Hydrogen Fuels ? Essay, Research Paper
Why are we as Americans so afraid to change? even if it is a change for the
better? the world has been using oil coal and other petroleum products to power
just about everything that moves for the last 150 years. yet most cars in the
united states only get 10-20 miles a gallon and even the “good” ones can get
only a petty 20-50 miles a gallon. so why do we put up with the inefficiency
when there are far better alternatives out there? Such as hydrogen, which was
discovered hundreds of years ago. Hydrogen has long been known for its explosive
propeties (with air) and abundance in the universe (in other forms i.e. water
on earth, and its form in space is a gas). Hydrogen can do just about everything
conventional fuels can do but better.
Hydrogen can be “packaged” in several ways, as a fuel gas in a H2/02 powered
engine or the newly devised solid state pellet of hydrogen isotopes that
contains about the equivalent of 5000 cubic feet of hydrogen and is broken down
and releases gas into the second chamber where it goes to the engine for use.
There are many ways to get pure hydrogen out of many compounds using methods
such as electrolysis and chemical reactions. One of the easiest ways is using a
chemical reaction. Simple chemicals (aluminum,sodium hydroxide, and water) can
be reacted in the home to produce heavy hydrogen to power your furnace or your
hot water heater . No electrical power at all is required. The reaction also
gives off a tremendous amount of heat. Even the waste heat could be captured for
heating the house. The resulting sodium aluminate is harmless and could be
collected at recoiling centers for complete acid/base neutralization. This way
is a simpler way than electrolysis produce hydrogen for heating the home,
because in a automobile it would be harder to do.
Electrolysis is another way to produce hydrogen electronically. It is a way that
I am more familiar with because I do it quite a bit in my room and have done
several experiments with it. Electrolysis will produce a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen
to oxygen out of water. higher voltages will give you faster collection. With a
12-volt battery it took around a half an hour to get a quarter of a mountain dew
bottle filled with a catalyst of a small amount of Baking Soda. I used it
because it was cheap and I knew it worked. Another time I used a 75 volt / 2 amp
power supply with a catalyst of 2 drops of sulfuric acid to a pint of water and
the result was very differing from the last time. I filled the whole mountain
dew bottle in less than 6 minutes. All of that gas came from a little less than
a drop of water(when I light it off there was only a little spec of water on the
inside of the bottle)I can only gasp thinking that that was only 75 volts and
voltage can get into the billions of volts. Although electrolysis is not the
most efficient way to produce hydrogen it certainly deserves recognition for
working and I am sure sometime soon someone will discover a way to produce the
same amount of H2 and O2 with less power and time either with a new catalyst or
a more efficient power supply.
One reason that hydrogen power has not taken off is that there are thousands of
jobs in the petroleum and coal fields. Really who would want to own a car that
requires about 20-30 cents per mile in gas expenses when you could basically
pull up to the water hose every month and fill your tank with something about 20
cents every 2000 or so miles?? So demand for petroleum products would sky dive
and thousands of jobs would be lost and no one except the water company, car
alternator/generator company and the battery company would profit from it.
People would also so angry about losing their jobs over such a change and
boycott the automotive companies making hydro-cars and cause havoc for the
people trying to “upgrade” us to a better system of working. I mean everything
in a car has changed but the engine stays essentially the same. It’s commonly
known that large oil companies have been paying off the auto makers to keep all
cars under the 40 mile per gallon range. There are a few exceptions and all they
really changed was the size of the car. Every engine has the capability to get a
hundred miles per gallon and up with modifications to the carburetor and other
internal parts of the engine. Only half of the gas that goes into the chamber
actually gets burned and the rest goes right out your tail pipe, and they call
them efficient??
You would figure that when NASA uses it in the space shuttle for fuel to lift a
122 foot long craft plus a gigantic fuel tank (the solid boosters help also) it
has to be working right. And no one ever whines about pollution either unless
they are totally nieve because the only pollution from the shuttle (besides the
boosters) is water vapor. It takes a lot of energy to get water from water to H2
and O2 and it takes a lot of energy to get it back to water also, in other words
a spark (which is a very hot burning spec of flint but it doesn’t hurt us
because it doesn’t have a very long life and is small) or a flame and it takes
it on an explosive ride back to water vapor. It is weird that way I guess
because, if you burn a cup of gasoline you can’t just capture the soot (carbon)
and residues and other “by-products” and apply electricity to it and instantly
have what you started with. So basically hydrogen is a forever renewable
resource that is non-polluting
Politically oil is the source of all evil. We went to war for it and said it was
for another reason, yeah right. If we where ever to switch suddenly from
petroleum to an alternative energy like hydrogen we could expect an immediate
political or military threat because that is just like making the oil
corporations go bankrupt, instantly. It would be especially hard on a country
that has oil for its main export like Kuwait or Iraq, And it would be the stock
market crash all over again for us also. It will probably take a very dramatic
threatening event to make us switch from fossil fuels, like running out of them.
The world will eventually realize the potential of hydrogen and put it out there,
but it may come very late like when gas will cost 3.95 a gallon but it will
happen, it just has to. People will have no choice but to change or, well, walk.
It is time that we upgrade, we do not drive “Horseless Carriages” anymore so we
shouldn’t use ones fuel. We call ourselves “high tech” when we are using hundred
year old technology in our “high tech” things. Airplanes have gone from the
“June Bug” to the F-22 fly by wire fighter in around a hundred years so why
can’t cars and heaters and powerplants do the same?? As a globel society we need
to upgrade.