Quote:
Originally Posted by Bogie
But is it? Hydrogen is very nice once you have it, as the byproduct is water. But where do you get the Hydrogen?. You get it by stripping it out of something else, such as water. The energy required to strip it is going to be more than the energy it gives back when used to run the car. The fuel used to supply the energy used to strip the hydrogen has to be more friendly and less damaging than using that form of energy in the car in the first place. And it must also cover the percentage of energy lost in the transfer.
The same holds for electric cars. The process used to generate the electricity used to charge the vehicle must be more friendly than what the car would produce using gas.
This is one of the biggest problems I have with a lot of the hoopla about electric cars and hydrogen cars, or any car that runs on something other than oil. When it comes to the true cost on the environment, the entire creating and distribution chain must be factored into the equation. It does no good to produce a zero emissions hydrogen vehicle if the cost to the environment to produce the hydrogen is more than the cost would have been using oil alone.
In the short term, about the only thing these types of cars buy us is we can use a different source of energy than oil. A source that perhaps the U.S. has more in abundance (Natural gas...Nuclear....coal) than oil. So it might not help the environment, but it might reduce our dependence on foreign energy supplies.
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Natural gas is good but is non renewable and is getting quite a bit more expensive, Nuclear is not a bad Idea but there are some major packaging issues in a car and would you really want anyone driving a car being a nuclear power?
Liquefied coal might be interesting
Anything electric with large batteries is chemically speaking an environmental nightmare waiting to happen if produced on the scale that motorvehicles are presently produced.