Iceland becomes the first country intending to get rid of oil.

Like everyone here should know Iceland has plentiful resources of geothermal energy and it has been used there long time for heating cities and generating electricity. (although indirectly).
But for cars they have used oil as fuel like others countries.

Now that is changing and they intend to have whole country running without fossil fuels before year 2050. Instead of oil burning combustion engine powered cars they're starting to change cars to hydrogen fuel cell powered cars whose only emission is water vapour.
Technologies required for hydrogen fuel cell based vehicles aren't anything new and have been around for years. Even scaling up production of hydrogen wouldn't be big problem but problem has been that separating hydrogen from water requires electricity and that has to be produced somehow, often by methods which produce emissions so it has been just "reallocating those emissions to other column".
Now this is where Iceland has huge advantage, geothermal energy gives them pollutant-free source of electricity which can be used to produce hydrogen for transportation.


abcnews.go.com...

good for the people of iceland. i wish them well

the only problem may be if the new cars don't reach fast enough speeds as the icelanders do tend to like racing along the interior of their country in their vehicles

Way to go Iceland. Too bad every country cannot do this.

Good for Iceland

Except too bad hydrogen fuel cells don't really work, not yet at least. Hydrogen fuel cell engines have a life expectancy of 200 hours, so after every 200 hours of use you have to get a new engine.
It also takes 1113 gallons of gas hydrogen to equal the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline.

[edit on 21/1/2006 by SwearBear]

Swearbear do you have a source other then a message group for those figures?

Originally posted by sardion2000
Swearbear do you have a source other then a message group for those figures?

The article on the message group is from the EV World magazine, as you can see.
Michael Ruppert also mentioned this in his docu "Denial Stops Here."

Originally posted by SwearBear

Originally posted by sardion2000
Swearbear do you have a source other then a message group for those figures?

The article on the message group is from the EV World magazine, as you can see.
Michael Ruppert also mentioned this in his docu "Denial Stops Here."

Kay thanks, I just looked at the URL so my mistake I knew that the comparison between gas and h2 was bad, I just didn't know it was that bad.

Originally posted by SwearBear
It also takes 1113 gallons of gas hydrogen to equal the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline.

I really doubt that because the Honda FCX gets over 50mpg on hydrogen.

honda.com

Also, the record holder for the most fuel efficient vehicle is a hydrogen car that got over 12 thousand miles per gallon.

eere.energy.gov

There's an interesting document on hydrogen myths here:

rmi.org (pdf)

Crude oil can be more efficiently converted into delivered gasoline than can natural gas into delivered hydrogen.12 But that’s a red herring: the difference is far more than offset by the hydrogen’s 2–3-fold higher efficiency in running a fuel-cell car than gasoline’s in running an enginedriven car. Using Japanese round numbers from Toyota, 88% of oil at the wellhead ends up as gasoline in your tank, and then 16% of that gasoline energy reaches the wheels of your typical modern car, so the well-to-wheels efficiency is 14%. A gasoline-fueled hybrid-electric car like the 2002 Toyota Prius nearly doubles the gasoline-to-wheels efficiency from 16% to 30% and the overall well-to-wheels efficiency from 14% to 26%. But locally reforming natural gas can deliver 70% of the gas’s wellhead energy into the car’s compressed-hydrogen tank. That “meager” conversion efficiency is then more than offset by an advanced fuel-cell drivesystem’s superior 60% efficiency in converting that hydrogen energy into traction, for an overall well-towheels efficiency of 42%. That’s three times higher than the normal gasoline-engine car’s, or 1.5 times higher than the gasoline-hybrid-electric car’s.47 This helps explain why most automakers see today’s gasoline-hybrid cars as a stepping-stone to their ultimate goal — direct-hydrogen fuel-cell cars.

Originally posted by AceOfBase
I really doubt that because the Honda FCX gets over 50mpg on hydrogen.

honda.com

Also, the record holder for the most fuel efficient vehicle is a hydrogen car that got over 12 thousand miles per gallon.

eere.energy.gov

That would be compressed hydrogen, which is 10 times more flammable and 20 times more explosive than gasoline.
Do a crash test on that and you might have some really nice fireworks!

Intresting read:
The Myth of the Hydrogen Economy

Hello

The population of Iceland is only 300,000 so it's probably as good a place as any for a pilot study. Their boats are still going to run on diesel, though, right? They make most of their money from cod (they still have some because they've managed their fisheries sustainably, unlike the EU and Canadians).

TD