Hydrogen Fuels
Alternative Energy Handout
The Advantages of Hydrogen Fuels:
- Hydrogen power is very readily available. It can take some work to create hydrogen, but there is no other element in the universe that is as plentiful as hydrogen.
- Another advantage to using hydrogen energy is that when the fuel is burned, there are no harmful pollutants. Actually, the burned hydrogen fuel will leave behind clean water.
- Hydrogen is also a non-toxic fuel source that can be found in almost all environments. Thus hydrogen would be ideal for use because most other fuel sources are toxic.
Hydrogen energy is a very fuel efficient source and produces a lot of energy in relation to the amount of fuel. This means that a hydrogen fuel car would go much farther than the other vehicles using other sources of energy.
- Obviously, hydrogen energy is renewable and can be produced infinitely because hydrogen is so widely available.
Under the Hood of a Fuel Cell Car
Hydrogen Storage Unit
Hydrogen Fuel Pump
The Disadvantages of Hydrogen Fuels:
- Hydrogen gas is expensive and time-consuming to create. This means until we have the technology to make creating it easier, hydrogen energy will be too costly for most people.
- Hydrogen is also very difficult to transport and store. It can be very expensive to move large amounts of it, which makes it almost impractical for most uses.
- With the way the gasoline empire has been built it will be very difficult to replace it with hydrogen fuel. It would cost huge amounts of money to try and replace the current system with hydrogen fuels.
- Hydrogen in itself is a very powerful fuel source. As the fuel source is entirely made up of the element hydrogen it is very highly flammable and any highly flammable substance can be dangerous.
- Even though hydrogen energy is a renewable source, the biggest issue is that we still need other non-renewable sources of energy to separate it from oxygen. We may reduce the use of fossil fuels but we would still be using them to produce hydrogen fuel.