How Close Are We To Hydrogen-Powered Cars?



A century ago, cars on Earth were in thousands. These days, they are billions, and there approximately one among seven people got a car. If you imagine Earth as a massive gas station with limited fuel, then you can realise the crux of the problem. According to many geologists, the supply of gasoline will start to reduce in the next few decades. God forbid, if we face such a scenario, then how can our cars run? Well, the quick fix is to look out for an alternative.

In the long run, vehicles run by electric fuel cells, which are batteries powered by hydrogen gas can be a better solution.

Pollution-free and silent, they are among the cleanest power sources for a secure future. Are they really a better solution as they claim to be? Let’s have a glance and know how they work.

What are fuel cells?

Most of the cars use an internal-combustion engine to ignite petroleum-based fuel, create heat, and make the pistons move up and down so as to drive the wheels.

Instead of an engine, Electric cars rely on batteries that feed electric power to electric motors to drive the wheels. Compared to conventional and electric cars, Hybrid cars got both internal-combustion engines & electric motors. Hybrid cars are between the two according to the driving conditions.

Fuel cells are a mix of an internal-combustion engine and battery power. Similar to an internal-combustion engine, they too make power by making use of fuel from a tank. Instead of gasoline or diesel, the fuel is pressurized hydrogen gas. Unlike an engine, a fuel cell never burns the hydrogen. Hydrogen is fused chemically with O2 (oxygen) from the air to create water. In this process, electricity is released, which is later used to power an electric motor that can drive a vehicle.

Consider fuel cells as batteries that never dries up. Fuel cells run on a continuous supply of hydrogen instead of slowly draining the chemicals inside them like normal batteries. Thus they can make electricity as long as there is sufficient fuel in the tank.

How does a fuel cell generate electricity from hydrogen?

An electrochemical reaction takes place in a fuel cell. It is a chemical reaction as it involves two chemicals and it is also an electrical reaction as electricity is produced.

A fuel cell got 3 key parts similar to a battery. Fuel cell got a positively charged terminal, a negatively charged terminal, and a chemical called an electrolyte in between to keep them apart. You can have a better idea if you imagine it as a ham sandwich. While the two terminals are the pieces of bread, the electrolyte is the ham.

1. Since Hydrogen is flammable, the tank has to be extremely strong. Hydrogen gas from the tank feeds a pipe to the positive terminal.

2. Oxygen from the air travels comes down a second pipe to the -ve terminal.

3. The positive terminal i.e., red is made up of platinum, which is a precious metal catalyst designed to boost the chemistry that occurs in the fuel cell. When hydrogen gas atoms reach the catalyst, they divide into hydrogen ions i.e., protons and electrons i.e., small black blobs. If you are confused: hydrogen ions are just hydrogen atoms with their electrons detached. As they have only single proton and electron, to begin with, a hydrogen ion is the same as a proton.

4. As the protons are positively charged, they are attracted to the -ve terminal and move through the electrolyte towards it. An electrolyte is a thin membrane made up of a special polymer i.e., plastic film. Only the protons can pass through it.

5. The electrons pass through the outer circuit.

6. During this process, they power the electric motor that drives the wheels of the car. Finally, they reach the negative terminal.

7. The protons and electrons reunite with oxygen from the air during a chemical reaction that creates water at the negative terminal.

8. The water is released from the exhaust pipe as steam or water vapour.



This type of fuel cell is known as a polymer exchange membrane (PEM) as it involves an exchange of protons through a polymer membrane. It continues to function as long as there exist supplies of oxygen and hydrogen. As there is plenty of oxygen in the air, the only limiting aspect is the amount of hydrogen in the tank.

Why are fuel cells taking longer time to catch on?

People have been applauding fuel cells as a miracle in power supplies since the 1960s, when the Apollo space rockets successfully demonstrated that the technology was practical.

Even after decades, there are few fuel-cell cars on roads due to a variety of reasons. The world has already started to produce gasoline engines by the million. They are naturally cheaper and better tested as you can buy an ordinary car for a few thousand dollars/pounds, but a fuel-cell car can cost you hundreds of thousands.

Cost is not the only problem as there is a massive oil-based economy to assist gasoline engines and there exist several garages to service gasoline-powered cars. There are also many filling stations to supply fuel. Unlike cars powered by gasoline, hardly anyone is aware of fuel-cell cars.

There are no filling stations that supply pressurized hydrogen, and the "hydrogen economy" is still a distant dream.

The future scenario of hydrogen gas

It is quite easy to see how a world packed with hydrogen cars might work. We would have several electrolyzer factories all over the place to make hydrogen gas from water. It is a known fact that gases take up more space than liquids or solids, so we will have to turn the hydrogen gas into liquid hydrogen so that it is easy to transport. It can be stored and compressed to high pressure with ease. We would then transport the hydrogen to gas stations where people could pump it into their cars. These cars would be powered by fuel cells instead of regular and conventional gasoline engines.

Where can we get hydrogen?

For the past 150 years, every car has functioned on a liquid which we misinterpret as gas. In theory, running cars on hydrogen is a wonderful idea as it is the simplest chemical element and it holds the vast majority of the entire matter in the universe. It may look like we got plenty of hydrogen, but there exists an obstacle. You can only find one liter of hydrogen in every million liters of air.

So where can we find such a vast amount of hydrogen to run our fleet of cars? We need to create it ourselves from water that covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface and partly made from hydrogen. Divide good old H2O into its portions and you can get hydrogen and oxygen through the process of electrolysis.

What is the problem with hydrogen?

Producing hydrogen by electrolysis needs a lot of energy, and we have to use electricity to split up water. Although solar cells provide that electricity, they are about 10 percent efficient while an electrolyzer is 75 percent efficient.

We might also use energy in transporting hydrogen and compressing it i.e., converting hydrogen gas into a liquid so that cars can carry in their tanks to travel anywhere. This is a major problem as the energy density of hydrogen i.e., the amount of energy it holds per unit of its volume is only a fifth that of gasoline.

Besides, hydrogen is difficult to store for a longer duration because of extremely tiny molecules which leak out of the container. Since hydrogen is flammable, leaks might lead to horrible explosions.

Hydrogen can be considered as a battery

It is not a fuel but a way of transporting fuel through other process. So it is better to consider it as batteries than to gasoline (a fuel). Hydrogen cars are less efficient than electric cars and ordinary gasoline or diesel engine vehicles. We can use solar cells for electrolysis of water "for free," and store the same energy in batteries to power our cars. Although fuel-cell cars seems a better option for future but if battery cars prove to be better, hydrogen might turn out to be an expensive distraction.



Why do people still opt fuel cars over its rival, battery-powered cars?

Well, their supporters claim they got numerous advantages over electric-power technologies. While charging up a battery-powered car needs approximately half an hour or a whole night, you can easily refuel a hydrogen car in only five minutes. Current models of battery-powered cars now claim they can drive hundreds of kilometers between charges, but not all are successful as it depends on how much power is being used for other things while driving. Besides, efficiency is reduced as your battery gets older. Battery technologies work best in small cars, and fuel-cells are equally good for bigger vehicles. Things might change with time when the two rival technologies - hydrogen fuel cells & rechargeable batteries undergo development.

Until oil turns out to be expensive, motorists will have no interest to switch to fuel-cell cars. So it has a long way to go. Make a note that there surely are rival technologies which may hamper the fuel-cell cars from catching on. In the near future, we can stick with internal combustion engines and power them with biofuels.

It can turn out to be a better option if we build electric cars with onboard batteries so that you can charge up at home. How about a mass switch to hybrid cars to extend world oil supplies or nuclear-powered cars? No one can forecast about the future, but one thing is certain: petroleum will have a little contribution. It is wise to try out various alternatives such as fuel cells, battery-electric cars, or biofuels.



Latest technological breakthrough to make hydrogen-powered cars more efficient

We are gradually moving from fossil fuel powered cars to eco-friendly technologies such as electric battery-powered vehicles. Although hydrogen power has made quite a buzz, but the expense of the fuel systems and complexity were a hurdle but not anymore.

Professor David Antonelli of Lancaster University led an international team of researchers and discovered a new material prepared from manganese hydride that provides a solution. This new material can be used to create molecular sieves within fuel tanks and store the hydrogen alongside fuel cells in a hydrogen-powered system.

The material, called Kubas Manganese Hydride-1 (KMH-1), would enable the design of tanks that are much smaller, cheaper, and easily out-perform battery-powered vehicles.

Professor Antonelli states that the cost of manufacturing this material is quite low. Besides, the energy density it is able to store is much higher than a lithium-ion battery. Hydrogen fuel cell systems costs five times less than lithium-ion batteries and provide more extended range.

KMH -1 makes the best use of a chemical process called Kubas binding. This process works at room temperature and stores hydrogen by separating the hydrogen atoms within a H2 molecule. This eliminates the requirement to split and make the bonds between atoms, processes that needs high energies, extreme temperature.

KMH-1 also absorbs and stores any surplus energy so that external heat and cooling is not necessary. This is vital because it implies that cooling and heating equipment need not to used in vehicles.

Experiments by the researchers show that the material could make the storage of 4 times as much hydrogen in the same volume as present hydrogen fuel technologies. This is good news for vehicle manufacturers as it offers them with the flexibility to design vehicles with more range of up to four times and lets them to decrease the tank size by up to a factor of 4.