What Are the Benefits of Hydrogen-Powered Vehicles?
The current fight against global pollution has many people thinking about purchasing cleaner-burning cars such as a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Hydrogen-powered cars offer several advantages over modern fossil fuel combusting automobiles in addition to pollution reduction. Although fuel cells are not commercially available now, current research needs only to solve a few problems before hydrogen becomes a more viable source for fueling automobiles.
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Significance
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Hydrogen fueled cars could help the world fight the emission of greenhouse gases and mitigate the phenomenon of global warming. Almost all cars today use an engine that runs strictly on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels contribute carbon dioxide, which collects in the atmosphere and warms the earth far too fast, according to current climate understanding.
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Clean Burning
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Several different prototypes of fuel cells exist, but they all use a chemical reaction between hydrogen and water that results in electrochemical energy. Hydrogen fuel cells are essentially pollution free. Water and heat are the only byproducts of the electrochemical reaction. There is almost no limit to what size vehicle a hydrogen fuel cell can power; hydrogen can even power energy plants.
Driving Experience
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A normal combustion engine has many moving parts that cause vibrations and bumpy rides. The fuel cell can provide a much more pleasing driving experience because a fuel cell creates energy like a battery rather through combustion. A hydrogen-powered car offers a much softer and quieter ride than a gasoline powered engine.
Safety
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The Department of Energy's Hydrogen Program reports that while hydrogen burns at a lower temperature than gasoline and natural gas, the heat radiated from a hydrogen fire is much lower than from hydrocarbons. Lower heat radiation reduces the risk of creating a secondary fire. Hydrogen leaks are also much safer than gasoline leaks; hydrogen is lighter than air and disperses quickly into the atmosphere.
Current Problems
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The current major obstacles to adopting hydrogen fuel cells as a national standard are storage/transportation and purification. Hydrogen is a light gas that provides much less energy than a comparable volume of hydrocarbons. This makes transporting hydrogen cumbersome and costly. Fuel cells use pure hydrogen gas, but hydrogen does not readily occur as a gas in nature. The current process to isolate hydrogen uses natural gas, which emits greenhouse compounds.
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- Photo Credit "Filling up at Propel Biodiesel" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: Spencer T. (Spencer Thomas) under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
