After looking through some of the previous blogs I decided to write one that relates to how we can reduce the pollution in our cities and ultimately the global production of greenhouse gases. I came across several different methods in which a car can use hydrogen as a full or partial fuel and they all have there pro’s and cons.

The first is the more obvious and seemingly more popular one. The fuel cell has been around for a long time the principal was published in 1838 by Christian Friedrich Schönbein and was quickly taken up by Sir William Robert Grove, who in February 1839 invented the first fuel cell using very similar materials to the one’s we use today.

Cars today that use fuel cells have some catching up to do before they become a good replacement for the modern combustion engine. The efficiency of fuel cells has already been proven, between 2002 and 2007 several buses and taxi’s using fuel cells as a power source were driven around London. It is expected that by making the switch we could cut our greenhouse emissions by half.

Another option is using hydrogen as a direct fuel in other words replacing petrol and diesel with cars that burn hydrogen instead, you lose some of the efficiency from using a fuel cell but you get much more power (280hp) as apposed to the equivalent fuel cell (80hp). Right now it is unknown which one will win over but in the mean time it looks like the petrol and diesel engines will hang around till approximately 2030.

Another option which I recently found is instead of introducing fully hydrogen cars immediately, hydrogen can be generated on the go using only distilled water and electrolyte. While researching I came across a petrol/diesel and hydrogen hybrid system which can be attached to almost any car which still burns petrol/diesel but at a reduced rate. It does this by instead of burning air and fossil fuel it burns air, petrol/diesel, pure oxygen and hydrogen.

The system attaches directly to your air intake and tricks the car into thinking less air is going into the engine so the car then puts in less fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen produced from the hybrid system are fed into the engine through the air intake and the car benefits from burning a cleaner fuel along with a moderate power gain from burning a more volatile fuel and you the consumer don’t need to go to the petrol station as often. In some case studies, some cars are found to have gained an extra 20MPG just from using this system and some rumours say cars that are already efficient will gain a lot more.