Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engines - could the V8 survive?

We all see EV is coming, in fact already here. I hadn’t heard about Hydrogen ICEs as a serious option until I watched the latest Harry’s Garage on Youtube. He visits JCB to learn about their in-house Hydrogen ICE, basically their existing diesel block with a new head and fuel system (OK, probably a bit more than that).


Bamford talk about it as better than EV for large high use commercial vehicles, but I wonder if it also means there is a future for our kind of car.

Incidentally, Lord Bamford doesn’t like Elon Musk much, or at least the effect he is having on the car industry.

Anyone have more knowledge about this field?

I think they are right about Hydrogen in larger vehicles. I wouldn’t fancy retrofitting it to cars like ours as the tank would be bulky. I think running old timer ICE cars in the future will involve some sort of (undoubtedly expensive) bio fuel.

Hmmmmm.........one word for you......Hindenburg
Boom!
Only joking.
Bamford would seem to be betting on Hydrogen and as the owner of a business of its size,
I'd assume he'd be quite conservative, when it comes to betting the house on a future fuel source.

As regards V8s etc Bamford or his ex-Lotus bloke, did say something about the future ability to retro fit
their technology to existing engines. However, it almost seemed like a throw away comment and I'm not sure
who it was directed at. Licencing deals with competitors maybe?

At the other end of the spectrum. My neighbour was having a new tarmac drive laid this month.
There was a lot of prep work needed and a cement mixer appeared. I girded various parts, assuming
the usual builders racket, but I could barely hear the thing when it was running.
I was pleased. The builder wasn't. Apparently the electric motors burned out after a few weeks of
normal operation and recharging after only a few hours of operation took the rest of the day.
Totally impractical for building site / 'heavy' work and a lot more expensive than the traditionally
powered mixers.

So, if battery technology becomes a commodity. Like the other parts of a car. It might be a case of
horses for courses. Except that cobalt and other rare elements used in lithium battery technology,
are frequently found in areas with unstable regimes and are in any case, expensive to mine.

I think the sweet spot is a carbon based storage technology, with variable programmable power delivery and recharging to suit different applications.

I think I read somewhere recently about researchers in the UK and/or US investigating the possibility
of using lithium alternatives for power storage. Graphene would seem to be a stepping stone beyond
lithium in terms of power delivery. I suspect that other technologies are in the pipeline, that will meet
our power needs better still and do it across the board.

There is a huge amount of work going into alternative chemistry. Graphine is more of a substrate than a reactive element, it’s what they attach to it that will be interesting. I have my money on Sodium-Ion as the next step.

Zep said:

I think they are right about Hydrogen in larger vehicles. I wouldn’t fancy retrofitting it to cars like ours as the tank would be bulky. I think running old timer ICE cars in the future will involve some sort of (undoubtedly expensive) bio fuel.

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I think he said there’s 3 times the power per volume with hydrogen over diesel, so I suppose that might keep tank sizes down? You’re right though - retro fitting would be a headache.

I've been saying it for ages now. Hydrogen will be powering our cars in the future, not electric.

The technology is there now to produce 'green' hydrogen using renewables and it is happening in a big way.
Chile is positioning itself to be the green hydrogen supplier for the America's. We at least South America until the USA up their game.

Total have just purchased 13,000 Hectares in Chile to build a Green Hydrogen production plant and there are a number of other projects either being built or proposed to be built in the next few years.

How hydrogen will be retrofitted into existing cars is beyond my pay grade, but hydrogen cars do exist already, Glickenhaus has a proto type to run a Hydrogen Le Mans car already.

Toyota are spending more R&D on hydrogen than EV so rest assured others will be upping their game as well.

As for Elon Musk, I'm with Lord Bamford.

Hurricane52 said:

I think he said there’s 3 times the power per volume with hydrogen over diesel, so I suppose that might keep tank sizes down? You’re right though - retro fitting would be a headache.

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This is a bit of sleight of hand. Hydrogen has more energy per unit of weight. But it isn’t very dense at atmospheric pressure. So volumetric energy is low. This means you have to store it at very, very high pressure (over 600 bar - 600 times atmospheric pressure) which makes the tanks bigger as they need to be quite sturdy. This is one reason why it is better suited to larger plant and equipment plus replacing natural gas in the grids.

The use of hydrogen in EVs is also much more likely than in ICE cars because the conversion to motive energy is so much more efficient so tanks can be smaller / safer. Using hydrogen in an ICE with peak efficiency of 35-40% is why storage etc is going to such an issue.

In any event, we shall see.

I’m pleased the discussions might be opening up and current fads are being challenged.

It’s a real concern when investment in any given technology is purely media led. In my previous life in tech PR last century, we helped create this problem - especially by introducing the big US players into Europe and getting the mainstream press interested in technology. Bill Gates’ first Euro press tour was in my boss’ Ford Granada estate. By the second, he was in a Porsche 928 and Bill was well on the way to ordering his 959.

Back then we met many British software and hardware engineers continually muttering into their beer.

We had better technologies, but the US spent more on marketing.

Now it’s much easier to get messages out and tech is an everyday obsession for most developed countries, perhaps these UK pioneers will have a fighting chance?

GeoffCapes said:

I've been saying it for ages now. Hydrogen will be powering our cars in the future, not electric.

The technology is there now to produce 'green' hydrogen using renewables and it is happening in a big way.
Chile is positioning itself to be the green hydrogen supplier for the America's. We at least South America until the USA up their game.

Total have just purchased 13,000 Hectares in Chile to build a Green Hydrogen production plant and there are a number of other projects either being built or proposed to be built in the next few years.

How hydrogen will be retrofitted into existing cars is beyond my pay grade, but hydrogen cars do exist already, Glickenhaus has a proto type to run a Hydrogen Le Mans car already.

Toyota are spending more R&D on hydrogen than EV so rest assured others will be upping their game as well.

As for Elon Musk, I'm with Lord Bamford.

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The Glikenhaus, Toyota and the hydrogen Le Mans cars are fuel cells so are still EVs but with a fuel cell in place of batteries. They aren’t ICE.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about “Green” hydrogen. So we know what this means, it is hydrogen usually generated through electrolysis, with conversion efficiencies between 60 and 80%. However there are more types of hydrogen than there is colours in the rainbow and in future the source of your hydrogen will be important for its potential environmental benefits.

It is no surprise to me that the large petrochemical companies are betting big on hydrogen, if everything is electric they will lose their market, they want a product that still fits with their business model of central supply and price management.

If on the other hand, the chemistry of batteries can be improved to the point of no rare earth minerals being needed, there is also a strong argument that this will reduce the need for double conversion in the form of generating and then consuming hydrogen which could arguably be more efficient as the green energy used to convert water into hydrogen could go straight into the tank (battery pack) of an EV.

There is a genuine race between different technologies for the final product, it is like a supersized VHS / Betamax of our age.

What a great video from Harry; Lord Branford is very sage in his understanding of the practically of the existing tech. I particularly like that they have bolted this to a basic diesel and are getting great results. Towards the end Harry is referencing the previous attempts at converting ICE engines resulting in horrible knocking and ludicrous temperatures leading to poor results but how much of that is EV lobbying? At the end of the day Betamax was probably better than VHS but didn’t win the day. History is littered with losers and winners like that. If they can convert a diesel lump to hydrogen then why not a V8 petrol, maybe in 10-20 years it will become commonplace? I would be happy to take a £££ hit to get life out of a conversion. Now I need to think how I can farm Hydrogen in my garden…

Although I lord the idea ov V8s having a future, but feel that the worlds governments have an agenda to rid us of all combustion and make use buy a new type of vehicle just to keep capitalism moving buying stuff we replace every time a new version pops up... new Ipone anyone, just tike the last one but costs more.

Betamax was superior. Noticeably so. I remember my father buying one in the mid 70's.
Unfortunately Sony over played it's hand and every other manufacturer went with VHS.
Thus the market went with, what was at that time, the inferior product.

safrane said:

Although I lord the idea ov V8s having a future, but feel that the worlds governments have an agenda to rid us of all combustion and make use buy a new type of vehicle just to keep capitalism moving buying stuff we replace every time a new version pops up... new Ipone anyone, just tike the last one but costs more.

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Exactly. Governments of the G20 as well as the biggest manufacturers and consumer goods companies will determine pace and direction of adoption.
The defence contractors will be looking for another war, to prop up their balance sheets. Watch this space in the Middle East / Africa / former Soviet Republics/South China Sea.

Zep said:

I think they are right about Hydrogen in larger vehicles. I wouldn’t fancy retrofitting it to cars like ours as the tank would be bulky. I think running old timer ICE cars in the future will involve some sort of (undoubtedly expensive) bio fuel.

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except that bio fuel is still carbon based so it not only reduces our ability to grow food, it produces CO2 just the same. So not really an answer. No reason why ICE's cant run on Hydrogen, not a drop fit by any measure but clearly possible. Storage and Access to Hydrogen as a fuel is a huge problem. I worked on a hydrogen storage system for cars in 1982, it was safe as the gas was stored in an absorbent material that only released the gas at a certain rate, but it was expensive and as has been mentioned high pressure storage.

davy83 said:

except that bio fuel is still carbon based so it not only reduces our ability to grow food, it produces CO2 just the same. So not really an answer. No reason why ICE's cant run on Hydrogen, not a drop fit by any measure but clearly possible. Storage and Access to Hydrogen as a fuel is a huge problem. I worked on a hydrogen storage system for cars in 1982, it was safe as the gas was stored in an absorbent material that only released the gas at a certain rate, but it was expensive and as has been mentioned high pressure storage.

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I don’t disagree. I see “petrol” for older cars it as something like leaded fuel now for old timer cars. You can still buy it in a few places but it rare and expensive and so will be for the few remaining cars, not for the mass market. No doubt hydrogen conversion is also be possible but compromised in a lot of ways.

And you are bang on about hydrogen storage, it’s not impossible, just impractical on a large scale.

As for the VHS / Betamax, the analogy works in a lot of ways, there is potential to end up with a technology which is inferior being ubiquitous, but it is actually too early to tell which is which. VHS might be hydrogen fuel cell, it might be BEV or vice versa. One thing is for sure, the excellent but sadly inefficient combustion engine is so far down the list it won’t be one of the options except for some very specific applications.

The best analogy I've heard for fuel sources is this.

Petrol is vinyl. Been around for donkeys years and everyone hankers after them and reminisces about them even though they have flaws.
Electric is a CD. The next big thing, but limited in what you can do, popular for a while, until newer technology took over.
Hydrogen is MP3. ......

So what is streaming?

Zep said:

So what is streaming?

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Just what I was thinking, especially with it being in the news again for artist’s rights etc

Zep said:

So what is streaming?

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When you're cutting too many onions.