What would happen to the atmosphere if all the cars in the world became hydrogen powered?

Question

What would happen to the atmosphere if all the cars in the world became hydrogen powered?

Answer 1

Oil corporations would be very rich.  They would provide the source for hydrogen from oil.  There's more hydrogen in oil than water, plus oil is more abundant than water.

Many people would be killed in Challenger type explosions.

Repairs would be expensive.  Look how often the shuttle is grounded because of fuel leaks.

Answer 2

Interesting question, considering water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas there is, and is also the only product of combustion in a hydrogen powered vehicle.

Answer 3

That depends where we got the hydrogen from.

At the moment, the only reasonably efficient way to get hydrogen is to extract it from natural gas, but the process produces as much CO2 as burning gasoline.

If we discovered a method to break the atomic bonds in water and get hydrogen that way, then it could potentially decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  However, at the moment we don't have any way of doing this, and electrolysis requires a ton of energy.

So the answer to your question is if right now all cars were hydrogen powered, it wouldn't really change our atmosphere very much.  A better solution would be to make all cars electric powered.

Answer 4

City air would be cleaner, our health would win a few points, and global warming would be slowed down.

Answer 5

Good thinking.

Nothing much will happen to the atmosphere except for the levels of CO2 (decrease) & O2 (increase) will change  & climate will get more stablized - we had a healthy world before the invention of cars, i.e., automobiles.

Answer 6

not much. as someone else said, humans have little impact on the environment.

Answer 7

There'd be a lot of Hydrogen Bombs around.

Answer 8

Very little.

Humans have little impact on the environment.