Electric Car News

This spring will mark a rather revolutionary development (or maybe not) in green motoring. Mercedes will provide 200 B-Class F-Cell vehicles on lease for customers in USA and Europe. The cars could be ready as soon as early in March.

It will be the first serially produced fuel cell car. The F-Cell has a 100 kW electric motor that is powered by a fuel cell system using compressed hydrogen. There is also a back-up Li-Ion battery that will provide additional juice and store braking energy. Theoretically it really is a zero emission vehicle because the only by-product of fuel cells is water… no problem with that.

The problem comes with getting and compressing hydrogen. You will use the good old fossil fuel to produce and compress hydrogen.

The cheapest way to produce H is steam reforming from natural gas. This process needs high temperature (burning fossil fuel) and the by-product is either CO or CO2. Another way is to derive hydrogen from water. Again, you’ll need loads of energy to split the water.

The last stage - compressing H so that it can be stored in liquid state just like petrol. Again - takes energy to do it.

So, what initially seemed a great idea, might not be it when you consider all the CO2 that will be released in making the hydrogen for this zero-emission vehicle. Alas, sorry for spoiling your pie.

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