Nissan has revealed the world’s first solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) vehicle that runs on bio-ethanol electric power. “The e-Bio Fuel-Cell offers eco-friendly transportation and creates opportunities for regional energy production, all the while supporting the existing infrastructure,” said Nissan president and CEO Carlos Ghosn.
“In the future, the e-Bio Fuel-Cell will become even more user-friendly. Ethanol-blended water is easier and safer to handle than most other fuels. Without the need to create new infrastructure, it has great potential to drive market growth,” he added.
The vehicle here is based on a Nissan e-NV200, and comes equipped with a 24 kWh battery and a hydrogen fuel cell. However, instead of filling the tanks with hydrogen, the car uses ethanol, which goes through a reformer in the SOFC system, to produce hydrogen for the fuel cell. The van is claimed to have a cruising range of about 600 km.
Unlike hydrogen, ethanol can be readily distributed from available infrastructure as mentioned by Ghosn. Therefore, you can refill a SOFC vehicle at a regular fuel station that offers ethanol. The downside here is, reforming ethanol into hydrogen will produce a small amount of CO2.
However, the company says the CO2 produced can be offset by the plants (corn, soy and sugar cane) that are used to produce ethanol, allowing for what Nissan calls a “carbon neutral cycle.” Of course, the CO2 output associated with the system doesn’t take into account the amount generated to produce ethanol.
According to Yukimasa Ban, general manager for advanced vehicle engineering at Nissan, the technology should be ready for vehicles around 2020, making hydrogen-powered vehicles more accessible to the masses, although he did not reveal what vehicles would benefit from the technology.
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Prefer this technology than electric car
This is electric car. The different is how u get the power to move car.
I think there are too many systems involved in this drive train.
I am more inclined towards the simpler electric motor and battery combo, treating the battery as a “fuel tank”.
I think technology is moving there slowly, where you are able to charge up the battery quickly and lots of it to enable long mileage.
Whilst the whole world is progressing by leaps and bounds, our Proton, hybrid also not to be seen. EV they drama showcased 2 years ago to get more money from Mustapha, now don’t know where the Iriz EV is.
It’s always about proton, proton and proton.
i want black smoke from euro 2 diesel
This is just a full ethanol vehicle. So why the big words used?
It isn’t. Ethanol vehicle uses combustion engines to power the car, like our current cars but instead of petrol it uses ethanol. This fuel cell tech is to pass Ethanol through some membranes to create electricity and then uses those electricity generated to power the electric motor which powers the car. A breakdown would be;
Full ethanol vehicle
ETHANOL > COMBUSTION ENGINE > MOVEMENT
SOFC vehicle
ETHANOL > FUEL CELL > BATTERY > ELECTRIC MOTOR > MOVEMENT
The problem with this technology is, a lot of thing could go wrong in between, not catastrophic but annoying break-downs. Another note is that the Fuel Cell’s typically have a 300,000 km lifecycle and is temperature sensitive (requires high operating temperature). Battery conditions may be affected by the Fuel Cell’s operating temperature but clever engineering may offset it? Battery lifespan runs on an average of 200,000 km. In other words, this car will have a horrible second hand value because the cost of replacing all those tech.
If I read this correctly it’s not a full ethanol combustion vehicle. It converts ethonal to hydrogen. Uses the hydrogen in it’s fuel cell stack to generate electricity. The electricity in turn runs the car.
Hence the long name for a car …
Delphi, with BMW, created the first SOFC fuel cell vehicle around 2001. It was only a concept car (or demo, like the Nissan probably is). I worked there 02 to 05, designing the wiring harnesses, and you can Google “Delphi SOFC”… Hope it works out for Nissan. I suppose the difference is the fuel, ethanol vs gasoline. http://m.wardsauto.com/news-analysis/bmw-delphi-partner-fuel-cells-new-system-runs-regular-pump-gas