Honda Begins “Production” of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle
Honda has started rolling the first US specification FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell sedans off a production line in Japan to be delivered to a small group of hand-picked high-profile California test customers. Leases to these customers, including Jamie Lee Curtis, are scheduled to begin in July.
The combined sales plan for the US and Japan calls for a few dozen to be leased the first year with about 200 total units leased over the next three years.
The FCX Clarity was designed from scratch as a dedicated fuel cell vehicle and is powered by the relatively compact Honda V Flow fuel cell stack. With a 280 mile range per tankful of hydrogen, Honda claims it has a miles-per-gallon-gasoline-equivalent (GGE) fuel economy rating of 74 mpg (how’s that for a confusing tongue twister of a concept?).
Honda chose California as the starting place for the roll-out because, currently, California has the best liquid hydrogen distribution network in all of the US — with plans to expand the existing network of hydrogen fueling stations even more.
Hydrogen fuel cells create electricity to run a vehicle in the same way as a battery powered vehicle. However, fuel cells need to have their electricity generating substance (e.g. hydrogen) constantly replenished, whereas batteries are a closed system that can be recharged by plugging them into an outlet.
To accommodate the special equipment needed in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Honda has designed and built a new dedicated assembly line. The assembly line includes processes for installing the fuel cell stack and hydrogen tank. Because of the potentially explosive nature of storing compressed liquid hydrogen on board, the attention to detail must be very high.
Obviously, the adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles at any meaningful level is going to be entirely dependent upon accessibility to compressed liquid hydrogen refueling stations (unless hydrogen can truly be produced in large enough quantities in the vehicle and on-demand by some other means). This is no small road block and it leaves me still wondering if hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will ever really make it big.
But I guess it’s a good thing to research all the different possibilities for cars of the future. Eventually a few technologies will settle out as the winners and the world will be better off for it. I could be eating my words in 10 years, but I just don’t think hydrogen fuel cells are going to be one of those winners though.
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Image Credit: Honda Motor Company
This is a little old but still great news!
Old…yes. Close minded…yes. Every major car manufacturer is working on a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle. The U.S. military is already employing hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicles. The Army has pickup trucks and SUVs. The Air Force has buses, cars, aircraft tow vehicles, and forklifts. Norway has the “Hydrogen Highway” which is about 400 miles of highway with hydrogen fueling stations along the way. One fueling station has a gas station style overhang of solar panels powering a refrigerator sized box producing hydrogen. The only two inputs to this setup. Sunlight and water.
It is this attitude, close-mindedness, and ignorance that now has us paying $4-5 per gallon for gasoline. We don’t have hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles available in mass, because of this. It would be a real shame for our wallets, the environment, and quite frankly irresponsible if you never drive a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle.
What will win? Biodiesel? When do you think the restaurants are going to catch on and charge for used cooking oil? Ethanol? If you think gas is expensive now, wait until your mouth and lead foot are competing for the corn growing in your neighborhood farmer’s field. The cost to process the corn to put into your gas tank is extraordinary now, and will only get worse if this ever became mainline. Straight electric cars? Where’s the electricity come from to recharge them? How long does a charge last? How long does it take to recharge? Enjoy your trip across the country in your electric car. It’ll take you a month just to make the drive. Some electricity comes from water, and some from coal, and some nuclear. But some also comes from…oh…you guessed it…oil.
All of these alternatives I just listed are Band-aids. They don’t fix the problem, they are just a different problem waiting to happen.
I don’t live in a world where I believe that hydrogen fuel-cells are the perfect solution, but the way I see it, it could be the most economical and environmentally friendly solutions. I’m sure that there are some downsides to hydrogen, and I would welcome an intelligent (I stress intelligent) downside to hydrogen. Don’t come at me with the ever popular, “But you have to burn fossil fuels to create hydrogen” No you don’t.
People need to wake up and smell the hydrogen. If it’s not for your wallet, make it for the environment, and if not for that, maybe for your children’s world, or their children.
To all:
Yes it’s a bit old news, so what? We don’t have an army of writers. We get to what we can and try to get to all the hot news when it’s hot… but sometimes we just can’t. However, that doesn’t mean we should’nt cover these topics even though they’re “old” news (I mean is a few days really that old anyways?).
@ Here’s your sign
First, let me preface my response by saying I’m about the most open-minded person you’ll ever meet and this response is not meant as an endorsement of any one particular solution to our energy problems.
I’m not sure why you say my post is “close-minded.” I state in my article that it’s a good thing to do research on all possibilities. It’s simply a fact that changing to a compressed hydrogen society would take major changes to our infrastructure. Some would argue that those changes are too much to bear for our society. Some, obviously including yourself, would say that this is the only way to go.
If you will… your concept of the problems associated with ethanol are based on a “close-minded” view (please excuse me, I had to say it) that ethanol can only come from one source: corn. It is true, corn is currently the major source of bioethanol in the US, but that is because it has a tested manufacturing system that has been around for 30+ years… yes we’ve been making ethanol from corn for that long.
Cellulosic ethanol (ethanol made from non-food or waste products such as switchgrass, garbage, and wood chips) does not have the same problems as corn ethanol. True, this is not online yet, but it will only be a short time before there are lots of facilities producing cellulosic ethanol. But liquid fuel may not be the best solution in the end anyways.
If a car is running on a battery (all electric or plug-in hybrid) then it’s true that the electricity to charge that battery is coming from the national power grid which consists of a mix of different power sources. Currently 70% of the electricity in the US comes from coal fired power plants. However, many states either have enacted or are considering enacting legislation to change much of their power to renewable sources (wind, solar, wave, water, etc.)
Nevertheless, even without the upcoming change to more renewable energy sources, things such as economies of scale and our ability to distribute electricity far and wide very quickly, efficiently and easily, make it a fact that each charge of a car’s battery (and therefore each mile driven) uses much much less energy than that embodied in a system that relies on distribution of a liquid fuel source. Why do you think it costs pennies per mile to drive an all electric vehicle versus about 40-50 cents a mile to drive a gas car?
Also, battery technologies are changing so rapidly that soon how much charge a battery holds and how quickly it can be charged could be close to what you’d expect when fueling up at a gas station.
I hope this will spawn less combative further discussion.
Nick, my hats off to you for being one of the only people who published this story with a title that is not deceiving… thank you for putting the word “production” in quotes. People are being misled to believe that they can go to a dealer and get these. They MAY be able to, “hopefully in 10 years” according to the Honda engineer behind this effort.
Bo Bennett, Host
EVcast.com
@ EVCast (Bo Bennett)
Just trying to keep every thing real and in perspective. Thanks for your compliment.
I begin to find that dubitative attitude of most analysts and newspeople regarding the future of hydrogen cars extremely irritating. It reminds me of the long period during which most british newspapers expressed doubt, when not open hostility and sarcasm for the Channel Tunnel. It was doomed to collapse some day, infected foxes and rats would invade Britain and a lot more of such rubbish.
Regarding the cost of producing hydrogen, let us consider the huge amount of money the french oil Company TOTAL is to invest to extract oil in extreme conditions from the arctic sea, north of Russia; and what about the desastrous effect to environnement of exploiting shale oil from Canada.
Not convinced? Then, let’s hope that oil will very soon reach the 300 dollars per barrel.
@ Jean-Bernard Brisset
I can understand your frustration, especially since you are one of the many people who feel that hydrogen fueled vehicles are the ultimate solution to our transportation problems. Again, I’m happy that research is being done on all possible alternatives, but in my personal opinion I feel that a liquid hydrogen infrastructure is such a huge task to build that it may never happen.
Can you blame people for being pessimistic? Even before the words “sustainable,” “alternative energy,” “green,” and “biodiesel” were part of our lexicon, hydrogen was being sold as the savior of the future.
I remember a feature article in Popular Mechanics when I was in 7th grade (1989) in which they proclaimed that hydrogen would be adopted within the decade. So here we are 20 years later and it’s still a “decade” off. Pessimism flows naturally from a situation like that.
Can I just correct you on one technical point that may confuse some of your readers. The Clarity uses a tank with compressed gaseous H2 stored at a pressure of 5000psi, it does not hold compressed “liquid” hydrogen as your statement infers “Because of the potentially explosive nature of storing compressed liquid hydrogen on board”.
Cryogenic storage of liquid hydrogen on board [as in the BMW Hydrogen7] is a completely different approach to powering an H2 vehicle than the one adopted by Honda in the Clarity.
I personally feel H2 will ultimately prove to be the best solution, but of course there will be room for other zero emission solutions such as the plug in electric. I’d like to also point out that there are other ways of enabling the H2 economy without the need of a massively expensive new pipeline infrastructure.
Once again gaseous H2 [not liquid] can be produced locally anywhere that has access to electricity and water [with zero CO2 emissions if the electricity is generated by wind, solar, wave]
There’s a company in the UK who are about to launch a H2 refuelling system using a a breakthrough in cheap electrolyser technology. Using either off peak cheap rate electricity or a roof mounted solar PV system it will be possible to generate your own gaseous hydrogen at home. The company claim that the Mk1 unit will initial supply sufficient H2 at 75bar to power a converted bi-fuel Ford Focus the first 25 miles of any journey on H2 before automatically switching back to petrol.
Some will feel that 25 miles is neither here or there but surveys have found that the majority of daily journey actually average less than 25 miles. Therefore in reality the amount of fossil fuel saved will be considerable. The company is called ITM Power. http://www.itm-power.com The ITM in the name refers to their breakthrough PEM membrane technology, Ion Transfer Materials.
I take umbrage to the arrogance of the oil-producing countries. How DARE they hold us HOSTAGE.
I am sick of it.
Bring on alternatives.
IT IS TIME.
HYDROGEN FUEL ONLY POSSIBLE AS A BY-PRODUCT OF NUCLEAR PLANTS
Hydrogen as a fuel is only possible if it is manufactured as a by-product of nuclear power. It makes no sense to burn fossil fuels to manufacture hydrogen.
The hydrogen-oxygen bond is one of the strongest nuclear bonds in existence. It requires an enormous amount of energy to break it.
Nuclear power has the ability and power to do this…otherwise…”fogetaboutit….
sanjosemike