The use of hydrogen cars

Question

How far away are we from using this as a replacement for our fossil fuel ran cars? I've read in an article that it would take a decade for cars to be down in an affordable price and hydrogen to be a dollar per gallon, but the actual process of actually switching both systems. Also, how does it work differently from fossil fuel ran cars? Last of all why isn't this option as accepted as ethanol or electric cars? The pros and cons of using hydrogen? Ethanol will just stress our food supply and electric cars are just plain unreliable.

Answer 1

No matter which one you pick, they will all have to have charging stations to replace fossil fuel, if any of them are going to be able to travel very far.

The biggest difference between hydrogen or electric, and fossil fuel or ethanol is that you can charge the hydrogen and electric cars at home at a lower price that fossil fuel.

While both hydrogen and electric need an investment for inexpensive home fueling, The current hydrogen home converter requires a natural gas hook up, which is simply converting fossil fuel (natural gas) into hydrogen.

while all that electric vehicles need are either solar panels or wind generation, and can be obtained any where.

However the large amount of fossil fuel is used for commuting of less than 100 miles a day, and if we can convert to electric for commuting we can effectively reduce our dependence on fossil fuel.

And by advanced improvements in battery technology, and allowing Ev cars to operate at higher speeds, this can be done quite easily.

EDIT: I would like to add a note, that in the UK, they have solar charging stations in some areas that are free.

Answer 2

We may never really see the use of hydrogen as a replacement.  There are other technologies that do actually look more promising at this time; as others have said here, the hydrogen energy gained through electrolysis of water is less than the energy needed to produce it... a net loss.  There are those who claim to actually split the water molecule at the point of injection using a spark/injector setup that supposedly causes the molecule to crack as it enters the combustion chamber.  This is something that has yet to be confirmed but a few people have said they have done it.

As far as ethanol goes there are many crops that produce more energy per acre than corn and crops that are more readily converted to fuel.  However, these crops aren't subsidized by the government so they are less likely to be produced.  There are lots of plants which produce high yields of vegetable oil which can be quite easily converted for use in diesel engines; it is up to private entities to explore these alternatives as our government and economy are so fueled by oil right now.

Answer 3

Jeff about alcohol you should look at this site <alcoholis a gas.com> after you listen to the same interview out of the Archives of "Coast to Coast" talk radio, the old Art Bell show before you make a judgement about effects on our food supply.

Answer 4

The main flaw with Hydrogen cars is that there is currently no Hydrogen economy to power them.  There are only a few stations which provide Hydrogen fuel, and those are all located in a small area in Southern California and were set up mostly to serve a very small number of very wealthy clients.  Electrical cars aren't really all that unreliable, and there is already a system in place (the existing US power grid) which could provide them with enough electricity to go for a week doing a normal daily commute without needing to be recharged.  Ethanol, while undesirable, might be a necessity in the near future if we aren't able to find another solution to our fossil fuel addiction before the oil starts to run out.

Answer 5

Well in the 1970’s they told me 20 years in the 1980’s they told me 20 years in the 1990’s they told me 20 years and surprise in 2000 they told me 20 years, so say 20 years.

Unless they are talking about fuel cells just about any car today can be modified to run on hydrogen, and it doesn’t cost that much.

Right now hydrogen is going for 2.00–$3.00 per gallon of gasoline equivalent, but you’ll have to spend millions if not billions of dollars building re-fueling station, and that’s not going to happen until there is a demand for hydrogen, and there won’t be a demand for hydrogen unless there are hydrogen powered cars, and there won’t be hydrogen powered cars until there are refueling stations. Also even if a small percentage of cars were switch over to hydrogen the price of hydrogen will go way up.

Ethanol is a basically a creation of the government and the corn lobby, it will drive up the price of food and there is no way for ethanol to even replace a small percentage of our fuel.

I don’t know where go got the idea that electric cars are unreliable, most are far more reliable then gas powered car, they suffer from a range problem, but they are reliable.

Con for hydrogen expensive to produce, energy wise, you lose 34% of the energy you put in just breaking water apart. There are other ways to make hydrogen but they are not clean or efficient. Storage is a problem. I could go on and on.

Hydrogen is a pipe dream until someone come up with a cheap, efficient and clean way to produce it.

Answer 6

Starting from the last and going to the front, it is true that if we use corn to make Ethanol it will be a disaster because we can get 350 gallons a year from an acre of corn, but if we use algae farms we can get 2500 gallons of fuel plus it produces oxygen and consumes CO2 in the process. I don't know were you heard that Electric cars are unreliable as they are so simple that there is one moving part in an electric motor vs hundreds of parts in an internal combustion engine (ICE). Maybe you think it is the batteries that are unreliable but you have been using a low tech battery in your car for a hundred years with out much trouble and battery tech is sky rocketing so that is not a problem either.

Now, on to your initial question. Hydrogen can be used in two ways to power a car. One is to use it in a fuel cell to produce electricity for the power in the electric motor. The other is to use Hydrogen as a fuel for the ICE. Either will work. Neither will work well. Industrial Hydrogen is made from natural gas, but the byproduct is CO2, the greenhouse gas we are trying to avoid with alternate fuels. Yes, it could be made by breaking the atomic bonds in water but it takes more electric power to break the bonds that you get from the Hydrogen. Why not use the electric power to move your car?

By the way, there is a burgeoning industry making EV chargers. sort of the silver lining in this deal.

Answer 7

We do not really have an efficient hydrogen car. Most hydrogen powered vehicles are larger vehicles like trucks and buses. But here is the freaky thing, they are all running on fossil fuel, natural gas. While we can make hydrogen from water, it takes a lot of electricity to make it so that hydrogen from water costs more than hydrogen from natural gas.

In effect, a hydrogen vehicle operating on hydrogen from water is like driving electric cars, except that hydrogen is so difficult to store and it takes a lot of space.

We can solve the space problem, by converting hydrogen to ammonia, compressing it, then converting it back to hydrogen to power a fuel cell. But the ammonia is heavier.

Electric cars can be made reliable, but like cars running on hydrogen, they require large amounts of electrical power, which requires us to build nuclear power plants, or some other power plants. We do not appear to have a lot of surplus generating capacity.

Answer 8

There is no practical method of obtaining hydrogen in quantities sufficient to use it as a motor fuel, and the stuff is not much fun to transport and store.  You've been told that solar cells can break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, but that takes a very large solar installation for even the smallest car, and the maintenance of a water electrolysis plant is not altogether a pleasant chore.  Right now we get hydrogen--the small amounts we use for industrial purposes--by heating natural gas until the carbon falls out, but this is expensive and wasteful of fuel.  

The reason hydrogen has been stressed lately is because of a short-sighted government mandate to develop a zero-pollution car that needs no imported oil.  Hydrogen will indeed do this, but nobody thought the hydrogen supply through very carefully.  No large scale electrolysis plants have been construced, planned or proposed; there are significant difficulties with such a project.