Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Ford  Using water as fuel is pure balderdash!
Water is the _waste_ product of burning Hydrogen. The process can be reversed by splitting the water back into Hydrogen and Oxygen - but you need _at_least_ as much energy to do so as that you would get from recombining (burning) the two gasses again. If you can get the energy to split the water for free eg. from sunlight, then you're getting there. But you need to store the Hydrogen somehow, either compressed, needing more energy - or at atmospheric pressure, which would be impractically bulky. |
fuel cell technology does have a real future as a way of storing energy generated from intermitent energy sources such as solar or wind - however it works better on a massive scale and is best used at power station level
in cars its a total non starter - not least because making a compressed hydrogen cylinder crash safe would make it so heavy it would screw up the cars performance. You only have to look at the hindenberg to see a graphic example of why having non crash safe stored hydrogen is a really really bad idea.
also as every phase transformation is inefficient you would be better off using your electricty generated from "free" means to charge batteries powering an electric car.