That's the bottom line: it all comes back to an ultimate origin of the energy. In this case, the only practical way to get industrial amounts of hydrogen is through electrolysis. Something has got to create the energy for the electrolysis. And that process is going to be ultimately polluting, even if the energy is produced using so-called "renewable" methods.
Sadly, you're not going to get away from the second law of thermodynamics.
That’s not true at all, electrolysis isn’t usually used for industrial scale production of hydrogen
“Sadly, you’re not going to get away from the second law of thermodynamics.”
They could probably find a liberal judge to ignore the Law..
I have a hard time believing they can really make hydrogen a safe fuel for consumer use. Once the vehicle goes bouncing down the road for a hundred thousand mile and get a good eight or ten years on it, there is no way the seals are going to hold. It’s hard to prevent hydrogen from leaking under ideal circumstances. H2 is a pretty small molecule.
As of 2016, 96% of global hydrogen production is from fossil fuels via steam reforming (48% from natural gas, 30% from oil, and 18% from coal); water electrolysis accounts for only 4%.
Electrolysis method uses approximately 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen produced.
At $0.08/kWh (approx. $4/kg), producing hydrogen with electrolysis is is 3 to 10 times costlier than with steam reformation of natural gas.
I’m with you: how many Kilocalories does it take to produce the fuel and fill a hydrogen fuel tank for a vehicle, and how many kilocalories of kinetic energy can that vehicle produce?
What “pollutants” were produced in reducing other compounds to release atomic hydrogen.
And by the way, water vapor is *the* most prevalent and active greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So by modern ‘warmist’ standards, these vehicles are terrible polluters.
At least gasoline cars emit plant food (CO2) along with water vapor.
The flaw in the argument is that water can only be converted into hydrogen with fossil fuels. Because hydrogen can be stored, off the grid power sources, such as solar and wind, can be utilized to ‘crack’ water into hydrogen and oxygen for use in fuel cells.
Interesting note: Brown’s gas is the result of hydrolysis, and burns quite well in internal reciprocating engines. Yes, water for gas DOES exist.
A catalyst promoting oxidation of aluminum when mixed with water, while efficiently releasing hydrogen on demand, has been accidentally discovered by an U.S. Army Research Lab. The aluminum would form a waste of oxide or hydroxide, which could be later re-processed.
A fuel cell would combine oxygen taken from air with this hydrogen to produce electricity, forming water as the reaction product. Barring large losses of water to the process, only a minor operating reserve of water might suffice in a mobile application.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319914023301