Hydrogen Fuel Cells and the Environment
So I am not normally a “Let’s go green and safe the world!” kind of person, but honestly, a car who’s exhaust pipe is more humid than Florida is pretty cool! So if you didn’t get that I’ll explain a hydrogen fuel cell.
The fuel cell I the catalyst for the chemical reaction that bonds oxygen to hydrogen to make water. The release of energy caused by the exothermic reaction is collected and then used to power the car. Then the steam left over is sent out the exhaust pipe. Simple right? Yeah, I guess so.
But then, I think, what are other things that might happen to the environment because of all of that water displacement. Obviously, the only way to produce that much hydrogen is to separate it from water in the first place. If we are creating water, we must destroy it too, other wise mount Everest will be as tropical as Hawaii in no time.
Then it got me to thinking, logically we won’t produce more hydrogen than we need right? That might be true, but even if we do, think of all of the water that will be displaced by all of the cars. Highways will always be wet, and during the winter, completely glossed over in ice! Also, what about places that don’t get much natural moisture, how will we be affecting them. I live in the desert and with a major highway running just a few miles away, I’ll wake up to an early morning fog, everyday…. In the desert!
Honestly, highways will have flora along them like rivers do. It’ll be pretty interesting to see but how will introducing all of that water from parts of the world that need to to parts of the world that don’t? Although because the only product of the car is distilled water, we could solve the world thirst problem by having power stations running off of hydrogen, but then how effective would that be?
First off the energy required to split hydrogen and oxygen is not efficient. We need to come up with a very cost effective way to do this other wise we will just dig ourselves deeper into the whole energy crisis issue. I’m going to write a story to expose this in better detail.
So my dad brought up a good point: if they did expel a large volume of water that would harm the environment, they could just design a holding tank for the water. Because the fuel cell is smaller than an engine and hydrogen can be compressed, we would have much more space for an item like that. Good job dad! Personally, I would like to see the effects of water displacement, because the desert is boring and drought is painful!
Matthias Oreklein’s Blog by Matthias Oreklein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
