Hydrogen Powered Cars Explained

There are many different ways to make hydrogen fuel. Some of these involve burning trash to generate the heat required to break hydrogen out of natural gas or water. You won't be able to drive on a banana peel, but that peel can be used by a hydrogen production facility to produce the fuel that your hydrogen powered car can use to operate.

There are multiple ways in which an automobile can be powered by hydrogen fuel. The same internal combustion engine that is used today in gasoline-powered cars can also power cars that use hydrogen fuel, with a moderate amount of modification to convert it to burn hydrogen.

Existing cars can be retrofitted as hydrogen powered cars with specially designed installations to completely do away with gasoline as the fuel source altough this could be expensive. There are also kits available that show you how to modify gasoline engines so that hydrogen gas is added to the current air gasoline mixture. This modification not only results in dramatically improved emissions, but in strikingly higher gas mileage as well.

Hydrogen powered cars are roughly three times more efficient than their fossil fueled counterparts and have low to zero emissions resulting in a carbon footprint free vehicle. Electric vehicles can be set up to utilize hydrogen as the fuel for on board electrical generation. An electric or fuel cell vehicle has a storage tank for hydrogen gas, which is fed into a fuel cell where the hydrogen is converted into electricity to power all vehicle systems.

Hydrogen fuel is cheaper to produce in addition to being a truly renewable source of energy. It takes 300 billion gallons of water to refine the gasoline Americans burn each year, but it would only take 100 billion gallons to refine the same amount of hydrogen fuel. As a result, hydrogen costs about half as much per gallon as gasoline.

The number of hydrogen powered cars will increase steadily as hydrogen fueling stations become more available. Starting in 2008, several hydrogen powered vehicles will already be available in limited numbers. Even now, every major automobile company is working on designing and engineering its own model. Some car makers are also trying to develop in-home systems that produce hydrogen, meaning that we could conceivably not only have pumps in the driveway to fuel up hydrogen powered cars in the future, but we could also supply hydrogen fuel to supply electrical power to our homes.

As far as safety concerns you can rest assured hydrogen powered cars are as safe, or safer, than their gasoline fueled counterpart. The high-pressure tanks used to contain the hydrogen have undergone extreme testing to ensure they will resist any leakage in even the most severe accidents.

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