Are hydrogen powered vehicles the greenest way to go?

Question

I read the other day that Hydrogen (fuel cell) vehicles liberate not CO2, but water vapor. Isn't water vapor another greenhouse gas? So hydrogen might not be the solution to global warming?

Answer 1

The traditional fuels cannot be replaced by alternative sources  until there is build out of a distribution system.  All of the Green plans are not objectionable as an academic exercise.  Where are the  service stations for a nationwide launch of hydrogen, fuel cell, etc.?

Answer 2

it isnt greener

I wrote a 29 minute speech on why it is false... we as humans do not cause it

EXTRACT:

--Email [e-mail] for the whole thing--

I.  For a long time people have been looking through glasses that have foggy lenses of deception regarding global warming.  In the next couple of minutes I intend to show you a more accurate eye chart and update your prescription.

A. My point for this response is to try and persuade you to see the light at the end of the dirty tunnel of humanities’ lies.

II.  Global Warming is the most debatable topic that was probably ever around.  You need to know this information.  If you don’t educate yourself properly on this topic you will live the rest of your life in fear of something that doesn’t exist.

A.  Global Warming is a natural cycle.  Everything about it is natural.  Carbon dioxide levels vary throughout time.  Humans can make little or no impact on the environment.

1.  In reality….  There is about one person who doesn’t believe in Global Warming to two people who do.  This means that only 60% of the world believes in global warming.  My goal by the end of this response is to have the 60% be persuaded that they do not believe in the accurate thing.  With the following facts, I am 100% sure that this goal is possible and will be achieved.

2.  Al Gore stated this quote in his movie “…The 10 hottest years ever recorded were within 15 years of today.”  Now this point is valid and true, but we have not been measuring the temperature or anything since the early nineteen hundreds.  Can we go down and see how the polar ice caps were doing in the early 1800’s?  We can not do that because temperature was not recorded.  You may say that they guessed using carbon dioxide levels, but whose to say that they are right?  I heard that scientific measures were not always accurate because they took a hundred year old log and did some carbon 14 testing on it.  Scientists thought that it was thousands of years old.  It was later proved to be younger after more tests were ran.  Who’s to say that our method of discovering weather is right?   We have been measuring temperature for only a short period of time.  Earth right now is in a heating process.  Thousands of years ago we were cooling which is when we had an Ice Age.  Now we are doing the opposite and are starting to warm up before cooling again. Look at this political cartoon.  What is one thing that you notice?  I notice it being freezing then gradually getting warmer. As my next point is about to prove, we have no effect on the environment no matter what we do.

3.  In 1990 a volcano in the Philippines erupted violently.  It was by far one of the biggest explosions of the century.  We all have read about how volcanoes let off carbon dioxide, but did you know this… When the volcano erupted, it put more carbon dioxide in the air than all of humanity has ever produced…. More than humans have made since the creation of time.  All in just a matter of hours. Look at this picture (not included).  See all of this carbon dioxide being put into the air?  While, with all of this there was no temperature increase or decrease at all… just some carbon dioxide level changes, but nothing major.  If volcanoes put off this much carbon dioxide with no effect, then how could we be doing this?  When all this happened, then how could you be persuaded that humans who produce fractions of that amount could impact the environment in fractions of the time?  Humans if we tried could not severely impact the environment.  It is just too big.  Even if we are letting some off, plants and other natural recyclers of Carbon Dioxide are just transforming them to oxygen.

4.  During World War II, we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.  We spilled tons of harmful green house gasses into Mother Nature.  This includes radiation, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.  After all of that happened, again there was no effect to the environment that was found.  Hiroshima has been having radiation problems still, but there is no significant temperature problem.  Nothing humans do can severely change our environment.  We only occupy about 50% of the globe.  The other 50% is the ocean, ice caps, and land that are not suitable for humans.  How could two nuclear bombs not have an impact on the environment, but changing a light bulb in your house to fluorescent can save the environment?  It is just impossible that we could have an impact.  

5.  Another point is that if you look in your text book, I promise you that you will find these words… “When Washington was marching his troops, it was bitterly cold outside” Bitterly cold means freezing.  I know that they didn’t have supplies but Virginia in the summer (which is when they fought) is warm.  As you can see by these charts, it was 106 degrees outside in the summer.  This is without humidity too.  Now when we look at this chart it shows us that the battle was fought in Yorktown.  There isn‘t much of a distance between Yorktown and Richmond, were this was recorded.  How was it bitterly cold a few hundred years ago when now it is normal?  The conclusion is that it is a natural cycle.  The cycle changes every several hundred years.  It was cold then, and now it is slowly warming up.  We have nothing to do with it.  This is perfectly natural for our environment to do.  We would like to believe that humans are the dominate species.  Have we ever thought to wonder if what we believe in is caused by nature?

6.  One of the most important factual information is still on our planet.  Greenland is one of the most misunderstood places around.  People like to believe that the reason that it got it’s name is because the settlers didn’t want people to move there so they called an icy land Greenland so that settlers would move their instead of Iceland were it really was green..  After I saw a show on the discovery channel,  I concluded that it was actually green.  When the first settlers went there,  they dined on grapes and cows.  I don’t think that I am mistaken, but how could a cow live on an icy land with nobody to feed it.  Grapes grow in warm environments which is not ice.  Greenland fits that exact description.  Also as you can see on this picture, there is still some green left in it.  All of it was green once, which proves that it once was green and now it is ice because of the natural cycle, it is starting to freeze.  Now Greenland is melting to start the process all over again.  In a few hundred years, Greenland will begin to freeze.

NOTE TO READER: FOR POINT 67-8 IT MAKES NO SENCE UNLESS POWERPOINT IS VISIBLE… THANKS!

7.  Ok…  Phoenix is known as a hot dry desert place.  You think that it keeps getting hotter and hotter here each summer.  Take a look at this display on the screens.  As you can see, during the day the sun is radiating energy to a large city… lets call it Phoenix.  It does this all day until the sun starts to go down.  As you can see now,  the buildings are built up with radiation while the desert area barely got any radiation build up.  Now it is night and as you can see the buildings are radiating heat forming a heat bubble.  Now in Phoenix at night it is around 95 degrees.  That is because of the buildings radiating.  We are made of concrete and steel so we absorb heat.  Take a look over at the desert.  See how the temperature there is lower?  This is because it is not trapped in the heat bubble of radiation.

8.Many people relate global warming with long citywide droughts.  Like in Phoenix, we are in a drought.  There are many reasons why this is not caused by us. Have you ever watched the news and heard the following phrase “… and people of Chandler are getting pelted by rain, many individuals are putting up sand bags to protect their homes…?”  What this is saying is that small little cities are getting poured on.  Look at the power point and see why,  The big glob in the center is called Phoenix, Glendale, and Peoria.  Ok now imagine that we are in the middle of a storm.  The red indicates heavy rain and the yellow indicates moderate rain.  As you can see from this animation that I made,  the storm is going around Phoenix.  We are a giant blob and the storm is just simply avoiding us.  Smaller cities like Chandler and Mesa are being pelted by this continuous down pour.  So in smaller cities they may say, “We got rained on the most we ever have” and the airport were they measure the amount of rain says there were only a few drops of rain.  This proves that we did not cause the drought by carbon dioxide, but we did it by industrializing.  

9.  Global Warming is also just a political trap.  Who are the only ones who want to try and do something about global warming besides tree huggers?  Politicians do.  When somebody is running for office this makes a better point, I am going to save the world!  Who would you rather vote for… Mr. Free Dental Insurance or Mr. I am Going To Save The Planet From Destruction!  The choice is pretty clear.  Which, that was Al Gore’s main election motto.  They want you to vote for them do they are scamming you.  Al Gore doesn’t believe in global warming himself!  When he was running for elections, he rented private jets which emit 800 pounds of CO2 per passenger instead of commercial for 88 pounds of CO2 per passenger.  He didn’t even own a private jet either; he flew this way for 20 trips.  If he would have flown on a commercial plane he would have saved 14240 pounds from the environment.

III.  Global Warming is all natural.  We do not have an effect on it.  If we tried there is nothing that we could do that would impact our society.

1.  We have nothing to do with what is going on in the world.  There is no reason that just because our planet is warming, we are to blame.  This has happened before and will be continuing to happen for the rest of the history o

Answer 3

They're not the greenest way to go, but not for the reason you think.  Water vapor is a feedback, not a global warming forcing.  For an explanation, see Myth #9 here:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global...

We could emit as much water vapor as we wanted and the planet wouldn't warm at all.  It would rain more though.

However, hydrogen is not the greenest way to go because currently we get 96% of our hydrogen from fossil fuels.  Electric vehicles are the greenest way to go.  See the links below for further details.

Answer 4

actually your correct water vapor is a greenhouse gas. And is much more present in our atmosphere than co2. Co2 makes up .03 percent of our atmosphere. Water vapor however makes up 70%. So when people tell you that co2 is even making a difference you can laugh in their face

Answer 5

No-- hydrogen has its own issues-- like:

According to John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, "If the hydrogen does not come from renewable sources, then it is simply not worth doing, environmentally or economically."

and because of these:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progr...

and because:

"If we don't generate hydrogen in an environmentally responsible way, we'd be going five steps backward, rather than forward," said Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, where he is also an engineering professor.

Answer 6

Bubba has put his finger on it.

There is no ecological problem with the production of water vapor, as Bubba tells us. The single reality in the way of hydrogen powered vehicles is the indisputable fact that the production of hydrogen uses vast amounts of power, emits polution, and is prohibitively expensive.

Precisely the reason that we need a "Manhaten Project" for alternative fuels. Bring together the best and brightest to work on the applied mechanics and theoretical chemistry of hydrogen production, and we can make the gasoline engine an antiquarian oddity.

Answer 7

Your right that water vapor is another greenhouse gas. It is the largest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by far (about 0.03 % CO2 vs  100% RH before the water vapor rains out).  The actual percentage of water vapor in the air changes constantly, but it is very large relative to CO2.

Water vapor however is NOT very effective at absorbing long wave radiation compared to CO2.  It tends to moderate climate instead of making it consistently warmer like CO2 does.  It is an important feedback mechanism and will influence precipitation patterns.

The moderating effect is why the climate in New Orleans is warmer in the winter (rarely below freezing) than deserts at the same latitude.  New Orleans is also cooler than places like Death Valley in the summer, for example, because of water vapor.  New Orleans gets 99 or 100 degrees in the summer (not uncommon) and the water vapor is so great, if any convection is happening at all, the cooling as hot, moist air rises triggers a thunderstorm and cools things down.  The humidity is stifling for people and makes it feel hotter because sweat is not evaporating, but the air temperature is actually cooler than Death Valley.

Death Valley, by contrast gets in the triple digits often and as high as the 110-115 degrees F. Plants grow great in high heat and humidity of New Orleans, but not so great in the high heat and low humidity of Death Valley.  

Reducing CO2 would do more to help reduce global warming and climate change than reducing water vapor, since most of the Earth is covered with water anyway.  And if we make hydrogen out of water, when we burn it, we just re-make the water.  The system is sustainable (at least as I have conceptualized it) with no disruption to the hydrological cycle.

Now producing the hydrogen from water without making more greenhouse gases - that is energy intensive and may be a problem.

Answer 8

You're right hydrogen power is a really bad idea.  Who wants to pay twice as much for a car with half the range and has half as much power and costs 4 times as much to run.  

Gasoline would have to get really expensive before that idea catches on.

Answer 9

Yes, yes it is true.  Everything is a green house gas.  You breath in green house gas.  You pass green house gases from every opening.  Cars make green house gas.  Cows make green house gas.  Buildings, out gas.  Oceans out gas.  Bogs make green house gas.

Trees pass gas, but that is good gas.

When trees die they make gas, but that is bad gas.

We make gas, we generate gas when we burn gas.  

Gas bad, man bad, must stop gas.  Yes, master, what me do now master?

Answer 10

i dont understand why soemone cannot make a solar powerd car.they have solar everything but not one solar powerd car

Answer 11

H2 powered vehicles still have issues, but "greenness" in comparison to fossil fuels is one of the smallest.  

1. H2 is most commonly created by the electrolysis of water.  So the cycle is water + energy = 2H2 + O2.  Combustion of H2 releases the energy, recombines the 2H2 + O2 and produces water.

2. As has been already stated by other responders, the source of the H2 (methane/natural gas, or fossil fuelled electrical plants) affects the relative "greenness" of the H2, i.e. if you use fossil fuels to create H2 there isn't a net benefit.

3. There is not currently a good method of storage or distribution for H2 as a transportation fuel, storage technology is currently under development. (see link for more information)

4. The favored technology for using H2 is to produce electricity in fuel cells.  Fuel cells have 2 technological problems: 1) Platinum is the catalyst, there is not enough platinum on the planet to meet all the transportation needs with fuel cells [iron based catalysts are being studied], and 2) fuel cells are bloody HEAVY.  A fuel cell to provide the same horsepower to a vehicle that a current internal combustion engine produces would be almost 100X the weight.  Fuel cells might have current applications for rail and heavy machinery, but not so much for road or air transport where weight is an issue, unless the technology improves.

5. Batteries have little or no green advantage over fuel cells, it all comes down to the source of the energy.  If fossil fuels create the electricity to charge the batteries it still produces CO2.  The batteries are heavy as well, the quantity of energy you can reasonably carry is small and the recharge times are a lot slower than refilling a tank of Hydrogen gas.  The ENV motorcycle (2nd link) is fuel cell powered and has a top speed of 50 mph and a range of 100 miles on a tank of H2 about the size of a water bottle.

This doesn't exclude batteries from being part of the final process.  Fuel cells create electricity, regenerative braking creates electricity.  To avoid energy conversion efficiency losses it is better to store any unused or recaptured energy in a battery than to try to create H2 out of it.

Answer 12

Hydrogen vehicles do release vapor, but the total amount is minuscule.  The problem with hydrogen vehicles right now is the process to create the hydrogen.  At present that process uses oil.

Once they get that figured out hydrogen vehicles will be a very good idea.

One thing that people always seem to forget about water vapor is that the capacity of the atmosphere to hold water vapor is dependent on temperature (the hotter it is the more water vapor it can hold).  If you get too much water vapor in the atmosphere it rains, sort of a self regulating system (alot like the global temperature...self regulating...even though the greenies don't want to admit that).

Answer 13

It is not as it would be like riding a BOMB!!!