If it takes as much crude oil to make hydrogen as it does to just use that oil for our cars?

Question

then what the heck do you think hydrogen fuel would do for the environment?

Answer 1

It takes much more energy to make hydrogen than it will produce. Every transition of mechanical to electrical will loose u energy.

Answer 2

It makes them feel better.    

Stop trying to confuse them with facts, it's not about facts, never has been.

Answer 3

You're making a common mistake--assuming technical problems will remain unsolved.  The whole point of research and development programs iss to identify and solve all the relevant problems.  Developing an alternative method of making the hydrogen is just part of the overall effort..

Answer 4

What you have wrong is that oil doesn't have to be the source for Hydrogen.

Advanced nuclear reactors could produce it more efficiently from water than oil refineries can. Electrolysis at 2000 degrees is very efficient.  

Ethanol is almost as good a source for hydrogen as crude oil and bio-butanol is probably better.

Then there is wind power. Mass collection of wind in the US could almost supply the world's requirements for energy including hydrogen production.  

Then there is geothermal wells, which has even more potential than any other "green" source of energy, but is only getting started in development.

There are a number of other directions that hydrogen could come from as well. So please don't give into this idea that simply "because we don't have the infrastructure today, that it is impossible to achieve". Only conservatives who don't understand why we would want to advance anything and anti-environmentalist stick with that claim. Are you one of those fools?

Answer 5

Unless hydrogen is made from a renewable source, such as electricity produced by windpower, hydrogen does not make sense.

In adition to  being made from fossil fuels, hydrogen can also be made electrolytically by the use of electricity to extract the hydrogen from water and convert the hydrogen to a usable form for operating an engine.



It takes approximately 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce an amount of hydrogen with the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.

Answer 6

It just depends on how you get the hydrogen fuel.

For example, if you get the hydrogen by combining water with a metal alloy, you're not using any fossil fuels to get it.  This appears to be the most likely method of acquiring hydrogen, but there are issues with it such as the amount of heat released through the process.

Bottom line - there are some ways to get hydrogen which are fossil-fuel intensive and other ways which aren't.   We just have to develop the latter.

Answer 7

Irrelevant question, we won't be making H2 from oil.

Answer 8

Actually hydrogen can be made from any source of electricity including solar and wind..... there are other problems with hydrogen as a fuel other than how it is produced.

Answer 9

Hydrogen cars have to eventually be part of a system that includes power from other sources: nuclear, solar, wind.  Hydrogen is basically a way of accumulating portable energy from those sources for use in cars.

But you don't do that one piece at a time, you work on it all at once.

My friend Dana has made a rare error.  It also takes power to make the metals he's talking about.

Answer 10

Yes, it takes huge amount of energy to produce hydrogen. The "idea" is to have solar powered plants to do it, but to do it with solar power on a large scale, you need solar panels the size of Texas and the initial cost to built such power plants is prohibitive.

Maybe it's a good idea, but simply not practical at this time.

Answer 11

Good point. I am not sure it does, but it wouldn't make any sense if it does. Is it the same as Ethenol which some say takes almost as much power to make as you get out?