Effects of Deforestation

Hydrogen is a highly combustible gas and has the potential in the future to replace conventional fuels in powering motor vehicles. However with current technology, it is not possibly to fuel cars cost effectively on hydrogen gas alone, and so hydrogen is used only as a fuel enhancement to improve efficiency and power, supplementing more conventional fuels used in internal combustion engines. This is similar in practice to using propane or nitrous oxide injections to increase engine performance.

Hydrogen injection improves engine performance and efficiency, by allowing a leaner air/fuel mix than normally possible into the intake manifold of the engine, thus requiring less fuel to drive the engine. This also means that the temperature at which the fuel combusts is greatly reduced, which in turn lowers carbon dioxide and nitrogen emissions.

There are two ways of powering vehicles with hydrogen. The first is through direct combustion, where hydrogen is produced through thermochemical methods or electrolysis, and pumped directly into the engine in a similar method to conventional fuels. Both petrol and diesel vehicles can be modified with an electrolysis system, that extracts hydrogen from water using electricity from a battery supply.

The second way of using hydrogen to power a vehicle is through a fuel cell conversion, where hydrogen is reacted with oxygen to produce electricity, which is then used to power an electric motor. Currently these fuel cells are very costly to produce and are not yet robust enough to take the bumps and vibrations of constant motor vehicle use. Also most of the working designs currently require very rare materials to work as catalysts, such as platinum, and so cannot be produced in any commercial capacity.

Using hydrogen as fuel can be theoretically utilised for any kind of combustible engine, including motorbikes, boats and air planes. Companies such as Boeing are currently working on developing a plane that will run on a hydrogen fuel cell system, although with current technology it is likely that these will be hybrid planes, and will still relay mainly on conventional fuel systems, with hydrogen cells as supplementary and back up devices.