Hydrogen power is answer to cleaner cars in the future
A lot has been written recently about the need to introduce electric cars in order to reduce air pollution.
It has been pointed out that two problems with this are that electricity from renewable sources will not necessarily be available when required (when people arrive home from work and want to charge their cars batteries for the following day) and the power-supply infrastructure, both national and domestic, would be unable to cope with the large amount of electricity being drawn off the national grid at times of peak demand.
Surely suggesting a system that is dependent on storing electricity in batteries, which have short lives, which require rare minerals only obtainable from politically unsettled parts of the world, and which still need an awful lot of technical development, as well as offering, at their best, a limited range of travel, makes this strategy unnecessarily complicated.
We are far closer to having the technical ability to store surplus electricity by electrolysis of water (using electricity to separate oxygen from hydrogen which can be stored separately) and fuelling internal combustion engines with these chemicals as and when they are required.
Some drivers already use gas to fuel existing petrol cars. It would probably take little development to modify current internal combustion engines to run on hydrogen . . . and the exhaust gases would be pure water.
David Burton, Wellington
