The development of hydrogen fuel cells for cars has been described as the "ultimate green dream" in transportation.
But the high expense of producing an efficient cell has waned efforts to transform this technology into a common source of energy for vehicles.
Now, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have put a new spin on some old technology and are making important strides towards building a more efficient and less expensive hydrogen fuel cell.
Hydrogen fuel cells work by converting chemical energy into electrical energy without combustion. The most common ones used in vehicles, PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells, use hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity and produce water as a by product. This is far better for the environment than the greenhouse gasses emitted from gasoline-powered vehicles.
The use of platinum as an electrode in hydrogen fuel cells makes them expensive. The Berkeley researchers and colleagues found that by using a special mixture of platinum and nickel they could get about a 90-fold increase in efficiency over other platinum alloys.
Why is this important?
If this technology is developed to become as efficient as gasoline it would be a very powerful clean energy source. In addition to powering vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells are able to power small portable devices and provide heat and electricity to buildings. This technology could also be used as an electricity source in large industries to further ease the burden on global warming.
The research is published in the January 2007 issue of the journal Science.
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Hydrogen is not an energy "source" at all. As Robert Park is fond of pointing out, there are no hydrogen mines. Hydrogen is a means of storing and transporting energy. In this respect it is comparable to electrical batteries. But that hydrogen must be manufactured. The adoption of hydrogen as automotive fuel would not eliminate pollution, but merely move it to the hydrogen production facility. This could be a renewable source such as wind or solar, or it could be the same old fossil fuels being burned in a power plant rather than directly in the car. The use of hydrogen by itself will not solve the problem of global warming.
Unless we take it all the way - that is, using hydrogen to also generate the energy needed via nuclear fusion reactors. Using power generated from fusion power reactors to crack water into hydrogen (for example) will indeed have a tremendous impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Right now, DT (Deuterium+Tritium) reactor designs are by far the furthest along in research and development (See ITER). Deuterium is plentiful in sea water, tritium can be bread in the reactor from lithium. DD (Deuterium+Deuterium) reactors that will not need lithium to breed tritium will come later.
Otherwise you are right, you don't get something for nothing. Moving the carbon from the car to giant generating stations that burn the same carbon will solve nothing. Fundamentally changing the source of energy from carbon to hydrogen will make a the difference however.