why is hydrogen fuel cells not mandatory in all new vehicles?

Sep 8th at 1:01 am By: JetDoc

I think you need to check your facts a bit closer before you start making blanket statements about cost and availability of a product. When is the last time you pulled up to your local convenience store or gas station and found a hydrogen fuel pump out front and ready to use?

Over the past 100 years, the oil companies and state/national governments have spent BILLIONS of dollars developing and supporting the infrastructure to make petroleum fuels the fuel of choice and convenience for motor vehicles around the world. Starting from scratch with a different fuel would cost many more BILLIONS of dollars to develop and install the infrastructure to transport the fuel and maintain facilities to convert motor vehicles to the new fuel.

Not to mention that hydrogen is not the easiest element to isolate and store for use as a motor fuel. It takes more electrical power to split the hydrogen and oxygen apart that you could recover from using the hydrogen in a fuel cell, or burning it directly as a motor fuel.

Maybe in another 100 years or so, science will come up with a totally clean and economical energy source for the people of the world to replace their dinosaur powered vehicles, but don’t expect to see it tomorrow, and don’t expect it to be hydrogen.

Sep 8th at 1:51 am By: Cowboy Bill

Do you even know how hydrogen is made?
Right now, it takes more energy to produce H than is does to simply use petroleum in our cars. Even if we built 500 nuclear power stations soley for the purpose of creating H from seawater the production costs would be so high that filling your automobile tank with fuel would be ten times more expensive than gas. There is hydrogen fuel cell technology available that creates the H in your car. You simply fill the tank with water and plug it in at night and the tank seperates the H from the water molecule. But guess what? You still need a power source to plug it into so theres another power station you have to build that uses coal, natural gas or oil to fuel it.
Hydrogen powered automobiles are coming. The fuel is just too good of an energy source to be ignored as it is abundant and very clean but for now we have to make do with the resources we have. You can’t just bankrupt an entire nation of people by mandating hydrogen use overnight. Can you honestly say you would be willing to pay the $10,000 conversion to hydrogen on your personal car out of your own pocket? And would you be willing, or able, to cope with the equivalent of $20 per gallon to drive the car for up to ten years until the industry and research spooled-up enough to bring the costs down to a more sane level? And do you honest-to-God believe sucking oil from beneath the ground will result in a ‘dead’ planet? Hell, there’s enough oil in shale in the Black Hills of North Dakota to power the nation for 150 years if need be. Trust me, when it becomes profitable to make hydrogen for public consumption the world market will go full force in that direction and we will see some astounding results in the near future.

Sep 8th at 2:43 am By: unplugged

No money for infrastructure. What’s the point of a car you can’t refuel?

Look at electric cars…they polute much less, and there is infrastructure. Where ever you could plug in a toaster, a cell phone charger, or a computer, you have a place to plug in an electric car.

Making hydrogen uses a lot of electricity, then you gotta ship the hydrogen and store it. Instead of using that energy for processing and transporting hydrogen, you could use it to directly power a car.

Plus electric cars are cheaper to run, 1 penny/mile. If the oil companies still have a monopoly on the fuel industry by supplying hydrogen, then they could still control the costs and drain your wallet.

I agree its sad how people look at money before the environment, but hydrogen car’s aren’t the cleanest, electric cars are.

But what your doing is better for the environment and your wallet than any electric car or hydrogen car…your biking and walking. Cheap, good exercise, no polution.