How to produce hydrogen for automotive use?

Question

How to produce hydrogen for automotive use?

Answer 1

The most economic process for the production of hydrogen, and the only one in commercial scale use is by steam reforming of hydrocarbons, usually methane.

Answer 2

Clean Hydrogen Producers Ltd. (CHP) has the answer.

They have a product a solar water cracker that uses concentrated solar energy to produce hydrogen.  It's cheap for large scale.  They can generate electricity as well - I think they are using a stirling engine genset approach for electricity only.   Sounds like some ceramic material to filter or absorb the oxygen from the hydrogen for hydrogen production.

You can do this yourself with a reflecting dish and some scrap iron and a modified pressure cooker as I have.

There are many way to make hydrogen see the links below.

Answer 3

Kind of a thorny issue...

The common way of creating hydrogen gas right now is to obtain it from methane.  But this doesn't address the fact that we want to move to hydrogen as a energy carrier specifically in order to move away from fossil fuels.  

Electrolysis is a possible method.  The problem is that electrolysis requires a lot of energy.  Since the majority of electricity in the US come from fossil fuel sources like coal or natural gas, some argue that using electrolysis to obtain hydrogen uses more fossil fuels (and subsequently puts more CO2 into the air) than simply using a gasoline motor.  Widespread use of electrolysis to create hydrogen fuel would only be worthwhile if such an infrastructure was built strictly from renewable sources of energy (i.e. use wind or solar energy to get the electricity for the electrolysis process).  

Another option that might be better would be to use heat & pressure to seperate hydrogen from water.  I don't remember the name of the process, but it turns out that you can use solar energy to heat a greenhouse-like chamber of water.  Heat the water enough and keep it under pressure, and you get H2 gas at about 3x the efficiency of current solar cell conversion of sunlight to electricity to hydrogen (by skipping a step and converting the sunlight energy directly to H2 gas, the process is more efficient).

Answer 4

Crack tap water into hydrogen and oxygen at home.  I'm not sure how you would compress the hydrogen.  It might be better to just have the lower half of your car consist of flywheels and spin them up overnight.

Answer 5

The production of hydrogen for use as the ultimate recyclable fuel is a topic I did considerable research on back in the 1980's.

Electrolysis is NOT the answer.

Currently we get our hydrogen from petroleum. That doesn't resolve our oil dependency but may help with pollution problems. (Or may just change to nature of, and location of the pollution.)

Hydrogen is the ultimate recyclable fuel. Water is hydrogen and oxygen. When you burn the hydrogen it combines with oxygen and turns back into water. A fuel cell does this more efficiently at lower temperatures and produces electricity. A great improvement.

The problem is the efficiency of the process known a electrolysis.

FAR MORE energy is required to break down the bond in the water molecule than you can ever get back when you use the hydrogen for fuel.

Yes, that is a loosing battle. The negative energy use creates an impossible situation we have never been able to resolve.  

It is a problem that has been researched for many decades and still no solution has been found.

Electrolysis is NOT the answer. I hope someone finds an answer.

I encourage anyone with the brains and will to pursue this subject to a fruitful conclusion.

Converting sea water to recyclable fuel would solve many of the worlds problems.

Answer 6

The answer is: electrolysis.

But I wonder if we can buy off the shelf equipment for this purpose (automotive) that includes storage means.

Answer 7

the most efficient to date is ethanol simply because of 5 hyrolized pairs easily stripped with an ethanol reconstituter invented by lonny schmitt although this leaves an organic acid to deal with.

Answer 8

The best is probably aluminum. When you mix pure aluminum and water it converts into aluminum oxide and hydrogen. Then the aluminum oxide can be recycled to use over via some sort of electrolysis process.

That way hydrogen is produced on demand. Water and aluminum pellets are easier than hydrogen gas to distribute.

The biggest problem will be aluminum recycling.