EV World: Five Chinese Cities Test Clean Hythane Fuel in Buses

This story: Five Chinese Cities Test Clean Hythane Fuel in Buses (evworld.com, Jan 3, 2006) discusses how Hythane has an agreement with five cities in China to test their fuel in city buses. They're getting ready for the 2008 Olympics to be held in China. What's Hythane? That's a good question, because this is the first I've heard of them, but the answer is very interesting.

Hythane (hythane.com) makes a fuel by adding hydrogen to natural gas. They explain it best:

Hydrogen and methane are complimentary vehicle fuels in many ways. Methane has a relatively narrow flammability range that limits the fuel efficiency and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions improvements that are possible at lean air/fuel ratios. The addition of even a small amount of hydrogen, however, extends the lean flammability range significantly. Methane has a slow flame speed, especially in lean air/fuel mixtures, while hydrogen has a flame speed about 8 times faster. Methane is a fairly stable molecule that can be difficult to ignite, but hydrogen has an ignition energy requirement about 25 times lower than methane. Finally, methane can be difficult to completely combust in the engine or catalyze in exhaust aftertreatment converters. In contrast, hydrogen is a powerful combustion stimulant for accelerating the methane combustion within an engine, and hydrogen is also a powerful reducing agent for efficient catalysis at lower exhaust temperatures.

In other words it makes natural gas a better fuel. Hmmm...

Seems to me this gives an interesting adoption advantage over other systems. A battery EV or a fuel cell vehicle both require a wholesale switchover. It's hard to simply make a few changes to an existing vehicle to turn it into a battery EV or fuel cell EV.

On the other hand, vehicles running on compressed natural gas (CNG) are common. And a gasoline engine is very similar to the one which run's CNG. And finally it would allow reuse of the infrastructure that provides gasoline.

Hydrogen injection being used by long-haul truckers

Hydrogen isn't just for fuel cells any more. It can be injected into regular internal combustion engines (ICE) and help the ICE use the fuel more efficiently and produce less poisin into the atmosphere.

Truckers Choose Hydrogen Power (By Stephen Leahy, Wired News, 02:00 AM Nov. 15, 2005 PT)

The idea is to have an on-board electrolysis unit that takes existing power generated on board from the alternator, electrolyzes water, extracts the hydrogen, injecting the hydrogen into the ICE as it burns the fuel.

These truckers aren't just do-gooders. They like Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Injection, or HFI, system because it lets them save fuel, get more horsepower and, as a bonus, cause less pollution.

"We're saving $700 a month per truck on fuel," said Sherwin Fast, president of Great Plains Trucking in Salinas, Kansas. The company tried the HFI system on four trucks and has ordered 25 more.

"Drivers like the increased power and noticed there is a lot less black smoke coming out of the stacks," said Fast.

HFI is a bolt-on, aftermarket part that injects small amounts of hydrogen into the engine air intake, said Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Steve Gilchrist. Fuel efficiency and horsepower are improved because hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel, dramatically boosting combustion efficiency.

This is better than carrying hydrogen tanks because hydrogen refeuling isn't widely available. And it's interesting this contributes to better performance, pollution and efficiency characteristics.

Towards the end of the article is a rant, that I agree with, about the push for fuel cells as the solution. The way I see it, fuel cells are merely a way of pushing the supposed solution further out into the future so the car companies don't have to make any significant changes today. They don't want to solve the problem, they want to keep their cash cow going, which means nurturing the duopoly relationship with the oil companies.

On the other hand, this is available now, works now, apparently is simple to install, etc.

Resources:

Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Injection: This is the unit discussed in the article.

Protium Energy Technologies: seems to be a cunsultancy advising corporations on hydrogen power investments.

Canada's Environmental Technology Verification Program: Provides an analysis and verification service studying claims of environmentally sound products or services.

U.S. National Hydrogen Energy Association

'Clean energy' power plant?

There's a lot of hype that burning hydrogen is 'clean energy'. It's tempting, and there's a propoganda effort going on around moving to a hydrogen economy.

'Clean energy' power station move (BBC, June 30, 2005)

This concerns the "first" industrial scale hydrogen power plant. The scheme is to split natural gas to retrieve the hydrogen, burn that in a plant, liquify the remaining stuff (carbon primarily) and pump that liquid into an BP oil field.

It's supposed to produce 350 megawatts (a.k.a. 300,000 homes worth of electricity) and come online in 2009.

Part of the goaling is to increase the useful lifetime of an oil field, and another part is to capture the carbon helping the UK and Scotland meet their targets under the Kyoto accords.

My question in this is - to extract the hydrogen, it's going to require some energy. Where does that energy come from, and is it more than you get by burning the hydrogen?

e.g. if you get the energy to extract hydrogen from a regular power plant that's currently burning a fossil fuel, then you haven't truly improved the situation. You're just shifting the carbon production from one plant (the hydrogen burner) to another (burning an existing fossil fuel).

Maybe they see this as a "step in the right direction" just like the farce of the current hybrid-electric cars has people fooled into believing they're doing something useful for the environment by owning one. So far as I'm concerned it's not a step in the right direction if the vehicle or power plant is still dependant on a fossil fuel.