"If its such a well known joke, why is Honda spending so much money promoting it?"
Honda is promoting Brown's Gas?
That is news to me.
Now, I am aware of a fuel cell car. But that is a different issue.
It is this way. There is no way to electrolyze water and get more energy out than was put in. Can't be done. Remember that according to thermodynamics, you can never get ahead of the game. To make it worse, you can never break even...
But, that is the the Brown's Gas proponents claim. So you don't have to go very deep into analyzing it, they are just wrong.
But, fuel cells do make sense.
Here is why. To burn gasoline in a car, you only convert about 20% of the energy in a given unit of gasoline into moving the car. The rest goes into heating the engine, heating the transmission, friction of the tires, etc. That heat is wasted energy. However, with a gasoline turbine, you can convert the energy of the gasoline to electricity with much higher efficiencies. Figures I've seen indicate 60% or more is common. Now you can convert that electricity to hydrogen and oxygen with an efficiency well over 90%. And a fuel cell can convert that hydrogen and oxygen to electricity with similar efficiencies. And electric motors suitable for car use have efficiencies close to 95%. So if you multiply 60% by 90% and 90% and 95%, you get 46%, or more than twice the efficiency of burning gasoline in an engine. In addition, assuming you also have a battery, you can do regenerative braking where the electric motor is used as a generator to turn the braking force back into electricity. Which ups the efficiency even more.
And there are even more efficient ways to generate electricity than using a gasoline turbine, which in reality is just about the last choice. So the efficiency is even higher. And you can reform hydrocarbons to hydrogen and CO2 at very high efficiencies. So you can even skip the electrolysis step altogether.
Now, certainly, it would be more ideal to use batteries and avoid the whole convert to hydrogen and back to electricity. But, the problem is that there isn't an ideal battery technology. I could put up a wall of text to track down every problem with every battery technology, but suffice it to say there isn't one. There is some promise that might change, but... |
