Updates added at end of post.
When it comes to fighting global warming, Honda has rolled out the worst car on the planet: the new Clarity.
This is the first auto that runs on fuel cells ever offered to consumers. As Honda's site explains,Fuel cells produce electricity that can be used as a clean alternative to gasoline. The fuel cell stack in the FCX Clarity converts hydrogen(H2) and oxygen (O2) into electricity. Learn more about How Fuel Cells Work.As Honda's TV ads point out, the only exhaust from the Clarity is water vapor. The Clarity is obviously designed to capture the market of car buyers who think that gasoline engines are bad things for the environment because they emit carbon dioxide. So the Clarity, emitting only simple water vapor, must be magnitudes better at rolling back global warming, yes?
Problem is, when it comes to global warming, water vapor is enemy number one: "Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect."
So buy a Clarity and kill the polar bears!
Okay, a little more serious. The Clarity's fuel cell stack produces electricity that is sent to a battery, and from there powers the car's electric motor. How fuel cells work is explained here. The cells use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. Where does the hydrogen come from? Honda doesn't say, except to note that it is "stored in a fuel tank onboard the vehicle." The oxygen is from the atmosphere.
Which is all fine, but where does the driver get the hydrogen to begin with? Hydrogen gas, H2, is not found free in nature. There are two ways to separate hydrogen from its compounds: hydrolysis and reforming. The former, most commonly and easily done with water, uses electricity and a catalyst to break H2O into H2 and O2. Reforming uses heat instead of electricity.
More than 90 percent of the hydrogen produced in the world is obtained by steam reforming of natural gas. It's not energy efficient since the energy gained from the hydrogen gas is less than the energy required to produce it. H2 produced in this manner is not used for fuel, though, but for industrial and chemical purposes.
There is nothing on the Clarity's web pages to indicate that H2 is produced aboard the vehicle. It can be done using either method. See, for example, the Youtube vid at the end of my post on the coming 500 mpg car to see how reforming works aboard a car using the exhaust for heat. Substitute alternator-supplied electricity for exhaust reforming and you can eletrolyze H2 from water. Both such systems supply gasoline engines, though, while the Clarity uses no petroleum product for fuel. (I remember reading that GM is working on an on-board system to produce H2 from the auto's gasoline itself by reforming. Sorry, didn't record the link. Here it is.)
So the source of the Clarity's hydrogen is perhaps another issue to consider. Nothing on the site indicates that H2 is made aboard the car. If the H2 is produced using electrcity somewhere, then odds are that coal produces that electricity. So the CO2 production has been merely moved off the auto to another emitter. Also, does it take more energy to produce the H2, whatever the source, than the H2 supplies? If so, exactly what is the benefit of the Clarity?
I also note that H2 gas is itself pretty much the perfect fuel for internal-combustion engines. Engineers have known for decades that hydrogen injection into the air intake, just before injecting into the combustion chamber, improves fuel efficiency enormously. By weight, hydrogen has three times the energy of gasoline. The first patent for this scheme was granted in 1934.
The rub has always been how to get the hydrogen gas. H2 is very difficult to store. Hydrogen atoms are so small that making a leakproof container is no simple thing. H2 gas takes up a lot of space, making it imperative either to compress it (adding a safety concern and increasing the leaking challenge) or liquefying it (adding the refrigeration problem of mobile storage). And both compression and liquefaction of H2 add weight and complexity to an auto.
Presumably, the Clarity has an on-board tank of compressed H2. I don't know enough about fuel-cell engineering to know how much H2 it takes to propel the car 300 miles, the driving range car companies aim for no matter the fuel.
On the whole, I would have to say that on-board generation of H2 gas, to be added to the existing fuel-air mixture of a gasoline-powered vehicle, would essentially solve the problem Honda's engineers were trying to solve. The advantage is that the H2 would be electrolyzed aboard the car from either water-plus-catalyst (baking soda works) or heat-reformed from either water or the gasoline itself. Drivers then need not drive around with a compressed-gas tank and can refuel with water or gasoline just as simply as they refuel now.
Update: The car's web site does say on one page that "Hydrogen fuel stations are critical to the deployment of a fuel cell car," clearly meaning that the car does not generate its H2 aboard. This is made more explicit elsewhere on the site, too.
I am not suggesting that the negative balance of energy derived from H2 vs. the energy required to make it can be overcome. I have not yet found a way to repeal the second law of thermodynamics! It's the ratio that counts - witness the debate about whether making corn ethanol is really worth the energy costs to grow and transport the corn in the first place.
I am suggesting that on-board "cracking" of bound hydrogen from water or hydrocarbon fuel would seem to offer a better ratio. Here's why. The heat the Israeli engineer uses (of the Youtube vid referenced in the post) to reform H2 aboard his van comes from the van's exhaust. That means he is using a waste product of combustion to reform the H2. Whether he uses the H2 system or not, the van will still waste that exhaust's heat. So he's essentially using free energy. The exhaust's heat is a sunk cost no matter what. Now it's true that once the reforming system in put into place, a closed loop forms in which H2 is made, burned and heat therefrom is exhausted, then the heat is used to reform H2, and so on. But the effective energy loss is still minimal because the van will exhaust heat whether using H2 or not. It's the same principle of the Toyota Prius' regenerative braking.
BTW, I checked this assessment with a bona fide, practicing chemical engineer and he agreed. General Motors's engineers must agree, since "GM is working with oil companies on a new gasoline formula that would be more suitable for extracting hydrogen."
I am less certain that the same assessment applies to using electricity from the car's alternator to electrolyze H2 from water. It raises the load requirement on the car's electrical generation system, and this requires the motor to burn more fuel. But some of the increased load will be met using the H2 as fuel and some by burning the gasoline. If relatively speaking, less H2 is used to meet the load than gasoline (which is going to be burned anyway), then the same net calculation may still be true. But this seems less obvious than using exhaust to reform H2.
General Motors has a web page on the Prospects, Promises and Challenges of fuel cell technology, including an extended page about hydrogen storage.Fuel cell technology uses pure hydrogen in the liquid or gaseous form. Currently, this liquid hydrogen is derived from gasoline or methanol via a processor. General Motors believes gasoline as a hydrogen source provides the best bridge to a completely hydrogen economy, because world markets already operate in a gasoline infrastructure. However, GM also believes that a hydrogen infrastructure, similar to the gasoline model of today, is the ultimate answer.This begs the question, though: can you drive a fuel-cell car farther on H2 derived from a gallon of gasoline than you could on the gas itself? Perhaps we will with the stll-theoretical special formulations of gasoline. If not, then the economics don't make sense and the idea won't catch on no matter the presumed ecological benefits. (I have to assume that GM's folks know this, wouldn't you?) But modern gas engines combust extremely efficiently - according to Popular Mechanics's automotive writer, "Your vehicle already burns over 99 percent of the fuel you pay for."
Other approaches may gain more traction.
In particular, di-methyl ether is easily refined from coal, greatly reduces "greenhouse gases" (because it has no carbon-carbon bonds) and will run in existing diesel engines with nearly no modification apart from a propane-type storage tank.
An even more interesting option is Tata Motors' (India) compressed air car, on track for North American introduction in 2010 or 2011. This may encounter problems with Monsieur Gay-Lussac (expanding gas cools)in colder climates or seasons, but things are currently looking like a 200 mile range at up to 70 mph from a single 3-minute charge of compressed air.
For hydrogen to work as an internal combustion fuel the engine will need to be modified to burn natural gas. The advantage is that as available hydrogen can be mixed into natural gas at any percentage and still run the same.
Can't the H2 gas be mixed with the ordinary fuel-air mixture of a gasoline engine? That's what the Israeli physicist did whose Youtube vid is trhe one I referenced. I understand that valve covers need to be replaced with stainless steel ones because of the H2O that is exhuasted.
Not a chemist or anything, and I don't know about this car specifically, but no, the hydrogen is not made in the car, this would require a separate source of energy and water to break down. The hydrogen is separated in some other factory, and delivered to the car like gasoline is now. The fuel cell then combines it with oxygen from the atmosphere to produce electricity, which runs the electric motor to drive the car.
This is different from simply burning the hydrogen directly in an engine, although the chemical result of the process would be the same (water vapor). There is no combustion engine in these cars.
Yes, this entire process does not produce as much energy as is put into it. That is the second law of thermodynamics. It is the case no matter what fuel you are using -- burning gasoline is simply using energy which was converted into oil by various processes a long time ago. It is also inefficient, it's simply that we do not have to supply the original source of energy.
The question is how much energy is lost in this process, and where is the initial flow of energy to produce the H2 derived from, and how efficient is /that/ process, etc. I don't know how they compare, but generally fuel burned in a power plant is significantly more efficient than the equivalent fuel burned in a car. I would expect that this compares very favorably to traditional gas-burning engines, when the entire system is taken into account.
Just think of the H2 as a means for energy to be transferred from a power plant to an electric motor in your car. It is an intermediate form.
My main concern would be about the relative flammability/explosivity of a tank of compressed H2 as compared to a tank of gasoline.
Oh, to answer the question about on-board production of H2 -- I don't think this would serve a useful purpose. As stated, electrolysis of water requires an input of energy, whichever method you choose to use. The fuel cell simply recombines the chemicals to get that energy back out. It's only valuable as a method of temporarily storing energy from some other source. If you were to do it in the vehicle, that energy source would obviously have to be in the vehicle as well, in which case... there is no need to muck about with the hydrogen at all.
As to the polar bear crisis, while it's true that water vapor contributes to the greenhouse effect, I'm fairly certain that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is self-regulating via a process known as rain. Not 100% positive though, might need more research on that. :)
Yes, water vapour is much more important as a greenhouse gas than is CO2, and methane is almost as important as CO2.
However, water vapour also has a cooling effect, at least when it condenses. In any case, this is one of the cases where an effect can be amplified by the system itself. Scenario; CO2 rises, increases water vapour and thus the effect on global temperature is massively amplified - or maybe not, given the negative feedback just mentioned.
It's also the case that water vapour recycles much more quickly than CO2, so making changes has a faster effect.
Regarding methane; one of the possible problems that higher general temperatures could cause is runaway breakdown of methane clathrate deposits in various places, usually at the bottom of oceans. It doesn't take much of a temperature rise to make these deposits unstable, thus releasing massive amounts of the worst natural greenhouse gas of all. I say "natural" because CFCs are stronger still; however, we have stopped pumping those into the atmosphere for other reasons.
Incidentally, it has been mentioned that hydrogen is very good at escaping from storage. This is relevant for a very good reason; if hydrogen starts getting used extensively as an energy transport medium, there will be more in the atmosphere because of these losses; and hydrogen is also a very powerful greenhouse gas.
H2 produced in this manner is not used for fuel, though, but for industrial and chemical purposes.
It is for rockets (e.g., Shuttle and Delta IV, and the Centaur upper stage). Just to clarify.
Fletcher - while I agree it is high time to do something about our inadvertent (and inherently unwise) re-engineering of our atmosphere, of all the possible gases we could add to the atmosphere H2 would be the least of my worry. The reason we don't find free H in the atmosphere is because it readily combines with Oxygen.
It all sounds like witchcraft to me. Time to get back to the horse and buggy. I've got stock in buggy whips i've been holding for decades.
Bah, what have the polar bears done for us lately?
On a (slightly) more serious note, Fletcher Christian opens the door for an interesting point:
OK, so it's still causing "climate change", just on a different scale. But let's say we found some way to game the system and produce a net cooling effect. Should we undertake it? I know the fashionable furor these days is over anthropogenic global warming and the perils thereof; if you think we have to "do something" to combat AGW, does this mean we should be researching ways to actively cool down the planet? (I suspect overshooting and making temperatures 1-2 degrees cooler would have a worse effect than a swing in the opposite direction.)
In other words, is only AGW objectionable, or is all anthropogenic climate change objectionable, whether it's directed or an incidental side effect?
Unbeliever, I suspect that the answer to your question is yes; that any anthropogenic climate change is undesirable, and the reason is the speed of the change. Major natural changes have typically taken at least hundreds or the low thousands of years to occur, which allows the natural world to adapt in such ways as the latitude range of trees changing. Make the same change in tens of years and various organisms probably can't adapt.
This may not apply to the beginnings of ice ages; there is a school of thought that ice ages begin suddenly, "suddenly" meaning a decade or less. There is also precedent for various control systems to react to forcing in a paradoxical way; the way this might apply to the climate is an apparent warming forcing (high CO2) causing cooling, at least in the places where it matters. After all, it doesn't really matter how cold it gets in winter, given that it's cold enough to snow; what matters is whether the white stuff melts in summer, and if one of the things that happens is smoothing out of seasonal variations - it might not.
As for the effects of one or two degrees of cooling; well, I don't know where you live, Unbeliever, but I live in Northern England. I would be somewhat inconvenienced by half a mile of ice on top of my house.
InJapan, methane readily combines with oxygen as well. There is, however, an amount of it in the atmosphere enormously in excess of equilibrium, because there is a continuous input and the reaction at usual temperatures is slow. The main source of this is anaerobic decay, partly in the guts of ruminant animals; in other words, some of it comes from cow farts. Which is just one more reason why clear-cutting tropical forest for cattle ranches is a bad idea, but this is a post not a book.
A few minor points:
The H2 can't be generated (as others have said) in the vehicle without energy input (I don't see any solar panels...and a gasoline fired engine to make hydrogen to power the car seems nuts, even for the marketing division at Honda).
There is a real advantage to hydrogen fuel cells, even if the hydrogen is made remotely with coal-namely that you don't have an internal combustion engine. The ICE is responsible for the particulate matter, the nitrogen oxides (NOX), and the ozone (and, ultimately, the photochemical smog these produce) that are responsible for the pollutant clouds over our cities. Sure, it doesn't go much about climate change, but fewer kids with lung problems in urban areas is a plus.
Lastly, H2 is not a greenhouse gas. It's IR silent/Raman active. H2O is, but as one commenter pointed out, that's not really a problem-it's self regulating through rain.
Hydrogen is an energy medium, not an energy source (for our purposes anyway). The energy still has to come from somewhere, and the only non petroleum source for the forseeable future is nuclear power.
Fletcher Christian, I ask because thus far the AGW proselytizers have been asking for a limit on human activities which cause warming... and it seems only a small logical step to say we need to initiate other activities to actively cause cooling, if the doom-n-gloom really is as imminent as some make it out to be.
The "ice age in a decade" idea is an interesting one. It reminds me of the sci-fi novel Fallen Angels co-written by Larry Niven; not such a great novel, but the setting is an interesting scenario. Basically a luddite Green Party takes over and bans all kinds of environmentally unfriendly activities and emissions, which causes an ice age previously held in check by a century of AGW to take its full devastating force. In a very short period the earth is covered in ice and glaciers, destroying Canada and the northern US.
I don't think Al Gore is a luddite glacier-loving fiend, but it seems to me it is rather arrogant of man to think he's smart enough to meddle with a global ecosystem in any directed manner, including caps on human carbon output.
I live in FL, where we'd be annoyed if our winters start dropping below 50 for more than a week at a time, so I guess we have common ground here!
Minos:
I stand corrected, and I should have known better; H2 is completely non-polar (has no dipoles anywhere) and non-polarisable, which makes it IR-inactive. Hey, my physics and chemistry have 30 years of rust on them!
That shows me what you get for stating stuff half-remembered. However, I was also sorta right - H2 is described as an indirect greenhouse gas, because it reacts with oxidisers like the OH radical and therefore makes the level of some greenhouse gases higher by "mopping up" some of the species that destroy them. Hence, if atmospheric H2 gets significant then atmospheric methane will go up as well - and methane is a greenhouse gas.
Incidentally, H2O gets to be a real problem when the global temperature gets high enough to stop the recycling process - in other words, when it gets hot enough that the rain can't fall fast enough to stop water vapour levels going up. This is thought to be what happened to Venus, and also when Earth's global temperature gets high enough - without interference, half a billion years or so from now. To my knowledge, nobody knows where that particular tipping point is. Our models aren't good enough yet, and although we are already doing the experiment the data hasn't come in. Given the consequences of finding the tipping point by experiment, I hope it never does.
"Make the same change in tens of years and various organisms probably can't adapt."
There is no record of any recent changes being condensed, just bad data input as the basis for computations.
Sorry, just one more point. As it happens, just today I was reading something that makes on-board production of H2 a viable proposition - well, maybe. Hydrogen, as previously noted, is very good at escaping and highly explosive - so storing the stuff is a dubious proposition. However, it might just be possible to use hydrogen as the working medium for power generation in vehicles.
It works like this: Because gallium and aluminium are in the same group in the periodic table and next to each other in that group, a Ga/Al alloy is quite easy to make. Also, such alloys have the useful property of melting at rather low temperatures, and react vigorously with water - as Al itself does if you get rid of the oxide layer somehow. So you add water to this stuff and get aluminium oxide (which can be eventually re-made into Al), pure gallium and hydrogen.
Of course there are problems with this - not least, that fuel recharge stations would have to have the facilities to store large quantities of gallium. Given that gallium is somewhere in price between silver and gold, this could be a problem!
All the polar bears can say is Take Me Al Gore
[sorry, but it is too true]
[Drive-by. Deleted --NM]
For what it is worth, This is a very partial list of companies that are publicly traded and dealing in various parts of the Hydrogen/Fuel Cell industry.
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
Ballard Power Systems Inc.
Cabot Corporation
Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited
Ceres Power Holdings Plc
CMR Fuel Cells plc
Eden Energy Ltd.
Entegris, Inc.
FuelCell Energy, Inc.
Helius Energy Plc
Hoku Scientific, Inc.
Hy-Drive Technologies Ltd.
HydroGen Corporation
HYDROGEN ENGINE CTR INC
Hydrogenics Corporation
IdaTech, LLC
Itm Power
Medis Technologies Ltd.
Oxford Catalysts Group PLC
Pacific Fuel Cell Corp
Plug Power Inc.
PolyFuel, Inc.
Producertonex Technology Corporation
Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide, Inc.
UQM Technologies, Inc.
Voller Energy Group Plc
It does not include any of the big boys, Dow (Chemical companies will make a fortune producing catalysts), the Seven Sisters etc. nor any of the transportation companies, whether they be in Road, Rail, sea or Air transportation. The technology is changing very rapidly
Within the next two weeks or so I should be able to post a list of the major research institutions and Universities that are working on government and industry funded projects in the Hydrogen fuel area. The hydrogen economy is in its infancy. It is my belief that any technical problems will be solved if their is the will to do so. A lot of money and effort is going into a whole range of sustainable technologies and the markets are pushing us away from hydrocarbons very rapidly
#16 from Fletcher Christian at 9:13 pm on May 23, 2008
The technology you are talking about comes out of Purdue University. A researcher there was granted a patent about a year ago for the process. Read about it here
http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html
BTW, the original post strikes me as being Luddite in tone.
I must have missed the part where the original poster advocated destroying any piece of technology. I especially don't get any sense that Sensing is afraid of being put out of work.
#21 from Nortius Maximus at 3:01 am on May 25, 2008
I said "in its tone."
That means not what is literally being said. The part you "especially missed" was what I just explained.
TOC, when Carroll's Humpty Dumpty made a word work hard like that, he always paid it extra.
Pessimism and criticism are luddite only to the tone-deaf.
Carry on.
Hmmm, some rapid remarks:
A) The problem of hydrogen is not weight, but volume and temperature. In fact, hydrogen is a very light element: most of the Space Shuttle external tank stores hydrogen, and only the top part, above the orbiter and the solid boosters, the oxygen needed to burn it all.
Therefore, to say that it has more energy than gasoline in weight is not addressing the problem.
B) Although there is a problem of hydrogenation of the lubricant in the cylinders, to burn hydrogen in a spark ignition engine is possible. Again, that is not the question. The problem is that in doing so you are getting the efficiency of a SIE, well under 30%. So you are burning a very expensive fuel in a highly inefficient machine, which would seriously affect the economics of the issue.
If you burn that hydrogen in a fuel cell, you may get 55% efficiency, though conversion in the electrical motor & power electronics will leave the overall performance around 40%, which is close to the one of a diesel engine.
However, if you are driving in a urban area, regenerative braking may improve it, but again, for long distance, high regime driving, diesel almost equals hydrogen-electric cars in efficiency.
C) All these questions are further influenced by the way you get the hydrogen. Beyond national emergencies, hydrogen obtained from natural gas would be more expensive than oil (and much worse for storing). IMHO the only answer there is nuclear energy, either fission or fusion.
Thermochemical cycles to produce hydrogen are being tested now. They need a warm point around 1000 degrees celsious in order to get an efficiency of about 1$ per kilogram (or two pounds) of hydrogen. However, today's nuclear reactors cannot work above 810 ºC.
D) New developments may change this landscape: for instance, a combined hydrogen-electricity storage unit, taking advantage of the cold temperature of liquid hydrogen in order to keep electricity in a superconducting ring.
The future is waiting for us, a future with cars and polar bears.
Hydrogen has a very low octane number, which arises problems in spark ignition engines working at full loads.
Some state of the art here
BMW has achieved, it seems, an efficiency of 37.5% in lean combustion.
I cannot see the point of reforming gasoline in order to provide a lower octane number fuel to a SI engine.
#23 from Nortius Maximus at 6:43 am on May 25, 2008
Well, I suspected that the Maximus hinted at Imperial pretensions. So, I guess I'll just click my heels and fall in line.
Donald,
It is not true that water vapor emissions from hydrogen cars will cause more global warming. The cars we drive now emit about the same amount of water vapor per mile as hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do.
Here is an article that covers this (the link is below):
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that, according to Wikipedia, “causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth.”
Every once in a while, you might hear somebody say something like:
“Hydrogen fuel cell cars emit water vapor which is a greenhouse gas. Therefore, hydrogen cars would cause even more global warming.”
However, this is not true. The U.S. Department of Energy says that:
“Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles emit approximately the same amount of water per mile as vehicles using gasoline-powered internal combustion engines.”
Furthermore, this issue was addressed in the Winter 06-07 issue of Earthwise, which is the quarterly newsletter of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here is the excerpt:
“Since hydrogen fuel cells emit water vapor (a heat-trapping gas), what impact would a hydrogen-based transportation system have on global warming?
To compare the potential climate impact of a future transportation system dominated by hydrogen fuel cells rather than fossil fuels, we must consider all of the heat-trapping emissions produced by these two power sources. If gasoline, for example, fully combusts in a vehicle engine, the tailpipe exhaust will contain both carbon dioxide and water vapor. Tailpipe exhaust from fully combusted fuel cell hydrogen gas (H2), on the other hand, will contain primarily water vapor.
The impact these emissions have on our climate depends in large part on their atmospheric lifetimes. Water vapor remains in the atmosphere only a few days or weeks, and hydrogen gas about two years, but carbon dioxide lingers more than a century. Transitioning to a transportation system based on hydrogen would therefore have essentially no long-term impact on climate due to short-lived water vapor exhaust or minor hydrogen gas leaks, but would dramatically reduce our emissions of long-lasting carbon dioxide-the key factor driving global warming.
We must be sure, however, that the technology we use to produce hydrogen does not contribute to global warming. Fossil fuel-based production methods would release carbon dioxide (and heat-trapping methane) into the atmosphere, whereas production fueled by renewable energy would not.”
link
If you want to read more about hydrogen fuel cell cars, please read the series "Twelve Hydrogen Facts" at the following link which is part of the Hydrogen Manhattan Project:
link
Greg Blencoe, CEO
Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc.
[Bare links are deprecated. I corrected the format this time. --NM]
A few weeks ago, Treehugger.com posted a survey a few weeks ago asking readers if hydrogen was a viable solution. The results are available at the following links: link
Based on the results from the survey, if we are to meet our own expectations, as a nation, we must come together by stressing to our government and business leaders to support the development of an alternative energy infrastructure. This will allow for hydrogen to be produced from water using renewable resources and improve the overall effectiveness of renewable energy. In the meantime, we must also use the resources we have available to establish a hydrogen infrastructure. As a representative of the Hydrogen Education Foundation, I am helping people to understand that both a hydrogen and renewable energy infrastructure can grow side by side paving the way to a sustainable energy future.
Honda's achievement in making the FCX Clarity available marks the first step in allowing consumers to adopt hydrogen technologies in the automotive sector. Hydrogen applications, such as the FCX Clarity, virtually eliminate harmful carbon emissions, often emitting only water. As we consider alternative technologies, we need incorporate technologies that reduce air pollution. The adoption of hydrogen cars will help to reduce greenhouse gases, the main cause of ultrafine particles (UFP), and thereby improve air quality.
As was mentioned above, hydrogen can also be used as fuel in internal combustion engines. BMW has recently tested their new Hydrogen 7, which includes a hydrogen internal combustion engine. The Hydrogen 7 virtually eliminates harmful carbon emissions emitted from automobiles. In fact, the Argonne National Laboratory found that the air used in the combustion process, when released into the atmosphere, is cleaner. A clip is readily available at YouTube showing the BMW 7 being tested at Argonne, as well as a link to the report directly from Argonne National Lab: link
link
To learn more about the benefits of hydrogen, we invite everyone to please visit link
[Four bare URLs, all corrected for you this time. Please follow the recommendations for live link formatting in future. --NM]
A survey at Treehugger.com determines the technical and economic viability of a technology? Pinch me. Please.
I read it on the internet so it must be true......