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Quote by: ThoughtCriminal  Hydrogen has a lot of energy but it's very light. |
But a place to pump it from doesn't exist. You'd have to retrofit most (if not all) service stations because a hydrogen hybrid would require two fuels. Retrofitting a gas station would mean closing down, bringing in machinery, digging holes in the ground for tanks, replacing all the pumps... If hydrogen cars are the goldmine of the future, Exxon would not be selling off their stations as recently reported. Your source arguement is a good point.
You mentioned light weight. An obvious use then would be airplanes where weight determines the cost. Also, large storage tanks could be built at an airport without ripping up entire residential neighborhoods. The killer though, is the first hydrogen airplane is 25yrs away from being prototyped. Then, it has to be mass produced. The same goes for cars. So that's anywhere from
30-40 years before hydrogen makes any difference in travel, assuming this project is started tomorrow.
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Quote by: ThoughtCriminal Batteries are heavy and don't hold a lot of energy. |
Even at a 200mile range, that is a dramatic improvement over the 350mi from gas. True batteries don't hold alot, but electric outlets are ubiquitous. I could plug the car in almost anywhere, which is certainly easier than digging up all the gas stations.
I could even imagine a method of transfering energy without cables. Like, I saw a flashlight you shake back and forth to create light. If you could park your car next to an electric field which shook something back and forth in your car, this motion could charge a battery without cables. Any parking lot could use magnetic painted dividing lines to transfer the energy. It would be like a continuous trickle charge.
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Quote by: ThoughtCriminal I'm sure there's some loss when using elelectrical power to produce hydrogen... |
A railroad gets 400mpg because of electricity.
it makes no sense to use dirty methods to create hydrogen, then convert hydrogen to electricity. It is two extra steps of conversion where energy is lost. Cars seem like an obvious choice because they're everywhere and everyone has one. But they don't have dependable and predictable routes to follow, and they aren't stationary like industrial, warehouse, and office buildings that benefit from producing their own clean sources.