Hydrogen Gas In Cars – Something For the Future ?
It is most likely that your car is using an ethanol-gasoline fuel blend. Ethanol, produced from corn as fuel, has been hailed as a breakthrough to reducing both American’s reliance on foreign oil and dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. This is a moot point as many people claim that growing tonnes of crops to produce a fuel that is no better than gasoline is a cul-de-sac solution. For instance, Ethanol has been used by cars to run without optimization for quite a while without significant changes in fuel prices or greenhouse emissions. A newer contender is hydrogen gas in cars for improved fuel economy.
Using hydrogen gas in cars has numerous advantages over ethanol and gasoline. It’s a much cleaner-burning fuel which leaves no carbon footprint, since the only emission is water vapor, which consists mainly of nitrogen, an element that accounts for more than 75% of the air we breathe. Hydrogen fuel also gives us about two-thirds better fuel economy at roughly half the cost.
There appears to be two major concerns involved in converting to hydrogen gas cars. The first is distance from a hydrogen gas generation facility which may be the most difficult to overcome. Creating the infrastructure, a kin to all the gas stations that you see on every other corner of a street is a massive undertaking. Without available refueling stations, you will have problems finding the hydrogen fuel for your vehicle. The second issue revolves around designing a viable on-board fuel generation system to continuously power the vehicle.
The process of producing great quantities of hydrogen fuel on board a vehicle to burn instead of gasoline still faces technological limitations, compromising widespread use of this technology on the road. A few automobile manufacturers planning to manufacture fully hydrogen-powered vehicles are also planning to produce home hydrogen gas fueling stations. This will not only allow you to fuel your car but also generate power for your dwelling, giving you a big cost reduction in energy expenditure and help in environmental protection.
A few viable alternatives exist for converting your gas-powered car into a hydrogen fuel hybrid which will let you benefit from both increases in fuel economy and a big reduction in the car’s emissions. There are kits for sale that output a small amount of hydrogen fuel. They do this by using a supply of water and the electricity from your car to produce hydrogen and mixing that with the existing gas that is already powering the car. Such kits can be simple models that can be purchased for a few hundred dollars, or specialty deluxe models that will set you back thousands.
Large-scale commercial production of hydrogen fuel shows signs of expanding, and it will likely become more widely available. This will allow us to begin seeing innovative new methods of using hydrogen gas to fuel vehicles. some prototypes exist in the major car manufacturers research facilities, but they are purely research cases. No commercial prospects yet exist. Until that day, backyard mechanics and car enthusiasts can experiment with putting together their own version of a hydrogen gas hybrid using a few easy-to-find parts and water. You can find instructions for this so-called “water4gas” kit at various websites.
Hydrogen gas technology has been a focus of governments, energy companies, auto manufacturers and backyard mechanics alike, when all these groups get their findings out there it is going to allow for great leaps in hydrogen technology.