A while back I wrote a piece about the folly of hydrogen fuel. I was mainly basing my post on my knowledge of the internal combustion engine and how H doesn’t work well in that type of mill like other, currently used fuels.
But did they listen? Nope.
BMW is manufacturing the first series of hydrogen fueled cars. They’re not as green as they seem. For a start, they’re incredibly thirsty — and they will put more strain on the environment than a heavy diesel truck.
(snip)Â Â Â
Starting in March, the car will be delivered to about 100 celebrities, but so far BMW is keeping mum about their names or what their leasing rates might be. The car’s developers are hoping to gain insight into the practical reliability of a technology many consider the be all and end all of the car industry’s ecologically clean and climate friendly future.
The Munich-based company is promising “sustainable mobility and sheer joy of driving,” citing the car’s 260 horsepower, 12-cylinder engine. The Hydrogen 7’s standard combustion engine has been adapted to run on both liquid hydrogen and regular gasoline as well — and tons of it. The company says the car will consume an average of 13.9 liters (3.7 gallons) per 100 kilometers (roughly 17 miles per gallon) using regular gasoline and a whopping 50 liters to drive the same distance when fuelled by hydrogen.
In other words, BMW has created an energy-guzzling engine that only seems to be environmentally friendly — a farcical ecomobile whose only true merit is that of illustrating the cardinal dilemma of a possible hydrogen-based economy.
So BMW, one of the world’s leading automotive innovators, has created an internal combustion engine that will run on either petrol or H. Amazingly enough, it will only get 35-40% of the fuel milage on H that it does on petrol. Hmm, I think I could have told them that.
Kyle of South Park fame once said “What the fuck is wrong with German people?!” I believe that I have an answer: They’re European.
You see, while fully able to do wonderous things with technology and machines, they treasure words and style over substance. It is the same disease that infects the American leftist community.
To wit,
The problem is that hydrogen is in scarce supply and producing it requires vast amounts of energy. Climate-friendly production of liquid hydrogen on a large scale presupposes a virtually unlimited supply of ecologically produced electricity — not something likely to materialize in the near future. That’s why energy experts from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy believe forcing the transition to a hydrogen-based economy within the next three to four decades is “not an ecologically sound” idea.
Storing the volatile energy source also requires energy and money. The only method that promises a reasonable storage life is liquid storage at temperatures below -253 degrees Celsius (-423 degrees Fahrenheit). The process of cooling the storage facility down to such a low temperature alone uses up to one-third of the energy contained in one fuel tank.
So, even with a fuel cell vehicle, your fuel has a high potential to be more polluting to the environment than the manufacture of gasoline or diesel, and unless you deeply refrigerate your on-board supply of H, you lose half of your efficiency.
Hmm, I wonder what kind of environmentally unfriendly refrigerants will have to be put into automobiles to make them fuel sustainable?
2 whole Kilometers per Liter. 1K per L if your supply isn’t stored properly. Fooking stoopid enviroweenies.
If you noticed in the first excerpted portion, BMW will be handing these out to “status holders” first. Captain Ed, who found this article, had this to say about that:
At least they picked their initial target market shrewdly. They plan to sell the first one hundred H-7s to “celebrities”, the only people silly and rich enough to bother with the vehicle.
I cannot wait to see my first one of these here in the eco-wonderland that is Seattle. I am so going to laugh my ass off at the person who steps out of it.
