much identical to diesel variants, it’s the head and injection system that has changed.
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Thu 8 Sep 2022 15:45
Cars could soon run on thin air - Sofa Spud

It's generally more efficient to run a car on electricity than it is to use electricity to produce hydrogen to run a car.

If hydrogen is used as a fuel, then fuel-cell electric is more efficient than a hydrogen combustion engine.

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 16:42
Cars could soon run on thin air - Speedbird 747

Buy a petrol car now and keep it 20 years. My current car is 21 years old and I have had it for 16 years.

Mind you it is like Triggers broom. A lot replaced and in that time it has cost over £17,000 in repairs and servicing. Still immaculate though and drives like new.

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 17:17
Cars could soon run on thin air - Will deBeast

My mx-5 is coming up to 12 years.

The only repair was changing the EGR motor (which I did myself).

Apart from that, just normal servicing, which I've also mostly done myself.

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 18:21
Cars could soon run on thin air - Terry W

Someone has obviously got a brain the size of a planet to find a way to circumvent the first law of physics - that total energy is always conserved.

AFAIK no energy conversion from one form to another is 100% efficient with no losses. Even electric motors (generally very efficient) lose ~10%. Internal combustion engines lose ~70%.

Getting hydrogen out of the air takes energy, using hydrogen in a motor or fuel cell creates losses. Despite this, hydrogen may be a good store of energy when it is dark or the wind doesn't blow. Whether it is better than a battery is debatable!

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 18:42
Cars could soon run on thin air - Andrew-T

Getting hydrogen out of the air takes energy, using hydrogen in a motor or fuel cell creates losses.

There isn't any hydrogen in air to be 'got', at least in any worthwhile amounts. It has to be made chemically from hydrocarbons or electrically from water. When it is used as a fuel it recombines with oxygen to make water, which has no polluting properties so is acceptable environmentally.

But as all conversion processes are less than 100% efficient, making hydrogen from water requires more energy than can be recovered in whatever motor it is used.

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Thu 8 Sep 2022 19:36
Cars could soon run on thin air - Ethan Edwards

It's taken a dozen years to get the electric charging network that we currently have. It's still only about 20% of what's required ( my guess).

I believe there are currently six Hydrogen filling stations in the UK . So at this rate a sufficient network will be in place in as little as twenty years.

Sorry but it very much sounds to me like pie in the sky. Meanwhile I've been only driving EVs for one year, others longer. Some who use home Solar pv to charge are getting their travel for virtually nothing. Mine costs me 1.2p a mile. Hard to see how Hydrogen will cost less than that.

Edited by Ethan Edwards on 08/09/2022 at 19:38

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Fri 9 Sep 2022 11:46
Cars could soon run on thin air - galileo

It's taken a dozen years to get the electric charging network that we currently have. It's still only about 20% of what's required ( my guess).

I believe there are currently six Hydrogen filling stations in the UK . So at this rate a sufficient network will be in place in as little as twenty years.

Sorry but it very much sounds to me like pie in the sky. Meanwhile I've been only driving EVs for one year, others longer. Some who use home Solar pv to charge are getting their travel for virtually nothing. Mine costs me 1.2p a mile. Hard to see how Hydrogen will cost less than that.

Commercial electrolysis plants produce 1 Kg of Hydrogen from 48 Kw Hours of electricity.

The battery capacity of a Corsa-e is 45 Kw Hours, so it seems 3 Kw H would be wasted making hydrogen instead of just charging a battery. (not possible to get more energy from a process than you put in, excluding nuclear fission, which exchanges mass for energy per e=mc2

Reminds me of various claims over the years for amazing processes for running vehicles on water which were claimed to have been killed by oil companies.

Edited by galileo on 09/09/2022 at 15:38

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Sat 10 Sep 2022 08:59
Cars could soon run on thin air - edlithgow

Getting hydrogen out of the air takes energy, using hydrogen in a motor or fuel cell creates losses.

There isn't any hydrogen in air to be 'got', at least in any worthwhile amounts. It has to be made chemically from hydrocarbons or electrically from water.

Yáll don’t seem to have read the article.

I assumed it was a rehash of the compressed air power idea, (though that would be “thick air”) but its actually about removing water vapour from air for use in electrolytic production of hydrogen.

Hard to believe water shortage is a serious limit on electrolysis globally, but the pitch seems to be it’s a local limit for real estate especially suitable for solar, i.e. deserts

This in turn would seem to involve the assumption that a hydrogen pipeline is a cheaper way of transporting energy than an electric power line, which I find a bit surprising. Perhaps repurposing redundant desert oil pipelines helps the costings.

Be that as it may, if you had a pipeline anyway, you could presumably run it backwards every now and then to fill up your desert water tanks, so you wouldn’t really need to extract the water from dry air.

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Sat 10 Sep 2022 09:51
Cars could soon run on thin air - Andrew-T

<< it's actually about removing water vapour from air for use in electrolytic production of hydrogen. Hard to believe water shortage is a serious limit on electrolysis globally, but the pitch seems to be it’s a local limit for real estate especially suitable for solar, i.e. deserts >>

If this rather hare-brained scheme was made to work, it would presumably make annual rainfall in those places even lower - if that is possible. And the amount of hydrogen generated would be similarly limited ?

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Mon 12 Sep 2022 02:51
Cars could soon run on thin air - edlithgow

<< it's actually about removing water vapour from air for use in electrolytic production of hydrogen. Hard to believe water shortage is a serious limit on electrolysis globally, but the pitch seems to be it’s a local limit for real estate especially suitable for solar, i.e. deserts >>

If this rather hare-brained scheme was made to work, it would presumably make annual rainfall in those places even lower - if that is possible. And the amount of hydrogen generated would be similarly limited ?

Everything is limited, hence the "Spaceship Earth" thing.

However, I'd think this would have to be done on a huge scale to contribute significantly to desertification, though of course I havn't done the sums.

The desert winds still blow, after all

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Mon 12 Sep 2022 09:32
Cars could soon run on thin air - Andrew-T

<< I'd think this would have to be done on a huge scale to contribute significantly to desertification, though of course I havn't done the sums. The desert winds still blow, after all >>

Similarly it would have to be done on a huge scale to create any useful amount of hydrogen ?

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Mon 12 Sep 2022 09:50
Cars could soon run on thin air - Adampr

I'm pretty sure the product of hydrogen combustion is water, so it will come straight back out again.

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Wed 14 Sep 2022 02:51
Cars could soon run on thin air - edlithgow

<< I'd think this would have to be done on a huge scale to contribute significantly to desertification, though of course I havn't done the sums. The desert winds still blow, after all >>

Similarly it would have to be done on a huge scale to create any useful amount of hydrogen ?

It would have to be done on a useful scale to create useful amounts of hydrogen. That isn't necessarily enough to effect local climate change, and I'd bet it wouldn't be, but I'm guessing,as I suppose you are.

Edited by edlithgow on 14/09/2022 at 02:52

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Wed 14 Sep 2022 09:57
Cars could soon run on thin air - Andrew-T

<< I'd think this would have to be done on a huge scale to contribute significantly to desertification, though of course I havn't done the sums. The desert winds still blow, after all >>

Similarly it would have to be done on a huge scale to create any useful amount of hydrogen ?

It would have to be done on a useful scale to create useful amounts of hydrogen. That isn't necessarily enough to effect local climate change, and I'd bet it wouldn't be, but I'm guessing,as I suppose you are.

I was only pointing out that the scale would need to be sizeable because the air in those places contains very little water ?

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