I saw an ad for the new BMW Hydrogen Series while walking through the SJC airport. I stopped and read the ad and apparently they are making and marketing a new car that can do 140mph, but has nearly zero CO2 emissions. They purport that the emissions are almost all water vapor. I had to go on the web site and read about how they pull this off.
What’s more interesting to me, though, is that the ad naturally goes on to say that because it’s water vapor, and not CO2 that is emitted that the car is a “green friendly” car. I suppose that if you buy into all the hoopla that the IPCC puts out there then this would be a very likely assumption.
However, the reality is far more different. While there is virtually no scientific evidence supporting global warming through CO2, there is a substantial amount of data that shows how water vapor in the atmosphere directly affects the temperature in a given area. If you have ever heard of the urban heat island affect then you are already aware that population densities often increase the heat in a given geographic area. There are a lot of reasons for this, but water vapor is one of the primary contributing factors.
Upon further investigation what I found is that the car can run on either hydrogen or gasoline. When operating on gasoline, BMW is claiming a 17 miles to the gallon fuel economy. Not the greatest, but still better than some others. However, when operating on hydrogen the car gets 4.7 miles to the gallon (liquid hydrogen).
To make matters worse, hydrogen is readily available but only after you expend quite a bit of energy to extrapolate it for large-scale purposes….which really means that it is, in fact, not readily available to the average consumer. Combine that with the energy required to store it as a liquid form at -423 F and the manufacturing of safety equipment when dealing with liquid hydrogen, and the benefits of this vehicle start to rapidly diminish.
According to sources I could find, the energy required to store the fuel alone eats up to 1/3 of energy contained in the tank, which holds roughly 17.6lbs of fuel. Unfortunately, due to insulating properties and trying to keep the fuel cold, the tank ends up being the size of a 45 gallon tank, takes up ½ the trunk space and within 9 days ½ of the tank will go bad (can’t keep it cold forever).
From sources I could find cost of a kilogram of liquid hydrogen is approximately $6.50. Do the math on that one and you are looking at about $50.00 to fill up your hydrogen tank and you should fare about 124 miles out of it.
The car is still being researched and is only being release (sold) to some celebrities and stuff in the first year of production. Based on what I have read, it seems unlikely that the car could experience any real success.
My friend asked me if I thought it was a bad idea to be exploring alternative energy sources. I think it's a great idea, but this one doesn't seem to be well thought out.
I'd really like to think that it is ignorance on BMW's part. Or that there is some other objective that I am unable to ascertain. I hope it is not another example of an automobile manufacturer playing upon the fear mongering and ignorance of the general public. I suppose this is nothing new, but if you are really worried about globing warming it would seem to me that you would avoid a car like this so as not to be wasteful of resources and / or pumping even more water vapor into the atmosphere.
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