William: I wasn't planning to comment on your link to the piece about methanol powered fuel cell cars, but since I am here anyway to send Blindeye scurrying back to his home behind the garbage cans, I will make a few points.
This piece was put out by the American Methanol Institute. Its business is to promote methanol, so it is obviously trying to paint the most positive picture. Nevertheless, the contents of that piece should hardly give any reassurance to Ballard fans as you suggest.
1. It claims that internal combustion engines have an efficiency of 19% and methanol powered fuel cell engines have a 38% efficiency. The implication is that using the latter would cut down one's fuel expense. Two problems with that: First, efficiency is kind of a squishy number, but most fc people agree that the right number for the fc engine is more like 30%, while advanced ice engines are north of 20%. Next, methanol costs twice what gasoline does relative to the energy (measured in Btu's) it contains. Therefore, if a fc engine is only somewhat more efficient than an ice one, and must use a much more expensive fuel to achieve that efficiency, the total fuel expense per mile goes up, not down. Here is an exaggerated analogy: would you really save money if you had a car that went 100 mpg, but the gallons were not gasoline, but Ch. Latour '82?
2. Read carefully the section promoting methanol as a choice for reforming over gasoline. Among the advantages: lower emissions of NOx and CO. But wait a minute! I thought fc cars were supposed to be ZERO emission vehicles? Ahhh... only when they run on hydrogen, which is hopelessly too expensive. So a methanol powered fc car is qualitatively no different than an ice car - neither are zero emissions. Maybe the fc car will be quantitatively better, but maybe not - remember, the makers of ice engines aren't going to be doing nothing between now and 2004, and Honda, for one, has some very clean engines even now. Hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, can probably do even better.
3. Read the stuff again about what it would take set up a methanol infrastructure, and tell me how reassured you feel. It will cost about $50,000 per gas station to outfit it to sell methanol. FC cars will only be introduced in 3 US states, Germany and Japan. To convert only 10% of the service stations in those areas will cost $1.9 billion, and that only counts the initial capital cost, and doesn't include interest on the money or the cost of lost business to the extent that a gas station has to eliminate a type of fuel that is selling to replace the tank with methanol, which initially won't. Of course the gas station could try to cover the cost by charging so much for the methanol that fc car owners wanting to refuel will need a second mortgage, but that won't help spread the technology much.
Think about it -- someone must spend $1.9 billion, and even then, fuel won't be available in 9 out of 10 service stations in those states. If someone from California wants to drive his car out of state, she better haul a trailer full of fuel because she won't be able to refuel until she gets to NY.
In other words, when fc cars come out, they won't be a whole lot cleaner than ice ones, they will cost more to fuel, and fuel will be almost impossible to find, and that is the positive propaganda from the Methanol Institute, which is probably underestimating the costs. In addition, according to the head of R&D at Toyota, for many years fc cars will cost two to three times as much as equivalent conventional cars.
It is hard to imagine anyone at all buying the things, given these huge drawbacks versus conventional cars.
Slowly, eventually, I believe these problems will be solved and the fc car will one day start to get a significant market share, but we are probably talking more like 2014 or 2024, not 2004.
Now I'll leave everyone alone here again and you can all go back to your fantasies. |
