I have basic idea of working of hydrogen fuel cell but why just hydrogen? Isn’t there any better or maybe cheaper alternative?
(I know it’s bit complex for but I would appreciate your answers)
In: 346
Hydrogen can be produced from water and sunlight, then returns to water when used as fuel.
There are complications. Hydrogen loves to escape or explode. Expensive metals such as platinum are still used in the best conversion processes. A lot of experts don’t believe hydrogen will win over batteries.
There are alternatives. Ammonia is a big one. Ammonia can be made from water, air, and sunlight, then returns to air and water when used as fuel. And it’s much better behaved than hydrogen. Some experts have regarded ammonia the fuel of the future.
You asked for an alternative to Hydrogen. Carbon fit’s that bill, and we’ve using it in one form or another for millenia. It’s cheaper and easier to produce than hydrogen, but as you know has a lot of downsides.
Burning carbon produces CO^(2), Hydrogen produces H^(2)O (Water)
There are some other things we can burn, for example Sodium which produces very caustic waste product, much worse than CO^(2.)
The goal is to find something where the waste product is not worse than what we are already doing.
Hydrogen can be fused into helium to make massive amounts of energy, the mass of 2 hydrogen atoms is less than one helium atom so the extra mass is literally turned into energy
Literally how the sun makes its light. It’s a bonkers amount of energy Since it takes a lot of energy to make a small amount of mass
We have ludicrous amounts of hydrogen in our oceans, literally 2/3 of the water is hydrogen.
So if we can unlock fusion as something more than a science experiment, we can basically extract near limitless energy just from the water in the ocean.
Hydrogen is the single most abundant element in the universe, it produces zero pollutants when burned or used in a fuel cell (only water) and is potentially cheap and safe enough to use on a large scale. It’s also usable in it’s native form, there isn’t any refining required, nor are there any chemical reactions necessary to convert it to a useable state (unless you’re separating it from water, which can be done using electricity only, no complex chemical processes needed). The only concession is that it has to be isolated and compressed, which is energy intensive.
I can’t say with authority that it’s the only option, but it’s certainly the best. Nothing else we have is that favourable naturally. We’d have to spend far less effort producing hydrogen to use than we do gasoline, we just don’t have the infrastructure in place at the needed scale yet.
Because you have the sun for energy and entire oceans of water for electrolysis. The rest is engineering hydrogen storage, making them cost effective, combating inertia, and resisting lobbying by Big Oil and Big Gas.
There are countless myriads of ways to produce hydrogen, and it is easy to project that we will keep finding more.
The ash of this fuel is pure water.
If it weren’t for the storage question, this would be an ideal fuel.
But that question is no small matter.
1. Hydrogen is very abundant.
2. The emissions from “burning” Hydrogen is just H2O which is much cleaner that CO2 and CO. I believe some Hydrogen cars even collect the H2O emissions and store it in a water tank that you can use later as drinking water.
Latest Answers