Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 21.9%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 39.8%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 37 18.9%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 24 12.2%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.1%
  • Total voters
    196
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Value Collector said:
I have no problem with hydrogen if it were coming from electrolysis.

Except,.... that process has such huge energy losses, that you are far better off using the electricity to charge batteries, rather than fill tanks of hydrogen, and then convert it back to electricity.

Also, due to the huge energy losses of electrolysis, natural gas is a cheaper alternative, So even though the process will be sold as a “green” alternative, it actually won’t be, the increased demand for hydrogen won’t create demand for renewables it will create demand for natural gas.

Electric buses are growing in popularity every where, what ever issues you had in the Act are probably easily solved.

—————-
As I have mentioned before, I am longterm shareholder in Apa, so any extra demand for Natural gas means more dividends for me.

So it’s in my interest to push hydrogen, but I just honestly don’t think it’s the way to go.

(Although there will be some great uses for hydrogen in storage of excess green energy, and other uses, but for most vehicles, batteries are better today, and will get increasingly better with time. )
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The thing is, there will be purpose built solar/wind hydrogen farms, two such proposed plants are well into the design stage for the NW of W.A.
The electricity produced will be primarily for hydrogen production, so energy loss as such isn't an issue, it is just a product from a renewable source that can be sold at market price.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/huge-pi...igger-as-focus-turns-to-green-hydrogen-64292/
And the second proposed plant.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/massive...cts-set-to-fuel-was-hydrogen-expansion-91993/
 
qldfrog said:
Everything will go up very fast in presence of a naked flame:)
Crying voices will be affected...
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Yes the stoichiometric ratio for H2 combustion with air is very low, fortunately when used in an electric car a flame is not part of the energy release process, so the fuel and the converter can be kept very close together to minimise any possibility of a leak.
Also I assume the tank and fuel cell can be held in a vented section, so if any leak did occur it would quickly disperse, due to its lightness relative to air.
The other thing with a H2 fuel tank, it is a pressure vessel the same as an oxygen tank, therefore it has to be made to extremely high tolerances and standards. They are nothing like a cars fuel tank, the high pressure liquid gas cylinders can take a shot from a high powered rifle and still not rupture.
 
WolfInvestor22 said:
The push for electric vechiles is ineviatable as someone has said . As investors it is more how we can take advanatge of the increase in demand for inputs such as Cobalt and Lithium . I read this article a few weeks ago and believe it is very relevant ..
Cobalt stocks
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Firstly welcome to the forum Wolf, that is a good article, we have been discussing the underlying supply/demand for battery materials for a while.
At present the general consensus is that nickel is where the demand is outstripping supply, therefore the nickel stocks have been on a bit of a run, if you search the nickel threads on individual stocks or nickel in general there is quite a bit of discussion.
With regard lithium and cobalt there appears to be a bit of an oversupply, your article explained the cobalt issue well.
To search a subject, the search function on the top right of the home page is a great place to start, anyway hope you join in the discussions and enjoy the forum.:xyxthumbs
 
sptrawler said:
The thing is, there will be purpose built solar/wind hydrogen farms, two such proposed plants are well into the design stage for the NW of W.A.
The electricity produced will be primarily for hydrogen production, so energy loss as such isn't an issue, it is just a product from a renewable source that can be sold at market price.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/huge-pi...igger-as-focus-turns-to-green-hydrogen-64292/
And the second proposed plant.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/massive...cts-set-to-fuel-was-hydrogen-expansion-91993/
Click to expand...

Energy loss is an issue in the sense that with the amount of energy it takes to charge 1000 cars, you can probably on fill 600 cars with hydrogen.

I can see hydrogen being used in cases where we absolutely have to store electricity if we will lose it, but it’s not the best primary use to store electricity.
 
Value Collector said:
Energy loss is an issue in the sense that with the amount of energy it takes to charge 1000 cars, you can probably on fill 600 cars with hydrogen.

I can see hydrogen being used in cases where we absolutely have to store electricity if we will lose it, but it’s not the best primary use to store electricity.
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No it isn't the best primary way to store electricity, but it has high energy density and it is transportable. It won't make sense for cars, but heavy vehicles will probably be the first to utilise it. IMO
The other issue is, if a huge solar/wind farm is located in the middle of nowhere, the electricity has to be harvested,stored and transported. Therfore it requires changing into a transportable medium, currently H2 is the best option, the 1,000 cars can't drive to the solar farm for charging and transmission lines may well be impractical.
 
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I mentioned this a while back maybe in another thread but H2 by its nature is very hard to keep, it tends to escape at the first opportunity even thru thin metal etc.
I expect it will be much harder to design an H2 chain similar to LPG: with production, train or pipeline, vessels and service stations down to end user vehicle;
I like the h2/H20 battery cell rechargeable concept for the beauty of the chemistry involved, but in reality, I think we are not there yet;
The escapism of H2, the Houdini of gases, also means that it will probably be more reasonable to put production near consumption:
Bye bye Australia as H2 major producer dream....

Moving more into energy system problem overall, I suspect we will see standard EV a la lithium etc recharged on the grid, but that grid could make nice use of PV and wind , where these green farms could produce H2 when in overproduction mode and just burn the H2 in a turbine the old way during the night or as a way to provide some base production on windless day;
Is that dreaming or doable @sptrawler or @Smurf1976 ?
This could maybe even make us reuse some of our gas turbine with minimal modification, H2O could be recycled to avoid too high water consumption on the farm for the H2 production
Wouldn't it be nice????
In that case, nickel and lithium vanadium are still a go
 
qldfrog said:
The escapism of H2, the Houdini of gases, also means that it will probably be more reasonable to put production near consumption:
Bye bye Australia as H2 major producer dream....
Click to expand...

Not there yet, certainly, but ammonia (NH4) is a possible pathway for H transport. There are other possible solutions in the pipeline (no pun ...) including research at the University of Newcastle using Halloysite (nano tubes) (I LOVE HALLOYSITE!)
 
qldfrog said:
I mentioned this a while back maybe in another thread but H2 by its nature is very hard to keep, it tends to escape at the first opportunity even thru thin metal etc.
I expect it will be much harder to design an H2 chain similar to LPG: with production, train or pipeline, vessels and service stations down to end user vehicle;
I like the h2/H20 battery cell rechargeable concept for the beauty of the chemistry involved, but in reality, I think we are not there yet;
The escapism of H2, the Houdini of gases, also means that it will probably be more reasonable to put production near consumption:
Bye bye Australia as H2 major producer dream....

Moving more into energy system problem overall, I suspect we will see standard EV a la lithium etc recharged on the grid, but that grid could make nice use of PV and wind , where these green farms could produce H2 when in overproduction mode and just burn the H2 in a turbine the old way during the night or as a way to provide some base production on windless day;
Is that dreaming or doable @sptrawler or @Smurf1976 ?
This could maybe even make us reuse some of our gas turbine with minimal modification, H2O could be recycled to avoid too high water consumption on the farm for the H2 production
Wouldn't it be nice????
In that case, nickel and lithium vanadium are still a go
Click to expand...
There would be no reason a gas turbine couldn't run on H2, you could actually run a car engine on H2, it is just the efficiency of the ice engine is very low compared to an electric motor. That is why they are going the fuel cell way, as for the leakage of the H2, I doubt that would be a huge issue or one that couldn't be minimised. Once it is onboard a truck or train, it will be used at a fairly fast rate anyway, they consume quite a bit of fuel and most that run interstate run nearly 24hrs a day.
It is interesting times, Japan certainly sounds more interested in H2 than batteries, as energy storage. I guess it depends a lot on how many natural resources you have and across how many mediums your fuel has to cover.
Batteries at this point are definitely the way for cars, I'm yet to be convinced on trains, trucks and aeroplanes.
 
qldfrog said:
I mentioned this a while back maybe in another thread but H2 by its nature is very hard to keep, it tends to escape at the first opportunity even thru thin metal etc.
I expect it will be much harder to design an H2 chain similar to LPG: with production, train or pipeline, vessels and service stations down to end user vehicle;
I like the h2/H20 battery cell rechargeable concept for the beauty of the chemistry involved, but in reality, I think we are not there yet;
The escapism of H2, the Houdini of gases, also means that it will probably be more reasonable to put production near consumption:
Bye bye Australia as H2 major producer dream....
Click to expand...
Large alternators as in Power Station alternators are hydrogen filled, this is done by filling and maintaining pressure in the alternator casing using bottled H2, the bottles are very much like oxygen bottles that welders use for oxy/acetylene welding. The main difference is, they are painted red.
The reason they fill the casing with hydrogen is two fold, the main one is called 'windage' this is the heat caused as the rotor is spinning at 3,000RPM, as hydrogen is much less dense than air the drag caused is much less therefore the heat generated is much less and power loss less.
A 50+ ton rotor spinning at 3,000RPM generates a lot of wind.:D
Leakage has never been an issue, nor fires.:xyxthumbs
 
sptrawler said:
Large alternators as in Power Station alternators are hydrogen filled, this is done by filling and maintaining pressure in the alternator casing using bottled H2, the bottles are very much like oxygen bottles that welders use for oxy/acetylene welding. The main difference is, they are painted red.
The reason they fill the casing with hydrogen is two fold, the main one is called 'windage' this is the heat caused as the rotor is spinning at 3,000RPM, as hydrogen is much less dense than air the drag caused is much less therefore the heat generated is much less and power loss less.
A 50+ ton rotor spinning at 3,000RPM generates a lot of wind.:D
Leakage has never been an issue, nor fires.:xyxthumbs
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I would suspect pressure is very low as ideally it should be vacuum?
So not much hydrogen in these alternator.but i could be wrong as i do not know this area.
But ammonia as a transport medium makes sense.
 
qldfrog said:
Moving more into energy system problem overall, I suspect we will see standard EV a la lithium etc recharged on the grid, but that grid could make nice use of PV and wind , where these green farms could produce H2 when in overproduction mode and just burn the H2 in a turbine the old way during the night or as a way to provide some base production on windless day;
Is that dreaming or doable @sptrawler or @Smurf1976
Click to expand...
Hydrogen as fuel in a gas turbine or for the boiler supplying steam to a steam turbine would be straightforward.

Just needs the right burners, fuel gas flow, air volume etc but that's all doable. Same with any gas - methane (natural gas), propane / butane (LPG), there's some minor use of straight ethane as a fuel in industry, town gas etc all the same concepts. There's at least one steam boiler (for power generation) in Australia that I'm aware of which is fired using carbon monoxide as the fuel - the CO comes from furnaces at the same site.

Hydrogen as fuel in a conventional car engine (that is, one designed for petrol) has been done indeed such a vehicle was entered in Targa Tasmania in 2006. There was no expectation of winning the race with a modified Corolla, the actual winner that year was Jim Richards driving a Porsche 911, but it achieved the aim of proving the concept of hydrogen powered cars in an environment with external scrutiny (ie motorsports) and raising some awareness.

Targa Tasmania is a ~2000 km staged road rally around Tas with competitive sections on closed public roads (and non-competitive sections on roads which remain open to the public between the competitive stages) run annually since 1992.

There was also some development done as part of that on using hydrogen as the fuel in a diesel cycle engine. So hydrogen as the main fuel and diesel as the pilot fuel (for those with some engine knowledge that means there's no spark plugs, a tiny amount of diesel provides the ignition to the gas).

For the record AGL's new Barker Inlet power station near Adelaide, currently in the process of testing following completion of construction, uses this approach but with natural gas as the fuel rather than hydrogen. Same concept however of a diesel cycle engine with gas doing most of the actual work. Similar things exist elsewhere in Australia but on a much smaller scale.

Also some other hydrogen things built on a smaller scale like go carts, postie bikes etc.

Multiple factors coincided to bring the hydrogen stuff to a halt though unfortunately.
 
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qldfrog said:
So one should wonder why solar farms do not have a small hydrogen plant attached to deliver night power in time for ev charging
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If the aim is to take the solar power, store it and return it for use as electricity then batteries or pumped hydro leave hydrogen for dead so far as efficiency is concerned.

That said, something to be mindful of in all this discussion about electric vehicles or indeed any technical subject is that the most technically efficient process is rarely the most commercially viable one in practice.

There are countless examples of that from computer operating systems through to home entertainment devices to how we move people around cities to aviation to conventional approaches to power generation. The most practical and commercially viable way of doing it isn't the most technically efficient way in virtually all cases.

Be wary of investing in anything where the main or only claim to brilliance is technical efficiency. There are exceptions but in general that alone isn't the route to business success unless every other way of doing it is so inefficient as to be regarded as an actual problem. :2twocents
 
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