I hear time and time again these referances to development of hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles. Now unless I'm sorely mistaken on the subject, this is FAR from being made a practical alternative. First are the economic issues. Hydrogen when used industrially is mostly extracted from natural gas, and second oil, only a mere 4% is generated via electrolysis of water. The reason for this is simple, it takes more energy to extract hydrogen by electrolysis than can be generated by reacting the hydrogen. Secondly, hydrogen is difficult to transport, and to be a feasible alternative many stations extracting the hydrogen would have to be built to reliably provide a fuel source. The costs of establishing and maintaining these facilities and transport systems i would imagine would be very high, and the initial investment required would be extremely high as well. Now these are a couple of problems i would imagine would be difficult, but the more extreme ones are the technical ones. Hydrogens density is very low, and while some crafty engineering can help this problem, it can't be solved entirely. The pressures required to be made practical are simply too high to be safe, and along with hydrogens reactivity, this poses a serious safety as well as engineering task. To this day, no experiments regarding a system containing a nessecary amount of hydrogen onboard something as small as a car have been deamed safe or structurally sound enough to be used (with the exception of more exotic chemical storage systems using paladium and other rare metals that are far to rare and expensive to be practical (If i'm wrong and this has been achieved, please send me a link as i would be very interested)). Secondly a straight hydrogen combustion engine pails in efficiency and reliability in comparison to a catalytic fuel cell, which again more often than not require the use of more exotic metals (though cheaper alternatives do exist). Now these are only two mahor technical problems I've mentioned, but they've only recently been tackelled in large-scale power stations, and even then they're still working out the bugs, and these are NOT simple problems to solve. But taking all this into account, i don't think that a hydrogen based vehicle economy would save on fossil fuels as much as it would first appear. Ignoring the initial development costs, the maintance and power consumption of generateing and distributing the hydrogen, along with the manufacturing costs of what would most likely be a nessecarily very precisely build vehicle would reduce the efficiency of the whole hydrogen economy much too far to be a practical alternative. America and the west in general has to lose its dependance on oil, but for these reasons i don't think hydrogen is the alternative. Also, does anyone have any studies on the effects of pumping as much water vapour into the air as such vehicles would in a place like LA or New York? On a side note, Just try to figure out what i'm saying, its been a long weekend and my writing skills are suffering from it lol.
