• Question: Why can\'t anyone use hydrogen to power everything when the inferstructure is there and hydrogen is so avaliable.

    Asked by crowntown100 to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi crowntown100,

      There are two problems with using Hydrogen to power things (three if you consider how explosive it is):

      First, you have to get your Hydrogen as a gas. And this means generating power to split it away from other molecules it’s attached to – like Oxygen in water molecules (there’s very little Hydrogen just sitting around waiting to be used). In fact, it takes more energy to create Hydrogen gas than you usually get back from burning it – which can be a bit of a problem.

      Then, you have to get the Hydrogen to where it is going to be used – and we don’t actually have the infrastructure in place to do that.

      Even so, if we could find an efficient way to use sunlight to convert water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, Hydrogen might one day be useful as a power source.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      What the Boss said above (he’s good isn’t he?) Plus it just musn’t be as cheap to make and expensive to sell as other technologies. We’re a capitalist society and the majority of decisions have nothing to do with how cool the science is or how dangerous to the environment.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi crowntown100…I know that hydrogen is extremely explosive even at very low levels, so to ensure that this doesn’t happen, we need to put in a lot of safety measures which is very expensive. I think other sources of power are cheaper to produce and easier to manage…unless one of the other scientists tell me differently!:)

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      It depends what you mean by the infrastructure already being there.
      Do you mean convert petrol stations to hydrogen filling stations?

      The problem with switching to a new fuel is partly the infrastructure, but also the technology itself.
      I don’t think (though I’m not an expert on this by any means) that hydrogen power is fully tested, efficient, safe, etc. just yet!

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