Will hydrogen cars flunk over or completely rejuvenate our economy?

Question

I am hearing about new these hydrogen cars. Since hydrogen fuel is renewable we wouldn't have to rely on foreign oil companies. Also, the only waste product is water which means no more spending massive amouts of money on pollution clean up (for cars anyways) and less road repair . Would this help fix our economic problems by switching to hydrogen cars? If so how much?

Answer 1

It might As it will kill a lot of people. Hydrogen is the most explosive gas there is.

Answer 2

Whoa whoa hang on there, back up for a second.  Hydrogen is not a renewable fuel source.

Renewable energy sources are things like solar and wind which are never going to run out (until the Sun burns out) no matter how much we utilize their energy.  Hydrogen has to come from somewhere, and while it can be abundant (depending on where you get it from), it's not renewable.

Currently the main place we get hydrogen from is natural gas - certainly a non-renewable source.  Theoretically you can get hydrogen from water via electrolysis, and if you used renewable energy to break the atomic bonds and separate the hydrogen, it would almost be a renewable process, since there's so much water on the planet.  However, electrolysis is currently an extremely inefficient process, and you have to put in a lot more energy than you can get out by burning the hydrogen as fuel, so there's no point.

So the first problem with hydrogen cars is that we don't have a good source of hydrogen fuel.  The second problem is that even if we did have a good fuel source, we don't have any transportation or storage infrastructure set up.  There are no hydrogen refueling stations, and to build such infrastructure would cost billions of dollars.

On top of all that, there's already an alternative fuel with the infrastructure in-place and the technology advancing rapidly - electric cars.  

Because of all those reasons, it will at least be a few decades before hydrogen cars are a viable technology.

Answer 3

No, hydrogen isn't a fuel source. It's more of a battery.

We may switch to hydrogen cars, as the hydrogen battery may be cleaner/more efficient than a regular acid, or lithium battery. But hydrogen by itself (so far) cannot be used as a power source.

Inevitably all cars will be electric though (hydrogen fuel cells are electric really). And that will certainly rejuvenate the economy at least to some degree.

Answer 4

There will probably never be a single fuel that will 'rejuvenate' our economy.  I see a combination of electric vehicles, bio-diesel / ethanol vehicles, and possibly hydrogen (fuel cell and combustion) vehicles as the solution to the oil issues.  On top of that would probably be mass transit and better designed communities (that allow people to walk / bike to work) to reduce the need for fuel more.

Hydrogen - as we use it now - is not really a renewable resource.  Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is basically on a par with CNG / LNG.  It's a good fuel, but it's not the answer as a general fuel.

On the other hand, because of electrolysis and the abundance of water, hydrogen may be an efficient form of storing / shipping energy from other renewable resources.  Although you can't really build a solar powered car, you may be able to use solar electricity to generate hydrogen, then run a car on that hydrogen gas.  The biggest problems there are that electrolysis is inefficient and you still need to compress the hydrogen for shipping which takes even more energy.  Right now, it's more efficient just to use the electricity to charge battery powered cars.

In the future, hydrogen fuel cell powered cars may be common, but a fuel cell isn't much more then a special kind of battery.

Answer 5

I think that you'll never see the day when autos/vehicles are propelled with hydrogen fuel!  You might see all electric cars though.

Answer 6

Keep researching this.  It's an idea worth trying, but I seriously doubt that switching cars from gasoline to hydrogen will somehow result in less road repair.  Along with ethanol and biodiesel, hydrogen might be something to consider, but it's way too early to tell how well it will replace gasoline.