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Honda to offer fuel-cell motorcycle; Harley to offer potatoes

5537 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by motosaurus, Jul 25, 2005

Nplateau

Discussion Starter · Jul 23, 2005

First post biznitches.

1 - 5 of 5 Posts

i really don't see the benifit of fuel cells, it is the quintisential feel good short sighted invention, sure they sound great, but people conveiniently forget where hydrogen comes from, OIL!!!!! least thats where they get it from now, you can make it out of water, but that takes lots of electricity which comes from among other things, OIL! then you have to keep it preasurized @ 5000 psi plus or refridgerate the bejesus out of it and by the time the water comes out of the tail pipe it is nowhere near eficient or non oil dependant, everyone forgets that hydogen is no more than a vehicle for energy, it takes as mich energy to make it as you can ever get out

fuel cell, no thanks, I'll burn alcohol or biodiesel,

I will be sad when I can nolonger accelerate amidst the syphony of my internal combustion engine, just can't see the whir of an elctric motor doin it for me.

rant off

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51819

· #3 · Jul 23, 2005

not to quibble, but you don't "make" hydrogen, you extract it, the rest of the post was dead on and you seem to know more than most of the idiots caught up in the fuel cell craze.

btw, there is a neat fuel cell motorcycle http://www.intelligent-energy.com/index_article.asp?secID=15&secondlevel=796&artID=3709, that has a modular fuel cell, so one unit can be used to "power" several different devices.

so in theory you could use one fuel cell for your sport bike, your cruiser, your dirt bike.

actually this would be great of dual purpose (as in bikes) camping. use the fuel cell to get you there and then once there use it to keep your beer cold

-d

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48454

· #4 · Jul 24, 2005

I stand corected, extraction is a beter term, guess I had a beer to english conversion issue.

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47967

· #5 · Jul 25, 2005

I *think* its natural gas that most hydrogen is extracted from. The numbers I have seen show slightly better energy efficiency in natural gas-> H2->fuel cell vs gasoline, and slightly worse if the H2 is burned ( ala BMW).

Fuel cells are very efficient while still at an immature stage in development. True the storage is unsatisfactory yet, and also there is a third way: metallic hydrides. Also, fuel cells still have to use platinum as a catalyst.

That said, there is zero air pollution at the vehicle. There is CO2 at the source, but there seems to be some hope it can be 'sequestered'. For us in So Cal that is a very good thing. There are solar carports ( Honda of course has one ) which manufacture electricity or H2 and shade your car. My daughter did a science project on Chlamydomonus, bacteria that produces hydrogen. Soylent Greeen anyone? Lastly, there is likely going to be a flood of (mostly) tiny fuels cells that run on alcohol, to replace batteries, unless batteries suddenly get a lot better. So it's possible that there might be an alcohol-fueled electric scooter, but then its still a greenhouse gas problem.

IMO we are talking about scooters and cars and segway-like things, not performance bikes. Simply cleaning up the SUVs would make a much bigger difference.

thanks for listening

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