What aout Hydrogen burning cars?

One Hand Clapping: "what about hydrogen cars? They would burn hydrogen and oxygen and emit water. How cool would that be, eh? But writer Patrick Bedard says that if by a trick of science autos had been invented using hydrogen-oxygen motors, so that everyone was driving them now,



... President’s FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be “the moral equivalent of war,” to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.



The reason is that the amount of energy required to produce a kilogram of hydrogen is simply enormous, many multiples more than the energy recovered by using the hydrogen as a fuel. Where would all that energy come from?



Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called “steam reforming,” is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he [Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University] says, “than if the natural gas were simply burned” in the generating plant.



Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our [natural] gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002’s usage. And don’t forget the carbon emissions.



Electrolysis to produce the element carries its own toll so that the energy required to produce a kilo of hydrogen for an auto’s use is several multiple of the energy a hydrogen kilo yields in the motor.



Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal [to generate electricity for electrolysis] gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.



Hydrogen as an auto fuel turns out to be terribly inefficient.



Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW’s hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California’s greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW’s official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.



No answer, of course, is the anwer.



Like it or not, we’re stuck with internal-combustion engines for a long time to come."