I watched a documentary on hydrogen cars, and am now very interested in the future of cars. Later, however i got into an intense argument with my dad about it; he's a BIG skeptic. He said that because nothing is 100 percent energy efficient plus we can never truly create energy, simply by putting water into a car would never work! I argued that gasoline, by that logic, wouldn't make cars run. He said that gasoline is made by enormous amount of energy and can therefore release that energy by simply lighting it. I understand that water, unlike gasoline, is not an energy carrier and to make energy carrier (hydrogen) from requires energy itself. so can hydrogen fuel cell really work?
yes hydrogen cars work, but the way to get power u have to first off use gasoline to make hydrogen. so like your dad said nothing is 100% efficient. so really u just lost power b/c u went to hydrogen. u would be better off with gasoline really. u dont loose any energy by converting anything. hydrogen isnt clean, its still putting crap in the air.
The Hydrogen Car Company will convert your internal combustion gasoline engine to run on hydrogen or you can buy a new car from them that has an internal combustion engine that is converted to run on hydrogen. This is much less expensive than using a fuel cell which costs several hundred thousand dollars for a fuel cell large enough to operate a full size sedan. A fuel cell for a small economy car is over one hundred thousand dollars. You can buy electrolysis equipment to produce hydrogen from water. The equipement uses approximately 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to rpoduce an amount of hydrogen with the energy equivalency of one gallon of gasoline.
What your father is talking about is the efficiency of converting from one form of energy to another there are always losses, energy that doesn't get changed into the form we want. But a fuel cell changes chemical energy to electricity and then to motion (2 conversions) while a gas engine turns chemical to heat to differential pressure to motion (3 conversions) + there are big losses in the transmission. A fuel cell / electric motor is more efficient than a gas engine. The problem is the weight. For the amount of energy they produce they are really heavy (100X more weight for the same HP). They might be good for a hybrid train (which they are used for now), but not great for a car. And the car would not burn water. The water would be broken down by electrolysis into H2 + O, which could be driven by green power sources; the H2 only would be used in the fuel cell. The point is, it doesn't matter if there is less energy per litre of H2 than per litre of gas, a hydrogen fuel cell doesn't produce green house gasses.
I think I understand this. It's true that you don't stick water in your car, you put in hydrogen. The hydrogen is made by electrocuting the water, which separates it into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen, when it passes through the fuel cell recombines with oxygen, and this process releases energy basically. So the hydrogen is like a battery, the most efficient type of energy storage that we know if as I recall. Almost all of the energy used to make the hydrogen can be recouped from the fuel cell, thus why it's appealing technology. You can also combust it like gasoline, which is what's being done with the hydrogen 7 car by bmw. Basically gasoline or hydrogen have stored energy. You refine oil to make gasoline, which you can use in your car. You also basically refine hydrogen from water. It's also more appealing than gasoline because unlike gasoline we have lots of water, and the byproduct is water when it recombines with oxygen. So you use water to make it, and it emits water after it uses it, so in a way it's more cyclical than gasoline, which you burn and it turns into a gas from which you can no longer recoup energy.
