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I have a friend who is partners with a guy who has been running a car on hydrogen for 27 years. Here is a link to his website [HYPERLINK@www.cleanpeace.org] Hydrogen power actually cleans the air as you drive and you could drink the output of the tailpipes because it is H2O - water. My friend is working on a project to run locomotives on hydrogen.
One problem is getting the hydrogen. Cheapest way is to spray white hot coals with water. That means strip mining. Another problem is that about half the gas produced is not hydrogen but carbon monoxide. Some energy can be extracted from that by burning...but the end product is the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Second cheapest way is to extract H from methane. That means drilling here or importing LNG (not a popular idea in Boston and other harbors). With methane , carbon monoxide is, again, a by product.
Then there is electrolysis--splitting H2O into H and O. Various ways to go about that. Right now nuke plants are the most economical way to get the electricity needed. Solar and wind are not yet competitive but the former might be in the not so distant future.
Storage is a problem also. A gallon of liquid hydrogen has one third the energy of a gallon of gasoline but we're unlikely to be carrying that around. Instead compressed hydrogen will most likely be used and that has one fifth the energy of gasoline per unit.
Hydrogen is the long term solution but its not going to be easy.
I recently read an article on hydrogen. I hate that I didn't save it. The gist of it was that water and aluminum react to make hydrogen through electrolysis. A problem arises when the aluminum oxidizes from the oxygen in the water. This process forms a barrier that prevents contact of the water with the aluminum. The important new discovery is that when gallium is alloyed with the aluminum, it fails to oxidize.
Presumably this new discovery would permit cars to run with on board hydrogen plants.
Energy utopia or is it a crock? I don't know. I do believe that given we were smart enough to put men on the moon 40 years ago, somebody is sitting on some answers. Why are they sitting on the answers? I do know that $ makes the world turn. In the past, the world economic powers have recognized that control of energy is essentially absolute control. While it is true that much $ is being invested in new technologies, I believe a greater amount is being devoted to how they will be made available, the goal being to retain as much control as possible.
