Hydrogen no good

[C M Smith <cmsmith@domain.elided>]

Very interesting, however, BTU by weight is of very little interest for 
vehicles. BTU by volume at atmospheric or near to atmospheric pressures is 
the key. Both for storage on the vehicle and combustion within the engine 
you need a compact fuel. Even Natural Gas which is mostly hydrogen by 
volume is a real challenge to store and transport. Alberta is full of huge 
Natural Gas compressor stations which run gas powered turbines to compress 
the gas for transport through pipelines. No way is Natural Gas an economic 
proposition for vehicle fuel though there are a few projects around North 
America trying it out. They face the same problems as you would using pure 
hydrogen: low BTU per unit of volume and the requirement for large engines 
to develop similar power to gasoline engines.

It still takes a whole bunch (by volume) of hydrogen to produce similar 
levels of energy to a few gallons of gasoline. I accept that gasoline is 
very heavy, but it's also compact at normal temperatures and pressures.

As far as the environment is concerned, water vapour is also an aggressive 
greenhouse gas which I believe is as potent as CO2. All those airplanes in 
the high atmosphere are probably contributing as much or more to global 
warming as ground level emissions, putting water vapour and CO2 into the 
upper atmosphere where it doesn't rain out, from their hydrocarbon fuels. 
Hydrogen is not the answer to the problem.

Now there are some possible technologies to permit storage of large volumes 
of hydrogen on board a car sized vehicles without very high pressure tanks, 
but the original post talked about electrolysis production of hydrogen as 
if it were the panacea, which it isn't.


Cheers

Michael Smith
Calgary, Alberta,Canada
91 Alfa 164L

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