Cars that Run on Oil Creek Water

greenghost

greenghost

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It's not what you think. This is a pretty cool marketing video by Toyota filmed up on Oil Creek. The car may never catch on but this is a nice promotional idea. Has a bit of Oil Creek history thrown in for good measure. Worth a watch. (Mods may want to shift this into Conversation since it's not directly about fly fishing.) It's truly amazing how much that watershed has cleaned up since the oil boom days.
 

Love it, Dave!

Now if they could just convert the car seats into toilet seats... a perpetually running car. (Except for diner stops!)
 
What's next.... Fueled by gemmies??
 
The Oil Creek advertisement and the BS advertisement are great Marketing pieces and very interesting.

I am glad that Engineers and Scientists are working toward viable improvements in energy usage and environmental impact.

The present reality seems to be that battery powered cars are more environmentally conscious than fuel cell, both both vary greatly based on the ultimate source of the electricity or hydrogen. So, if you are truly environmentally conscious, you need to be concerned with how the Hydrogen was refined or how the electricity was generated.

This article H Fuel Cell vs Battery Power

estimates that "...fuel-cell cars have an average lifetime greenhouse gas emissions rate of 61.83 grams of carbon dioxide per megajoule...." and "Electricity, on the other hand, was determined to have average lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of 41.37g/mj."

But important driver needs such as range will surely dictate usefulness of both technologies.

I am having a difficult time to understand why you would digest cow manure into Methane and then not just burn it (like natural gas) instead of breaking it down into Hydrogen.
 
What fuel cells give you over batteries is a storage mechanism. Batteries are rather incapable of taking large amounts of energy. They're getting better, but the energy density is still far below that of fossil fuels. Which means, you have to have a lot of space and weight in batteries to power a small car. For a larger car, it's even more. Even then, in order to get any kind of range, you have to sacrifice performance. Even the best batteries out there, like Tesla's, don't take a charge very quickly, which sucks if, say, you are in the habit of making 5 hour drives to see grandparents!

Hydrogen may not be more efficient, but it is a more efficient way to store it. You can store large volumes of energy in a small, light package, just like gasoline. Only, you don't gotta burn it and have nasty stuff coming out the tailpipe.

As such, if you want cleaner methods to translate beyond economy cars doing local jaunts between "fill ups", to family sized cars, trucks, vans, etc. that can have decent range and refuel quickly when needed, then you either gotta wait a long time till battery tech gets there, or you gotta look at something like fuel cells.

As for whether it's better than gasoline? For both electric and hydrogen, the answer is yes, albeit it's not nearly as clean as proponents would like you to believe. Electricity has to be generated, so it's only as clean as it's fuel, which is generally dirtier than gasoline. The advantages for electric lie in the fact that, on the consumption end, the internal combustion engine is not very efficient, it makes too much heat. An electric vehicle is very efficient.

Hydrogen is most typically taken from fossil fuels like oil and natural gas, though it can be generated from water using electricity (as the commercial shows, but that electricity has to be generated like the above).

Ultimately I think the near future of autos is still electric and gas/electric hybrids. I thought the Chevy Volt was a brilliant drive system, though the car itself kinda sucks. Far future? Who knows?

But where fuel cells will come into play is in making a jump to renewable sources for power grid applications. Things like wind and solar are too fleeting to base a permanent grid off of. It takes hours to start up a coal or gas turbine and get it running to efficiency, but then it's pretty much steady state. But solar and wind sources wane and surge on the order of seconds as gusts come and die, and clouds cover the sun and then let it out again. Way too fast to start and shut down fossil sources on demand. It just becomes nearly impossible to incorporate a large % of wind and solar into a grid without inducing brown outs and surges.

But if you just take them TOTALLY offline, and let them make hydrogen from water at their own pace, well, then you have a storage mechanism and a medium which can be collected and transported. You can have centralized power plants with a large banks of fuel cells instead of coal or gas powered turbines. And that energy is pure wind and solar energy that's been stored and can now be controlled easily.

As a side note, the latest nuclear reactor designs (which haven't been built) produce large volumes of hydrogen as a byproduct. Likewise, even beyond that, since nuclear fuel is virtually free it costs no more to run a nuclear plant at 100% capacity 24/7. So when grid demand is low you might as well run it and use that extra energy to make more hydrogen as well. So advancing nuclear would go far towards advancing a hydrogen economy.
 
I also dreamed of our cars being nuclear powered. Refill them every 10 years. Now if we can just figure out a way to keep people from tinkering with them.
 
Great stuff there Pat.

Luke, one thing that is often ignored with battery powered cars is production of the batteries themselves as well as the mining of the materials used to make them. I don't know if that is the case with your numbers or not. I'm just sayin. Those materials are dangerous and filthy to mine in the first place. China has cornered the market on certain rare earth metals. Not that we don't have any deposits here. It's just that they are willing to dig it up, regardless of the human and environmental costs. Yea, once you have the battery, it's clean to operate, but even those batteries have a limited life span so they need to be periodically replaced with more dirty batteries.

that's from memory, so I could be wrong.

Anyway. fuel cells have been around for a very long time, but I'm betting you knew that. There is even evidence that a form of fuel cell was used 4000 years ago. That was lost for a very long time.

The more modern hydrogen fuel cell was "invented" in 1839. Yep, even before the civil war. But it really wasn't used until NASA started using them. Expensive at the time which kept them cost prohibitive for anything but an agency with deep pockets. I remember studying them in college back in about 1980.

I personally think it is pretty cool that Toyota is working on that.

In addition to what Pat said about combining other forms of green energy with hydrogen storage, fuel cells (IMO) are likely a better way to store energy small to medium scale than batteries for electric vehicle transportation. Especially when considering longevity, too. Fuel cells last a long time and can be refurbished instead of replaced. Again, I am no expert, just someone with an interest in this. So what I said be considered opinion. I enjoy these types of discussions.

Big problem right now is where can you fill it. The infrastructure for refueling Hydrogen fuel cells doesn't exist yet.

However, we all know about the vast reserves. There is already a vast network of NG distribution, as well as a few scattered CNG refueling locations, so the logical choice is Hydrogen fueling at same locations. Once it takes off, we will have other sources of hydrogen come on line. Who knows, maybe I will be the first farm where you can drive up and fill your car with hydrogen and drive off with a dozen eggs, too. ;-) Not.
 
I'm thinking this would be a good topic for the Conservation or OT forums.
 
I am interested in a car that you fill with water and can fill up anywhere, once a week have the by products removed from the storage and sell the by products on the open market.
 
I am interested in a car that you fill with water and can fill up anywhere, once a week have the by products removed from the storage and sell the by products on the open market.

That's really not feasible. You can get hydrogen from water, but you gotta put electricity through it to do it. So essentially you still have to have another power source, such as batteries.

Then when you use the hydrogen, you get energy and make water as a byproduct, but you get less energy back than you had when you started. So why not just use the battery power? The ONLY valid reason is to negate batteries altogether, but have a solar/hydrogen hybrid. The water then only exists to make hydrogen from the solar panels.
 
very cool!
 
pcray1231 wrote:
I am interested in a car that you fill with water and can fill up anywhere, once a week have the by products removed from the storage and sell the by products on the open market.

That's really not feasible. You can get hydrogen from water, but you gotta put electricity through it to do it. So essentially you still have to have another power source, such as batteries.

Then when you use the hydrogen, you get energy and make water as a byproduct, but you get less energy back than you had when you started. So why not just use the battery power? The ONLY valid reason is to negate batteries altogether, but have a solar/hydrogen hybrid. The water then only exists to make hydrogen from the solar panels.

I GOT IT!

Lets make all cars and trucks, giant slot cars.

Oh wait. Then it would be more efficient to just run the cars directly off the electricity.

That is until the electricity goes out.

So, we can build a slot car with a fuel cell as backup power, and batteries and ...

Nevermind. :lol:
 
Aw heck, why not just put a wind turbine on the front of all cars. You can generate electricity from the speed, right?

(I'm j/k, but I'm sure there's some brilliant ppl who'll think it's a fantastic idea. The lack of understanding regarding the "law of conservation of energy" always amazes me).
 
pcray1231 wrote:
I am interested in a car that you fill with water and can fill up anywhere, once a week have the by products removed from the storage and sell the by products on the open market.

That's really not feasible.

Dang it!

Party pooper.

I was hoping to just fuel up the car at Spring Creek.

 
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