Hydrogen: Is it worth it? Essay

The Hydrogen Fuel Cell could revolutionize the world. This ingenious technology, which creates electricity from the chemical reactions of hydrogen and oxygen has, in its 150-year history, passed many of the critical tests along the path from invention to innovation. Recent developments in fuel cell technology and concurrent developments within the energy and automotive industries have brought the world to brink of the fuel cell age and the hydrogen economy.

Solar energy can be turned into electricity through solar cells 15%=cheap, 40% efficiency=expensive. Caloric theory of heat=caloric fluid flows from hot object to cold. Heat engine=

First, the article claims that the fuel cell engines utilize easily available , renewable resources. However, the professor refutes that by saying that the resources are not easily available. Although, hydrogen is available in water, but it's not usable. She said it must be in apurified liquid state and it's highly artificial, so the process of produce and stor the liquid hydrogen is not easy because

Of course there are reasons why we have not converted to alcohol burning vehicles before.  Ethanol costs more per gallon than gasoline.  However, new technologies have the potential to produce ethanol at significantly smaller costs.   Methanol, a high-performance liquid fuel made from wood or coal, can be produced at prices comparable to the prices of gasoline and natural gas.  In addition, oil does not occur naturally in unlimited supply, and just in the past few years, gas prices have been increasing dramatically.  Those prices will not fall back down.  However, the introduction of an inexpensive alcohol-based fuel would provide an alternative means of power and give consumers more choices.

As you go throughout your day, you use energy many times. Turning on the lights, using the toaster, taking the bus to school, all examples of using energy. Slowly, the fossil fuels that we are burning to get this energy are harming the environment. Hydrogen energy and biofuels would bring many benefits to Long Beach,

However, some pundits are concerned that adopting hydrogen energy as the sole strategy for the issues facing the automobile’s future is problematic because of the lengthy time frame in which they are projected to become ubiquitous. Furthermore, the present infrastructure for the distribution of hydrogen fuel sources or the production of hydrogen fuel cells is not only insufficient, but slow to develop. As such, fossil fuels are presently the main source for hydrogen production, which means that hydrogen vehicles do not successfully decouple the automobile from a fossil fuel economy. This is also widely inefficient because it will generate four times the carbon dioxide emissions generated by gasoline efficient automobiles. Furthermore, compressing hydrogen for the purposes of

Why then, is there virtually no interest in promoting alternative fuel technology? It is inevitable that at some point, sooner or later, we will not be able to make use of petroleum as a major fuel. The American public, as a whole, doesn't seem to be too concerned with this. Even the government fails to recognize the precarious nature of our energy future. Our own Department of Energy envisions a steady rise in oil, coal, and natural gas consumption for the next 25 years. The same graph shows only a nominal increase in the use of renewable energy technology and a flat-lining of hydroelectric energy generation.

The automotive industry is one of the largest industries in the entire world. As the world’s population grows and economic development occurs, the auto industry also expands. Unfortunately the growth in car numbers has had a negative environmenta, impact due to carbon dioxide and particulate emissions generated and released from the combustion process. Technology has developed a solution by utilizing the concept of hydrogen fuel cells. As the years have passed, there has been continuous development on automotive fuel cells and now it has come close to mass production of these vehicles. The main problem is the continued development of hydrogen fuel cells and their infrastructure may not be worth the cost.

Hydrogen was first found in later 16th century but it was not confirmed as a kind of chemical element by Henry Cavendish before 1766. It is a chemical element with symbol H and atomic number 1. That means it is the first one on the periodic table and each atom just has one proton and one electron.And with a standard atomic weight of 1.008, hydrogen is the lightest element on the periodic table. In addition ,it is the most abundant chemical substance in the Universe, constituting roughly 75% of all baryonic mass. On Earth,most of hydrogen exists in molecular forms such as water or organic compounds

Over the past decade the awareness of non-renewable resources has grown. A green energy moment has begun. People are more conscious of where things come from and how they impact the earth. Gasoline is a non-renewable resource and should be considered humanity’s most challenging problem because there is a limited amount of it on earth. Reducing the consumption of gasoline is important because humans are dependent on gasoline, it is becoming harder to harvest from the earth, and it is not a renewable resource meaning there is a finite supply of gasoline.

Some of the concerns regarding hydrogen that are currently limiting its widespread throughout the world is hydrogen gas is very time consumer which requires a lot of time to free up from its elements even though it is less expensive than regular gas. Hydrogen gas cannot be moved through pipelines like oil due to it is a very light gas. Hydrogen gas require energy such as oil, coal, and natural gas to separate it from oxygen which will not just have logistical issues but also environmental issues.

Hydrogen has already been under the micro scope for many years as an alternative fuel source to us because of its abundance and power. We have simply been lacking the

Recent years have shown an increasingly large need for a practical renewable energy source for such reasons as diminishing fossil fuels and increases in greenhouse gasses. Hydrogen appears to be a way out of this gasoline-dug hole, or at least, a way out in the future. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are being engineered as we speak as the technologies to refuel them cleanly are being proposed. Unfortunately, most of the technologies associated with hydrogen are still in the prototype/pre-production stages and require better enhancements before becoming mainstream. This paper assesses the practicality of hydrogen power in cars both now and in the future while explicating the actual process of how a

For the past three decades Oil dominates the agenda of political discussion. With scares over price volatility, sizes of reserves, international imports and least of which are the environmental impacts due to carbon dioxide and other emissions. Various speculations and educated guesses place our total depletion of crude oil within the next 50 years and there is a general consensus between environmentalists that we steer toward a hydrogen transportation system given the projected work and nonexistent carbon dioxide emissions (Environmental Technologies class lecture, Santa Clara University). However many barriers stand in the way of attaining such a goal, most of which pertaining

In order to understand the why behind the need to change from fossil fuels to hydrogen power, it is necessary to understand what that power is and how it works. Hydrogen is the most abundant and simplest element on earth. It is most commonly found as part of water. In its pure gaseous form it is extremely light, but when ignited in this state releases a large amount of energy in an explosion. In this violent reaction the hydrogen combines with free oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and creates water vapor. This is similar to the way gasoline is combined with air and ignited in an internal combustion engine in the cars used today and like with gasoline, the combustion of hydrogen has risks. In addition to the risk, some of the energy released in the reaction is lost in the form of sound and heat. As an alternative to burning, these same gases can be combined with the use of catalysts to extract the free electrons produced as liquid water is formed(Popovici and Hoble Dorel). Using cables connected to a fuel cell such as this, those electrons go through a circuit, generating electricity. This is more efficient than combustion because less energy is wasted in the form of sound and heat. Going further, greater efficiency for this reaction can be had the lower the temperature it is allowed to take place at, with 83% power at 25◦C(77◦ F)(Popovici and Hoble Dorel). As fuel cells are created with better heat management and