Why can't we use hydrogen in automobiles?

Question

Why can't we use hydrogen in automobiles?

Answer 1

They do have hydrogen cars but they are prototypes and are expensive at the moment.  There is one car that uses only hydorgen gas and doesn't put out any exhaust but has a storage for water because of the hydrogen that combined with oxegen in a prosess in the engine.

There is word that the government won't allow them yet because the oil industries would loose money and so would the gonvernment.  But that's only from a minority of people that have said that.

Hope this helped!

Answer 2

we can. the problem is storing it and transporting it

Answer 3

because the big wigs wouldn't get their cashola

Answer 4

Here we do not want hydrogen cars. This is what I hate about people in environmentalism and the new pity degrees of environmental science. A hydrogen car is worse for the environment that a regular car. 2 main reasons

1. Take a lot of electricity to make Hydrogen where does it come from , usually coal or nuclear energy.

2. What greenhouse gas is like 40-200x worse than CO2. why that is H2O which is the byproduct of hydrogen cars.

So you are dooming the planet. If you want to save the earth eat less red meat (cow f**t and burp methane) and don't eat fast food (the hamburger is from cattle farms that destroy the rain forests)

Answer 5

We could. easy. but the oil companies would have a s**t fit and lose billions

Answer 6

its not a gas like fuel...it has to be created by electricity...[coal and atomic]   2 the cost is high...all the people crying abt the price of gas are full of c**p,,,gas/diesel power is best and most efficient at this time... and can you imagine price of building 250,000 new hydrogen stations across the nation.

Answer 7

You can, but it is simply not cost competative with conventional fuels.  Some of the problems that cause the high cost are:

1) Availability - Hydrogen does not occur in nature.  Most of the worlds hydrogen is either combined with oxygen (water) or with carbon (hydrocarbons).  To get hydrogen, you need to break up these molecules.  This takes energy, quite a bit of energy.  

2) Distribution and storage - once you have the hydrogen, you need to get it from where it was produced to where it is going to be used.  In this case to the vehicle.  There is currently no distribution system in place that will provide hydrogen to locations across the country.  The design and construction of a system of this magnitude will cost trillions, and will take decades to complete.  

Once you have it where you want it you will need to store it.  To do this efficiently it must be raised to a very high pressure and/or liquified.  This takes energy, as well as expensive storage facilities to hold it.

Answer 8

Try making your own hydrogen safely. I currently run 2 trucks, my home hot water heater, home stove and home generator on hydrogen. There are basically 3 safe ways to make and use it... chemically, electrically and molecularly, the first 2 being easier so I'll only discuss them here.

Real h2 gens are a bit different from the Hollywood versions like seen Chain Reaction with keanu Reeves, that tend to explode violently every time a film is being made. However when used in an on-demand system there is no storage of hydrogen and oxygen in it's gas form, only liquid (water) and is only transformed into gas "on-demand" in small cylinder size amounts. It's actually safer then gasoline as it doesn't evaporate, creating explosive fumes in the tank like gas.

Chemically you'll need a 6inch x 1ft schedule 40 pvc pipe. With pvc cement glue a cap on the bottom and use a s***w on cap for the top. Drill a small hole (1/4inch or so) in the side close to the top, s******g in a small copper shut off valve. Place a few feet of stranded (food grade is good) flex hose to the valve and into the air intake of your weed eater's engine. Now crunch up a couple aluminum cans (beer cans, soda cans etc) and drop them into the pvc pipe, along with a couple cups of lye (Red Devil drain opener has lye in it, some Clorox and Drano's do to). Then simply add water, s***w on the top and wait a few minutes.

What happens in simplicity is that aluminum and lye don't really get along so they battle, and as always the innocent civilians (water H2O) that the most casualties, by giving up it's hydrogen and oxygen. This then builds up in the void of the pipe and is ready to be vented into your engine, by opening the valve. You may need to start your engine on gas then switch it off after the hydrogen starts burning.

Electrical is a bit easier. Simply take a small solar panel 1.5 amps is what i use ($9 at harborfreight.com, connect the 2 wires to 2 conductors (carbon cores of batteries work well, just be careful removing it from the jacket), but any conductive material will work. Drop the wires into a water tank (I use 55gal drums), rig up a valve as described above and your good to go. That's it.

Tiny bubbles will form and rise off one conductor (that's hydrogen) and even smaller bubbles that just looks like foam will rise off the other (oxygen). I don't remember which likes the positive and which likes the neg hydrogen or the oxygen.

The third method is more complicated and is what i use for my vehicles. It's just a modified Joe's CelI, there's a step by step DIY guide available at http://www.agua-luna.com/hydrogen.html to walk you threw the process. It also covers the other 2 methods described in more detail.

Hope this helped, feel free to contact me personally if you have any questions,

Dan Martin

Retired Boeing Engineer now living 100% Off-the-Grid with my family, using Alternative Energy & loving every minute.

for more info visit www.agua-luna.com

Answer 9

Right now the biggest reasons are the lack of a distribution infrastructure, including pipelines and retail outlets like gasoline has, and secondly, the preferred technology for manufacturing the hydrogen has not been established, electrolysis from water being so electricity intensive.  Direct extraction of hydrogen from natural gas (methane aka CH4) is still in the experimental stages.

Answer 10

We can, but hydrogen has two serious problems:

1.  It doesn't occur naturally, you have to separate it from something else.  That separation is both expensive and lossy.

2.  It is very difficult and expensive to store.

This is probably why the Bush administration likes hydrogen; it is no competition for oil, and it is most easily made from natural gas and coal — which are also products of the administration's supporters.

Answer 11

Because current automobiles aren't designed to carry hydrogen, much less run on it.

One could convert a car to run on hydrogen gas in the combustion engine, but I doubt this would be very efficient.  The alternative uses fuel cells to carefully combine Hydrogen with Oxygen to create water and electricity.  It's an old technology (Apollo used them for power on the way to the moon), but still prohibitively expensive.  (Any of the concept cars you see companies showing off are for demonstration only, as they require teams to technicians to keep them running, and cost millions.)

The other problem is that hydrogen is a weak fuel- it doesn't carry much energy potential.  As a gas it's hard to store except by compressing it or liquefying it, both of which are inconvenient for your average family car, and you’ll be hard pressed to get enough into the tank to go much further than the next county without refueling.

Answer 12

There are many very good experimental programs in place around the world today.

There are even some cars and buses being road tested. It appears H2 may have possibilities. Some of the problems to overcome for direct fueled are the cost of producing H2 in liquid or gas form, then safely using it as fuel. It will burn easily, but not controlled, It is very explosive. The other way to use it is via H2 Fuel Cells in which H2 and O2 are combined chemically to generate electrical power. Here again, the cost and safety concerns have been the main obstacle. The H2 is still very explosive, and the chemical reaction generates a lot of heat.

I am not an expert, but this is my understanding from reading articles and reports on this very interesting subject.

Answer 13

The atom is so small it will leak right through most hoses. It is also very explosive.