What ways are there to create hydrogen for cars that dont pollute?

Question

what ways are there to create hydrogen for cars that dont pollute? i heard usually people just burn fossil fuels to create hydrogen for cars but what is the non polluting way?

Answer 1

The non-polluting way is to run DC current from a solar cell or wind generator into an electrolysis cell.

Answer 2

When will you people realize that hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis? Hydrogen is produced, at least on the commercial scale, by steam reforming of hydrocarbons, usually methane.  Hydrogen production by electrolysis simply cannot compete with steam reforming.

Answer 3

OK, bear with me here.

Hydrogen can be used for fuel to burn in engines in our cars today, or in fuel cells to generate electricity for electric cars.

The problem is getting the hydrogen. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. One way to separate the two is hydrolysis: using electricity to separate the two. So now we need electric generators. Any source of energy: wind power, solar, tidal waves, etc. can do the trick.

Surprisingly, there is a slim chance that the best source of energy is hydrogen, itself.

Let me explain: There are two types of nuclear energy. One is fission. Take a very heavy atom and split it into smaller atoms. This gives off neutrons which split up other heavy atoms.  A chain reaction occurs giving off a lot of energy to heat water into steam to turn a turbine and generate electricity.

The other type of nuclear energy is fusion. Take a bunch of light atoms and fuse them together, also generating a lot of energy in the process.

An atom bomb is from fission. A hydrogen bomb is from fusion. Unfortunately, to generate a hydrogen bomb you need to set off an atom bomb first to generate the required energy to ignite the process for fusion. Think of trying to set a big tree on fire with a single match. Then imagine using a hundred thousand matches to set the tree on fire.

Maybe a bad analogy. At any rate, if the present day scientists can accomplish the ability to start up and sustain a fusion nuclear reactor (which they are trying to do, as we speak) then the world will have more energy than it will know what to do with.

one of the things of course would be to generate enough electricity to separate hydrogen from water that we could put in our fuel tanks to power our cars cleanly.

Whew!

Answer 4

http://nanodetonator.com What was impossible a few years ago is possible today . Whats impossible for one does not mean its impossible for another . Think out of the box.

Answer 5

Hydrogen is generally created from water using electricity, So your question could be 'what are non polluting ways of creating electricity' The short answer is, of course, Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.

Answer 6

Hydrogen does not come as a pre-existing source of energy like fossil fuels, but rather as a carrier, much like a battery. It can be made from both renewable and non-renewable energy sources. A potential advantage of hydrogen is that it could be produced and consumed continuously, using solar, water, wind and nuclear power for electrolysis. Currently, however, hydrogen vehicles utilizing hydrogen produced using hydrocarbons, produce more pollution than vehicles consuming gasoline, diesel, or methane in a modern internal combustion engine, and far more than plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.[6][4] This is because, although hydrogen fuel cells generate no CO2, production of the hydrogen creates additional emissions.[7] While methods of hydrogen production that do not use fossil fuel would be more sustainable,[8] currently such production is not economically feasible, and diversion of renewable energy (which represents only 2% of energy generated) to the production of hydrogen for transportation applications is inadvisable.[4]

It appears the Hydrogen car is a very complex mess. A better option is to use recycled cooking oil waste as a fuel for re fitted diesel motors. with new efficient diesel motors such as the ones used in the Audi and Peugeot GTP1 cars we could have fast and efficient motors. At the same time ridding us of waste. This would have no pollution. So why waste our time with the other stuff? The Audi has won every Le mans and Seabering  race. these are 24 hr races and Peugeot has come in second. So if it's fast and durable  you want it's already here. Now with that fuel we can have zero emissions.

Answer 7

Fossil fuels to create hydrogen???????

Hydrogen is produced from water - basically you use electric energy to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you get the energy back when you burn hydrogen. So, it works almost like a rechargeable battery, the difference is that hydrogen engine has much lower efficiency than electric engine but it takes much less time to refuel a car than to recharge a battery. Hydrogen also is very explosive.

Ok, back to your question - production of hydrogen is VERY clean but it requires a lot of electric energy. So the question is how to produce clean electricity. Typical answers are solar, wind and nuclear power plants.

Answer 8

One of the biggest problems cars cause is air pollution.

     An internal combustion engine uses fuel by mixing it with air and then burning it. When this happens, some exhaust gases are always left over. The exhaust gases go out the tailpipe and into the air.

Answer 9

This article explains it:

http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?cate...

If you want further elaboration on any aspect I will try to give you further info.

Note in this instance the hydrogen is projected to be used for power generation but it could equally well be liquefied for use in cars and buses.

Note the process is often called steam reforming and is much, much cheaper than electrolysis of water although hydrogen is a byproduct of the electrolysis of brine to produce caustic soda.

Answer 10

Here's a couple from the book, 'THE CHEMISTRY AND MANUFACTURE OF HYDROGEN' by P.Litherland Teed from 1919.

1. Sodium hydroxide + carbon = sodium carbonate and Hydrogen

2. Iron + steam (hot water) = magnetite (an iron oxide) +

Hydrogen.  

3. Aluminum + water = aluminum oxide + Hydrogen

4. water + electricity = Hydrogen + oxygen

5. biomass pyrolysis of any organic material - wood, straw, leaves, dung

Choose to use renewable energy everytime you can vs our old fossil fuel friends.