Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Hydrogen cars

Hydrogen is the way forward. Safety is a big issue but just look how volatile petrol is, and and empty petrol tank is even more dangerous with the vapours left.

Unfortunately whilst it would be possible to burn hydrogen as a gas fuel it is not so efficient. In the current use the gas is highly compressed in storage canisters and using some very high technology generates electricity to drive the car using fuel cells. I would assume some batteries would still be required as a sort of buffer to have electric power ready for use.


Giles. As far as I can see the canisters used to store the gas are practically bomb proof. That is not to say that it is impossible for something to go wrong but it is probably a lot safer than LPG systems.

I'm also a fan of hydrogen as the fuel of the future.
The concerns about storage are over played by the battery believers.
An advantage of hydrogen, if there is a leak, is that it is so light it rapidly rises up, away from any source of ignition. Petrol vapour and LPG both are heavier and stay at ground level.

Another advantage is that using the same technology as the boat, hydrogen can be made and stored at conventional refuelling points. This eliminated the need to ship petrol, diesel and LPG around. Shell is pioneering this technology.

Hydrogen powered cars will always be 250 to 500kg lighter than the equivalent battery car of van.

Peter, everything you say about hydrogen sounds so reasonable that it is paradoxically threatening to some ideologies. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I see that at least in my country many environmental activists don't want to have a viable alternative at all but want to abolish individual mobility.
They want to enforce battery technology with their eyes open that is not feasible for individual traffic for everyone.
Until finally a child says that the emperor wears no clothes. But that may take years to happen.

Heinz, so as it is here, It seems to me that Extinction Rebellion and others, including the greens want to reverse us back into the times when individual mobility was a privilege, not a right.

And this might assist in the H argument:
Old electric vehicle batteries mount up

Calculated waste for end of life, what is end of life for a car battery, well it isn't car usage. Car batteries go into storage systems both domestic and commercial.


I would think a BEV fuel cell hybrid would be a sensible approach?

I really don't understand the it has to be one or the other attitude a lot of people have.

The New Audi Q45 Zeppelin model.....

With current technologies I understand that hydrogen requires almost twice as much energy to produce as batteries to charge, whilst I would imagine that this will improve, at the moment batteries seem a better bet for the environment than hydrogen. (Although I have no idea about how the making/disposal of batteries would compare with the the infrastructure used to produce, store, transport hydrogen and produce the fuel cells).

The point is that if you can use the standby time of existing solar and wind power generators the costs are reduced to maintenance and management of those resources. Wind power generators particularly are often off line because of low demand periods.