Hydrogen vehicle conundrum?

Question

I have NO problem with fuel efficient vehicles,but...

CO2 is naturally occuring,and produced by gas powered vehicles.CO2 emmisions are bad for the environment.

Hydrogen cars produce water,also a naturally occuring substance.Would this in mass ,cause environmental problems? Rise in rivers,humidity,rain,etc.

Answer 1

Hydrogen is actually made from methane and water, not from water alone.  By reacting one molecule of methane with two molecules of water, you get four molecules of hydrogen.  Half of the hydrogen you get comes from the methane.  You also get one molecule of CO2.  So when you burn the hydrogen, half of what you are burning is from a fossil fuel and the net amount of water in the world increases.

Answer 2

Hydrogen does not contain methane, that post is referring to a way to produce hydrogen from hydrocarbons. Making it via electrolysis results in no greenhouse gas since as BFH said, the water was already present in the environment. At present it's not cost-effective to do this but I've read a few articles now on a new process using nano-materials being worked on by QuantumSphere. See the link below, they have a demo of the fuel cell in action, turning a large fan with a drop of ethanol. No demo I could find of the electrolysis technique but supposedly it makes it 75% more efficient which might be enough to make it viable for producing electricity in a fuel cell.

Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas by a wide margin but this wouldn't increase the amount of water in the air, I don't think it would produce any unwanted by-product but we'll have to wait to see. Things like this sometimes never make it to market.

Answer 3

Hydrogen vehicles are a technology we won't see in our lifetimes.  It's a red herring the government, big oil, and the car companies put out there at the end of the 1990's to help kill electric vehicle technology, which was ready to go.

Answer 4

And where do you get the energy to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in the first place?  It takes more energy to do this than you will get out of it.

Hydrogen, or hydrogen fuel cells, are just methods of storing energy generated by some other process.

Answer 5

No. You have to put the water in the car before you can release it out the tailpipe. The difference with the CO2 is that it was previously locked up in the fossil fuels, and by burning them you end up with more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was before.

To generate Hydrogen you use water and electricity to separate the gas, and if you are refering to hydrogen fuel cells, the cell converts the gas back to electricity and water. Full circle.

Answer 6

Yes. Plus H2O is a greenhouse gas. Clouds reflect sun energy from hitting earth surface. We must have new small hydro electric power plants to put the water to great use. This makes the formula balance or tip toward cooling. You can see more of the science on CoolingEarth.org