What are the negatives of cars using hydrogen instead of LPG or petrol?

Question

If indeed we are going to run out of oil supply and we still need cars to go from A to B, we need an alternative and we are told there will not be any air pollution from cars running on hydrogen!

Answer 1

Hydrogen can only be produced by using other energy sources. These energy sources are inherently polluting and because it is inefficient to convert these to hydrogen, making hydrogen is more polluting than simply burning the fuel. Also it has less energy per unit volume than other liquid fuels. Oil companies will have to replace their liquid handling systems with gas handling systems, cars will have to drive around with pressurised containers full of flammable gas. Apart from that...

Answer 2

The main negatives are low energy content per unit volume and storage. Storage is the killer. There's a limit to how much Hydrogen can be economically compressed and liquid H2 requires very expensive and heavy storage vessels. The real problem is that conversion and storage require large expenditures of energy.... so that mobile hydrogen power becomes a net loss in terms of polution and global warming. You get back as much energy burning hydrogen as you put in initially to get it from water. Add in the storage and transport costs and it's a net energy loser. Which is bad news to all the stock scammers and IPO promoters out there.

Hydrogen makes sense it you have an inexhaustible supply of electricity to create and compress/liquify it....like from nuclear or hydroelectric sources. But these sources have their costs too...

Answer 3

It takes more energy to get hydrogen from water that the hydrogen provides to run a car. There is a net loss in energy, and considering the difficulties in storage and transportation of liquit hydrogen, this might not be the best alternative fuel.

Answer 4

Biggest drawback - potential BOMB. If you live around bridges or tunnels, they may not allow you to cross them.

Idiot comment above - Hydrogen burns clean, it's byproduct is simply water. Can't say where No2 would come from by burning hydrogen with oxygen...that's simply wrong. Every scientific study done on hydrogen power proves it's clean burning.

There's a vid on YouTube now, an Australian has claimed to be able to add a chemical to plain WATER to get it to burn, with few modifications to the engine. If true, no more gas worries, and Arabs can learn to eat sand again. :) He's applying for the patent now. Interesting....

Answer 5

Hydrogen gas is difficult to handle... difficult to store and takes a lot of volume for the amount of power you're going to get.... unless you go to the trouble of compressing it to liquid state which opens up a whole other set of hazards and requirements in the fuel storage system.

LPG is not as "energy dense" as gasoline... but its stored as a liquid with relative ease. Much lower pressuer than the Hydrogen requires, so the fuel tank is much easier to build and there's less danger involved if the tank does rupture.

Answer 6

The biggest negative of hydrogen is the expense to produce. There are challenges to handling and storage, but these can be resolved. Hydrogen will only become effective once we start using nuclear power to generate it.

Answer 7

Sorry but the plants are recycling fossil fuel just as fast as we can. So we will never run out of fossil fuels . And if u Switch to hydrogen your car will still produce NO2 or photo chemical smog. Back to the drawing board.

Answer 8

I recommend that you contact the hydrogen car company at 5700 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles California.

They convert internal combustion gasoline engines to run on hydrogen.

The advantage of converting an existiing internal combustion engine is that you do not need to spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel cells that are easily poisoned by small amounts of contaminants in the hydrogen gas.

You can buy a car already converted from them or they will convert a car that you own.

You can also buy equipment to produce hydrogen by the electrolysis of water that you can install in your home.

The equipment commercially available for the electrolysis of water requires approximately 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce an amount of hydrogen with an energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.

The cost of production of hydrogen if your utility charges you 10 cents per kilowatt hour is essentially $5 per amount of hydrogen with an energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.

This is the first disadvantage. The cost of producing the hydrogen is more than the cost of gasoline.

The second disadvantage is that most electricity is generated with the burning of fossil fuel. so you still have the co2 emissions and the pollution, it is just transferred to the site of the power plant.

To have truly clean energy the electricity must be generated by a renewable energy source such as wind power.

Fotunately wind power only costs approximately 4 cents per kilowatt hour to produce. As I see it hydrogen is a good way to store wind power because the wind does not alway blow when you need it.

The disadvantage is that you would need to install approximately one million wind turbines with the capacity of 1.8 megawatts each to provide hydrogen for all of the cars in the United States.

One million wind turbines is a lot of wind turbines but it is doable if we get started now and have them put in place over a period of years, such as 20 years. then you only have to install 50,000 wind turbines per year.


The next challenge with hydrogen is that it is a very small molecule and it is much harder to seal plumbing against leaks of hydrogen than it is to seal against leaks of natural gas. However I see that as more of an engineering challenge than anything else.

Right now hydrogen is not readily available at your local gasoline station, however when there are more cars running on hydrogen I expect there will be mopre gasolins station owners willing to invest in equipment to produce hydrogen electrolytically.

I expect also that it will be possible to negotiate better off peak electric rates. Currently many commercial power contacts provide for off peak pricing and the ability to interrupt service at peak demand in exchange for lower electricity prices.

These are some of the challenges that are to be overcome before we move to a hydrogen economy.

Answer 9

If your vehicle makes it on an as needed basis everything is fine and dandy, but if you try to store hydrogen it will make a very big boom if it's ignited in an accident, a very big boom!

Answer 10

The main negative is that it's incredibly difficult to obtain hydrogen. I don't know where you live, but where I am, nobody carries it.