EPA Study on Diesel Tuners

[JayTheCPA]

Will, absolutely correct that the difficulty with producing hydrogen is the amount of energy that it takes to product hydrogen.

Advantage of hydrogen is that its storage requires simple and commonly available raw materials. Have not looked into whether the power cell requires a bunch of rare materials or not. In any event, the net sum of materials going into a hydrogen system (storage to power generation) does look like it uses a lot more commonly available materials than BEV alternatives.

Toward current paths of generating hydrogen, try looking at it this way. Yes, there are conversion losses in any energy system as less will always come out of the box than goes in. Advantage to generating hydrogen from water is that now we are able to do this with sustainable energy sources. Ok, sure, the best solar cell currently available is maybe 23% efficient, and then there is some loss from using that energy to split hydrogen and oxygen, and then some loss from pumping the hydrogen into storage, and then further losses in converting the hydrogen back to power at the wheels. Shoot, the total power taxation of the hydrogen from solar might actually make the ICE look *super* efficient and a BEV even more so. BUT, the hydrogen from solar / wind and water path is a fairly closed loop where the initial energy source (excluding the 'costs' to make solar cells and wind generators) is the sun and the exhaust products are heat and water. So, with all those conversion losses in the hydrogen system, it still looks like a very appealing deal to me

Seems at this point, the scale is starting to tip in hydrogen's direction (much to the anger of Musk) and it is a matter of how long it takes to scale-up production and improve efficiency in the generation process; not if.

 

[Rockabillyrat]

The difference is efilive and hptuners both have an interface to do tuning with, ez-lynk does not. It should be interesting as it is a foreign owned company that was specifically designed for this scenario. Ez-lynk does no more for tuning than buying an mdi knock off on the internet, they're both just tuning gateways, not actual tuners.

That is a good point I overlooked. EZlynk is simply just a pass though where as HP and EFI live are both actual editing software. None of them write or create tunes though.

My guess is they are going after EZlynk because how user friendly it is. I have used all three of them. And EZlynk is by far the easiest to use. Plug it in, get the tune off the cloud, flash it, and your done.

 

[jrsavoie]

Biodiesel is going to be the way we keep internal combustion engines on the road and in the fields. I don't see an Electric tractor being useful to the farming community . But with biodiesel they can literally grow their out fuel. Gasoline will defiantly be phased out in the in the next 30 years.

I agree we have a huge challenge ahead with lithium ion battery recycling

A couple days ago I asked a friend when he was going to get a battery powered combine.

 

[Big T]

Actually, the easiest source for hydrogen for the fuel cells is water, not gasoline or NatGas. Simple electrolysis produces hydrogen and oxygen gas from water. The Germans have already built and is using a hydrogen fuel cell locomotive for passenger and freight service. Solar cells atop station platforms and snow sheds, combined with wind power, provides more than enough green, free electricity to provide ample amounts of hydrogen from water to power the engines. They have been in daily use for about four years now. Manufactured by the same company that made AMTRAK's new high-speed trains for the East Coast corridor, DC to Boston run.

Currently, it is costly to extract hydrogen from water using electrolysis. As previously noted, it requires lots of electricity to do this and currently that mainly comes from Natural Gas fired powered plants. The greens dream of their wind and solar with no fuel costs to do this, but renewables require large expanses of space and subsidies are a big reason why renewables are cheap. I for one can't support spoiling our untouched areas with solar or wind just to power a hydrogen electrolysis plant. Enviros are fine with it, so long as it's not in their backyard.

Another obstacle is that efficiently splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gases has required rare and expensive metal catalysts such as platinum and iridium. Iridium is one of the rarest and most costly elements on Earth and even the most stable iridium-based catalysts can only withstand electrolysis for a short time. Current electrolysis research is focused on creating electrodes from elements that are more abundant and cheaper and that are more stable. We'll see how this progresses.

 

[JayTheCPA]

FWIW, have seen a common pencil and low voltage battery split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But, that is hardly scalable for use past a school project.

 

[THEFERMANATOR]

That is a good point I overlooked. EZlynk is simply just a pass though where as HP and EFI live are both actual editing software. None of them write or create tunes though.

My guess is they are going after EZlynk because how user friendly it is. I have used all three of them. And EZlynk is by far the easiest to use. Plug it in, get the tune off the cloud, flash it, and your done.

To me this is a classic example of government over reach. They're going to sue and tie up whoever they can until the people doing the actual tuning give up. The problem for them is there is quite the diy community developing. And with china making counterfeit oem tools, flashing the tunes could get a whole lot easier. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out with them sueing a foreign owned company that does not offer actual tuning, only a repository that end users upload to, and then the user uses them. The only thing I could see coming of it is doing away with the repository. And all these idiots in social media need to stop talking about it. They ARE doing this.

 

[JayTheCPA]

Am curious as to how long it will take for Defendants evoke the FaceCrook defense (aka: Section 230) which essentially makes the hosting platform immune from inputs of 3'rd parties.

 

[Rockabillyrat]

Kory willis statement on the epa lawsuit against EZlynk

"I’ll nip’ this in the bud really quick...

I know the bottom feeders of the industry will start jacking up the price of EZLynks stating “it’s going away”. It is not going away so those rumors can be put to rest.

EZLynk will drop some truth bombs soon I am sure and put all the unrest - to rest. It is a flashing device... Anyone can bring a lawsuit and make claims - those claims have to then be brought to court to be proven true. In my uneducated opinion - it is VERY unlikely that there will be an injunction on a product that could actually get an emissions exemption as the product itself has zero influence on emissions. This would be equivalent to taking dropbox down because they found hillary used them to store her emails prior to deleting them... Is dropbox at fault because she stored “forbidden” data in there? No. That simple.

Remember when news organizations went crazy saying trump colluded and then finally the truth came out that he didn’t and everyone was silent? Wait for the crickets on this one as well...

Do not pay a ton of money from some doofus telling lies that has no clue how things work."

 

[ak diesel driver]

The difference now might be that the EPA will have the full support of the government and media etc. Right or wrong won't matter.

 

[Will L.]

Innocent until proven guilty, unless national security or national safety. Then all bets are off.

 

[Big T]

It's NOT a sham, @Will L. . Seen it in operation during a presentation in Denver by the American representative of the German company that built them. They have several in operation the past four years now. It has almost the same power and range as the diesel-electric engine model it replaced, but with no emissions other than water vapor as its exhaust. And NO emissions in producing the hydrogen for the fuel cell, either.

They can only rationalize hydrogen from electrolysis of water by throwing renewables at it, which affords them the argument that the fuel/energy to do it is free. Ah but there is the capital investment and subsidies for renewables, not to mention the utilization of space, to get it all to work. Then those damn disappearing electrodes made out of stuff pricier than your wife's wedding ring. Like I said, if they can rationalize massive energy use to power Bitcoin server farms, then why not electrolysis to power Grandmas grocery hauler?

 

[FellowTraveler]

They can only rationalize hydrogen from electrolysis of water by throwing renewables at it, which affords them the argument that the fuel/energy to do it is free. Ah but there is the capital investment and subsidies for renewables, not to mention the utilization of space, to get it all to work. Then those damn disappearing electrodes made out of stuff pricier than your wife's wedding ring. Like I said, if they can rationalize massive energy use to power Bitcoin server farms, then why not electrolysis to power Grandmas grocery hauler?

WELL SAID!

 

[Husker6.5]

That is absolutely THE most ignorant, ill-informed drivel I have read anywhere in a long time. Of course, considering some of the incredibly racist things I've seen you post in your comments on threads that had nothing to do with the thread's subject, doesn't surprise me in the least. Like the oil industry, the richest on the planet, doesn't receive over $80B in subsidies just from the US Government every year, or expends far more resources for diminishing returns every year in a suicidal attempt to extract every bit of fossil hydrocarbon from the face of this planet.

 

[FellowTraveler]

Consumables are the issue, I have run a few HHO wet cell versions, had one blow up to like an HE grenade, however, there is one company selling dry cell units on the bay and from their site too and from what I have gathered the best return for the buck is on a big rig in constant service.
The AMP input required is massive using PWM and always it's the electrodes crapping out.

TT124 HHO Dry Cells For Tractor Trailers and the Transportation Industry - Fuel Cell LLC

www.fuelcellllc.com

 

[red]

They can only rationalize hydrogen from electrolysis of water by throwing renewables at it, which affords them the argument that the fuel/energy to do it is free. Ah but there is the capital investment and subsidies for renewables, not to mention the utilization of space, to get it all to work. Then those damn disappearing electrodes made out of stuff pricier than your wife's wedding ring. Like I said, if they can rationalize massive energy use to power Bitcoin server farms, then why not electrolysis to power Grandmas grocery hauler?

Highly close minded statements there, recommend doing some real research into it. ALL forms of energy get significant subsidies from the US government, including petroleum.

All forms of energy and fuel production use a limited resource, question is which uses the least amount of limited resources and is overall environmentally the cleanest. Add in the major pushes from government, industry, and people to change fuel sources to something cleaner. Parts of the west coast banning diesel as early as 2024 for example.

Current lithium battery tech is absolutely disgusting environmentally, but it's focused in China and Africa so people don't give a shit. Gasoline is the next cleanest option overall but since it's petroleum they are phasing away from its mass production for fuel. Then there's diesel, little bit cleaner than gasoline overall but we all know the perception people have since it's emissions are visible. Natural gas, again it's petroleum. Biodiesel from algae is environmentally very clean and its BTU's are similar to ULSD fuel, has the benefits of cleaning up waste water naturally as well which is where it gets closer to being a clean option. Hydrogen, the most plentiful element that we know of, uses some rare earth elements in its production but far, far less than electric vehicles.

Overall biodiesel from algae and hydrogen are the 2 cleanest options by far. Between public opinion and government regulations that are picking up steam the push is for what "appears" to be clean, which leaves only hydrogen and battery (battery is only clean in appearance). GM and Tesla are pushing battery, Toyota/Hyundai/Cummins/Schlumberger and many others are pushing hydrogen.

 

[FellowTraveler]

When all is said and done with disagreements "the military uses hydrogen generators" I have no idea what type but they do work...
There is a zoo in my AO known for the only zoo here with a hippo has a building for shows completely powered by a hydrogen generator which is full display...

 

[Big T]

Highly close minded statements there, recommend doing some real research into it. ALL forms of energy get significant subsidies from the US government, including petroleum.

All forms of energy and fuel production use a limited resource, question is which uses the least amount of limited resources and is overall environmentally the cleanest. Add in the major pushes from government, industry, and people to change fuel sources to something cleaner. Parts of the west coast banning diesel as early as 2024 for example.

Current lithium battery tech is absolutely disgusting environmentally, but it's focused in China and Africa so people don't give a shit. Gasoline is the next cleanest option overall but since it's petroleum they are phasing away from its mass production for fuel. Then there's diesel, little bit cleaner than gasoline overall but we all know the perception people have since it's emissions are visible. Natural gas, again it's petroleum. Biodiesel from algae is environmentally very clean and its BTU's are similar to ULSD fuel, has the benefits of cleaning up waste water naturally as well which is where it gets closer to being a clean option. Hydrogen, the most plentiful element that we know of, uses some rare earth elements in its production but far, far less than electric vehicles.

Overall biodiesel from algae and hydrogen are the 2 cleanest options by far. Between public opinion and government regulations that are picking up steam the push is for what "appears" to be clean, which leaves only hydrogen and battery (battery is only clean in appearance). GM and Tesla are pushing battery, Toyota/Hyundai/Cummins/Schlumberger and many others are pushing hydrogen.

I've done loads of research. My brother finances wind projects at GE where he close $2.0 billion worth of financings in 2020 alone. They are all tax driven passive equity deals. I review wind project financings in my current position. Wind gets production tax credits. Solar gets investment tax credit. By comparison, oil gets a depletion allowance. A depletion allowance is a tax deduction allowed in order to compensate for the depletion or "using up" of natural resource deposits such as oil, natural gas, iron, timber etc. Depletion allowance is analogous to depreciation expense. Wind and solar both get depreciation expense in addition to production tax credits. They get way more in tax benefits that oil and gas do. No one in the oil industry is getting passive equity flip deals based on tax subsidies.

These renewable energy tax subsidies are resulting in unstable electricity grids. The Texas Deep Freeze disaster was predictable and renewables contributed to it. In Texas Wind energy has been forcing fossil fuel power plants into retirement, placing increased reliance on unreliable renewables. ERCOT's business model of power only (did not pay for capacity) market also contributed to the problem. Throw a deep freeze on it and you could say they had it coming.

Wind, solar power sectors no longer need subsidies | Wind Energy News (wind-watch.org)

It’s Time to End Subsidies for Renewable Energy - America's Power

They've been working on biodiesel from algae for years. While the fuel itself works, it's prohibitively expensive to produce and consumes much space. Also, production is impacted by seasons. Have a friend who bought a biodiesel stock after its IPO, then he came to asking for advice on it. Did some research and it was your typical speculative start-up (BTW he loves speculative start up stocks). They could never produce the fuel at a low enough cost to make it viable. I knew their biodiesel business model had problems when they kept announcing other products such as algae flour for cookies, algae whatever for ice cream. Producing biodiesel from algae at scale costs from $240 to $330 per barrel and there really isn't benefit of a cost curve, which explains why we've never seen it come to market.

Same thing with hydrogen from electrolysis. The energy cost to do it is large, which is why they hope to do with it with "free" solar energy. But as you said yourself, nothing is free. If it were a cost effective way to produce hydrogen, they would have done it by now.

 

[jrsavoie]

Never trust what is right or sensible to have anything to do with the way bureaucracies enforce the laws they unconstitutionally make up and enforce.

They have unlimited resources. Unlike many of those they attack. Many of the victims simply can not afford to defend themselves.

Its the same with the way so-called justice is often doled out. I know a lady the lost her gun rights because she did not have an unconstitutional Illinois Concealed Carry Permit. There is no doubt in my mind, that if she had been able to afford a decent defense, she would have got off Scott free.

One of my favorite shops was closed because a gun they sold was used was used in a murder. They did absolutely nothing wrong or illegal, but could not afford the lawsuit. It put them out of business.

The EPA has deep enough pockets to ruin businesses

 

[red]

I've done loads of research. My brother finances wind projects at GE where he close $2.0 billion worth of financings in 2020 alone. They are all tax driven passive equity deals. I review wind project financings in my current position. Wind gets production tax credits. Solar gets investment tax credit. By comparison, oil gets a depletion allowance. A depletion allowance is a tax deduction allowed in order to compensate for the depletion or "using up" of natural resource deposits such as oil, natural gas, iron, timber etc. Depletion allowance is analogous to depreciation expense. Wind and solar both get depreciation expense in addition to production tax credits. They get way more in tax benefits that oil and gas do. No one in the oil industry is getting passive equity flip deals based on tax subsidies.

These renewable energy tax subsidies are resulting in unstable electricity grids. The Texas Deep Freeze disaster was predictable and renewables contributed to it. In Texas Wind energy has been forcing fossil fuel power plants into retirement, placing increased reliance on unreliable renewables. ERCOT's business model of power only (did not pay for capacity) market also contributed to the problem. Throw a deep freeze on it and you could say they had it coming.

Wind, solar power sectors no longer need subsidies | Wind Energy News (wind-watch.org)

It’s Time to End Subsidies for Renewable Energy - America's Power

They've been working on biodiesel from algae for years. While the fuel itself works, it's prohibitively expensive to produce and consumes much space. Also, production is impacted by seasons. Have a friend who bought a biodiesel stock after its IPO, then he came to asking for advice on it. Did some research and it was your typical speculative start-up (BTW he loves speculative start up stocks). They could never produce the fuel at a low enough cost to make it viable. I knew their biodiesel business model had problems when they kept announcing other products such as algae flour for cookies, algae whatever for ice cream. Producing biodiesel from algae at scale costs from $240 to $330 per barrel and there really isn't benefit of a cost curve, which explains why we've never seen it come to market.

Same thing with hydrogen from electrolysis. The energy cost to do it is large, which is why they hope to do with it with "free" solar energy. But as you said yourself, nothing is free. If it were a cost effective way to produce hydrogen, they would have done it by now.

Yep grid has problems with the renewable energy options along with the constantly tightening of emission requirements on on coal/gas plants. As mentioned by Toyota and others the grid cannot expand to meet demand from electric vehicles. The failure in Texas during the storm is mostly from Ercot not doing the weather modifications they were supposed to do and shit management. Per their own numbers the online gas plants had the ability to keep the grid up if the lines hadn't frozen, wind was even putting out higher than their expected 6% at that time (was over 20% during the storm according to them despite those that were frozen).

To be economical Biodiesel from algae must be grown from wastewater sources, not farmed like Biodiesel still is. Here we harvest it from corn, one of the lowest yield plant options and highest cost but since the government subsidizes corn thats what they do. Using wastewater would bring the cost below $1 per gallon just at a slower yield rate than the current farming practice.

Tax money for each energy source is still tax money used to subsidize it, regardless of what term they use to describe it. Like saying our military doesn't have napalm since Vietnam because it was outlawed for war. We have incindigel, same thing just a different term. End Subsidies for all of them.


Refusing to make improvements just because something isn't perfect doesnt work. Just because petroleum is the cheapest option with a high enough yield rate right now doesn't mean its the only choice to stick with. Has its downsides with supply, emissions, public concerns along with government regulations that are pushing the market to change. Change is here regardless if its the cheapest or cleanest option and refusing to adapt shows that you DO need to do more research and think outside the box.

 

[red]

Never trust what is right or sensible to have anything to do with the way bureaucracies enforce the laws they unconstitutionally make up and enforce.

They have unlimited resources. Unlike many of those they attack. Many of the victims simply can not afford to defend themselves.

Its the same with the way so-called justice is often doled out. I know a lady the lost her gun rights because she did not have an unconstitutional Illinois Concealed Carry Permit. There is no doubt in my mind, that if she had been able to afford a decent defense, she would have got off Scott free.

One of my favorite shops was closed because a gun they sold was used was used in a murder. They did absolutely nothing wrong or illegal, but could not afford the lawsuit. It put them out of business.

The EPA has deep enough pockets to ruin businesses

Yep, government has more than enough power to do the wrong things to get what they want. Right now they are pushing for things that appear clean, regardless whether it is or not.

Can either bitch and moan about the problems and get ****ed as things fail because of government regulations and public opinion, or adapt and find ways to fix the issue.