4 Responses

1. Hydrogen fuel cells is obsolete. Why not consider this hydrogen on demand car instead that uses just water.

2. since there is no H2 on earth, where would you get it? H2 is made from natural gas, do you have lots of natural gas to waste? You see 1 BTU of natural gas make .5 BTU of H2.

3. You should read the article on Sandia National Labs Sunlight to Petrol project. They started out by looking for a more efficient way of producing H2 from H2O and they found one but soon realize that the technique could also make CO from CO2. A mixture of CO and H2 is called syngas because you can synthesize any linear hydrocarbon including gasoline and diesel via a process called Fischer Tropsch synthesis. Therefore it doesn’t make any sense to build a hydrogen economy, you could have all the benefits of such an economy without replacing any vehicles or constructing any distribution networks simply by synthesizing gasoline and diesel.

   Indeed, syngas can also be made from biomass gasification with the charcoal byproduct being sequestered as biochar so you can choose carbon neutral hydrogen fuel or carbon negative synthetic gasoline.

   Besides, the commercial production of hydrogen is from the gasification of natural gas into syngas and then the hydrogen is filtered from the carbon monoxide, the addition of steam reformation also uses the CO to react with H2O to produce even more hydrogen but resulting in CO2.

4. The hydrogen fuel cell is not an energy source. You still need a source of electricity to provide the power. The best future use of the fuel cell is to store the intermittent energy from windmills and solar panels until the electricity is needed.