Hydrogen Powered Cars

ErrantKbd writes: "CNN's science section features this article about BMW's recent tinkerings with hydrogen-powered cars. It has some interesting information about safety issues, which are understandably a major concern for cars no less than for zeppelins. Hopefully other manufacturers will adopt the same attitude as BMW, so the rest of us can afford these if they should ever emerge on the market." For now these cars have a limited range and one (1) fueling spot, which is fine if you commute to and from the Munich airport. One day, though, it'd be great for the rooftop solar collector to be separating fuel for the next day's commute ...

Comments

Breaking News: Earth Sinks

[PhatKat]

March 17, 2005

It seems that the long touted "clean fuel" of the 21 Century had some unfortunate and unexpected consequences today when the massive amounts of H2O released into the atmosphere finally caused the earth to sink (The process of continents passing below the rising surface of the ocean) due to the exhaust created by urban commuters.

"We were really caught off-guard on this one," says John Shepley, an engineer at the BMW Space Station, one of the three man made structures still in existence. "Everyone knows that the coasts have been crawling closer and closer for years. The granola eater types really started complaining when California went under, but we figured all that liberal spouting was just hyperbole. I guess we were wrong."

The engineers have been working for some time on further innovations that may make the world inhabitable once again. "Yeah. We can make a machine that uses electrolosis to turn water back into its component H2 and O2 molecules, but the only design we could come up with used fossil fuels. We figured, no, we'll stay away from that. The use of fossil fuels can get you into all sorts of trouble."

Re:Hydrogen powered?

[Ig0r]

Hydrogen burns quickly and more importantly goes UP as it burns, away from the veichle.
Gasolene on the other hand burns slowly (in liquid form), flows everywhere, and sticks to everything it touches.

Now which one, do you think, would produce more 'gruesome' accidents?

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Re:Doesn't seem like a very good ide for me.

[Ig0r]

The amount of electricity required to electrolize water isn't that much, and isn't required all at once.
You could have a giant field of solar panels slowly generating electricity and breaking tanks of water into O2 and H2 with little supervision needed.

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Hydrogen is Safe

[SirDrinksAlot]

The Hindenburg dident blow up because itw as full of hydrogen, it blew up because it was coated in the same stuff the Solid rocket boosters on the Space shuttle use for fuel, or at least something verry similar.

Commercial hydrogen fuel does NOT come from water

[localroger]

My company services one of the plants which provide hydrogen fuel for Space Shuttle launches. 100% of the hydrogen used by the STS comes from petroleum. While you could electrolyze water to get hydrogen fuel what is currently practical is to crack petroleum in the same way you crack it to get gasoline. Naturally this does not have a very good yield compared to gasoline production, since it leaves the entire carbon content of the original petroleum as byproduct. (Guess where this carbon generally ends up.)

Hydrogen fuel advocates are assuming, perhaps correctly, that once economies of scale are applied to hydrogen that more long-term and large-scale production methods will become practical and economical. But it hasn't happened yet.