Hydrogen Combustion Engine

From dKosopedia

Category: Transportation

You can have a hydrogen economy with hydrogen-powered automobiles, but don't have to wait until the fuel cell community gets past its own cost and technological hurdles. Generate propulsion directly by the combustion of hydrogen, without having to convert it into electricity. Pollution benefits would not be as great as fuel cells, but is perhaps more feasible in the short term.

We cannot drill for hydrogen as we drill for oil. To obtain hydrogen for combustion it must first be split from water, from carbohydrates, etc. Splitting off the hydrogen requires energy. Compressing and cooling it to form a liquid that can be economically shipped or otherwise transported requires energy.

The energy to split off hydrogen can be obtained from several sources. All of them ultimately depend on solar energy except for nuclear energy. The use of nuclear energy creates its own problem. The direct production of electricity from sunlight requires expensive solar cell arrays. The indirect production of electricity from sunlight can be done by the indirect means of producing electricity by hydroelectric generators, wind generators, tidal generators, etc. A less direct method is to convert plant life (corn, birch or willow trees, ett.) to alcohol and then burn the alcohol in generators.

In short, to get hydrogen for fuel one must first generate electricity. Why not use the energy directly? For railway transportation, that would make the most sense. But electricity cannot easily be used for air transportation. Automobiles could store electricity in batteries rather than converting electrical energy to hydrogen and then burning that fuel, but automobiles intended for travel to remote areas might not find sources of electricity from which to recharge their batteries. Military vehicles (except for things like ICBMs) could not risk depending on finding a working generator in enemy territory.

One of the main advantages of hydrogen-burning vehicles is that they do not produce air pollution. The generators that produce the electricity that produces the hydrogen may well burn coal or other hydrocarbons, which produces pollution in vast amounts at the production centers. The trade-off on pollution is not necessarily even, however, since highly efficient generators maintaining high level pollution controls may still release less to the atmosphere than would burning the same fuel in millions of automobiles and other small engines. It is possible that carbon dioxide could be sequestered as it is produced by large generators, but it is hard to imagine any way that a single automobile could sequester its own production of carbon dioxide.

Ultimately, improved ability to harvest solar energy may eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels. The production of energy by nuclear fusion is a physicist's dream and an engineer's nightmare. After decades of producing hydrogen fusion we are seemingly little closer to being able to harness fusion to peaceful purposes.