If it’s reliable and the cost of owning and operating it make sense, sure. But the environmentalist crowd will eventually realize that water vapor is by far the most prevalent source of “greenhouse gas.” I don’t much care but they will, and they’re going to be the early adopters while the numbers don’t make economic sense. They may shoot it down before economies of scale can kick in.
I have been waiting for hydrogen powered automobiles for forty years. Hydrogen will be the solution to the range anxiety that haunts battery powered vehicles. We will be able to eliminate carbon from the fuel cycle.
I thought there was a “hot” problem....and lifting the hood alone was dangerous. Read that a long time ago???
This is a breakthrough, usually cars are made out of metal and plastic.
Huh? What about liquified gas? Plentiful, easily managed, and your existing car can be converted to dual fuel use in a few hours for a few hundred bucks.
Simple chemistry tells me that breaking bonds to free hydrogen from the molecules it is always bound up in costs at least as much energy as is retrieved by reforming the bonds with oxygen to make water. Even if the bond energy is identical (i.e. the hydrogen is extracted from water and later used to make water), there is always some energy loss to the system.
Where is the energy coming from to break the R-H bonds? (By chemical notation convention, “R” is any atom that functions in that position in the chemical reaction.)
How in the world can hydrogen fuel cell cars solve our energy problems?
I wanna see methane cars.
You just light a match over the tail pipe and off they go!
This is where the green technologies need to go. This offers a viable and economically sound free-market alternative to the very un-green electric and hybrid cars (the extra lead-acid batteries are terrifically polluting in production and disposal, not to mention the coal produced electricity required to charge the full electric models).
Once some of the engineering issues are resolved, the hydrogen engines could be used in the big power pickups like the above and at a much lower cost. Hydrogen and oxygen are easily separated with a small electric current. I am sure some smart engineers are going to come up with a solar/small windmill/rain spout/stationary bicycle powered separator-compressor that will fuel your vehicle in your home. — It could even be transportable to extreme remote locations where all you need is a dirty puddle of water and some sun or wind to fuel your vehicle. Can you spell “FREEDOM?”
Of course, the libs and big oil will hate this because it has the potential to fundamentally transform our economy and eliminates a big source of taxes. But this is the kind of free-market driven change I can live with.
Hydrogen didn’t end well for the Hindenburg.
I hope this will work out better.
Meanwhile, the millions of people out of work and facing a huge rise in healthcare costs are busy pinching pennies to buy one of these new “affordable” vehicles.
“its only byproduct was water vapor”. This just happens to be the number 1 “Greenhouse Gas”.
So let me get this straight: We’re gonna burn coal to produce electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burn the hydrogen to produce electricity to run cars. And this is going to allow us to be energy efficient? Oh, and at the same time we’re going to shut down as many coal-fired power generation plants as possible and run the whole country on windmills and solar cells. When the grid fails, welcome to the 19th century.
I am very interested in developments concerning a rotary engine technology developed by Dr. Nikolay Shkolnik and son in concert with M.I.T. -”Want one!”