Hydrogen and the Fuel Cell of Tomorrow

Any discussion of renewable energy platforms always manages to wind its in the past to the idea of using hydrogen for fuel. More specifically, by means of fuel cells.

Hydrogen may be the most typical element on our world. Frankly, it really is in only about everything, this means it really is abundant beyond belief. Making things better still, at the very least theoretically, may be the fact hydrogen produces excess energy when coupled with other common elements. This excess energy is of great interest to numerous in the power industry, particularly harnessing it. The majority of their focus is on the hydrogen fuel cell.

The hydrogen fuel cell is founded on a distinctive situation what goes on once you make water. Yes, water. When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed to create water, the procedure produces excess energy that may be transformed into electricity. Theoretically, it's the perfect power source. We have a lot of hydrogen and a lot of oxygen. The byproduct of the procedure is water, that is hardly an environmental concern. So, if that is such a good notion, we will all have hydrogen cars and so forth? Well, there are numerous of problems.

The first problem may be the hydrogen supply. While hydrogen is abundant and all over, it isn't in an application we are able to use. Hydrogen includes a bad habit of forming strong chemical bonds with other elements. Separating it from those elements is inefficient and currently takes more energy to accomplish than they hydrogen produced actually supplies. Until we are able to figure out a method to efficiently isolate hydrogen on a big scale, the technology is somewhat dead in the water.

Ah, but there's another large problem we need to overcome. Even though creation of water produces excess energy, it generally does not produce a large amount of it. Current fuel cell designs and materials are simply just not around the duty. One hydrogen fuel cell currently only produces a volt or two of energy. For instance, it could take at the very least six of these to produce the same energy of a 9 volt battery. Obviously, that's not nearly enough. If we are likely to start to see the fuel cell turn into a viable energy mechanism, technology will probably need to drastically improve.

Given both of these rather large problems, it might seem hydrogen fuel cells are one particular ideas gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Nothing could possibly be further from the reality. Actually, companies are dumping huge amount of money in to the technology, particularly auto companies such as for example Honda. Why would they do that? Well, the business that understands the answer first will probably be slightly rich and slightly popular.