Hydrogen Powered Motorcycle

Some college students have built a hydrogen powered motorcycle.

This is a genuine effort, but I know there are a few scams out there involving Hydrogen as a fuel. I am going to write about Hydrogen as a source of energy.

I need to simplify this a little, so I will just say "energy" as defined by scientists, refers to the ability to move or lift things. There is energy in fuel and you can scientifically calculate how much energy is in a certain amount of fuel. But why is there energy in fuel and how does the energy get in there?

Are there any free and renewable energy sources? The sun, the wind, waterfalls, the heat under the crust of the earth all are pretty much infinite - though of the three sunshine is the closest to infinite. There is another source, atomic energy, which is abundant, but dangerous to play with and produces unhealthy radioactive waste.

Oil is a source, but is not free or renewable. The oil itself may be renewable, for example if you could make oil in a lab. But we want oil mostly because of the energy we find stored within it, and we could not make that in a laboratory without putting the energy in first. The oil sands in Alberta are kind of in between, as it takes so much energy to extract the oil that it's almost like making it in a lab, but we do get some energy out of it in the final analysis.

The Law of Conservation of Energy is a law in Physics that says we cannot create energy from nothing. So no matter how we try to design a machine that produces energy, we cannot. Any machine, or process needs to consume more energy than it makes.

This law was not known a thousand years ago, so many inventors in the last 800 years have tried to build so-called "perpetual motion machines". These are machines that claim to produce more energy than they consume. These machines are still being invented today by people who refuse to give up on the very attractive proposition that a machine can produce more energy than it consumes. It is so popular among inventors that the U.S. patent office refuses to grant patents to perpetual motion machines on the basis of diagrams alone. To get a patent, you have to build a working model. The model does not have to actually produce more energy than it consumes, it's enough that it works at all. Most of these machines would take a fair amount of time to figure out all the energy inputs and outputs, and the patent office simply does not have the time to check them all out. But it is pretty much assumed that none of them deliver on their basic claim, which is more energy put out then goes in.

Oil is a great fuel because it is a very concentrated, though safe, form of energy. The energy in the fuel was put there by millions of years of sunlight being converted by plants and stored in carbon based molecules. Of course, to understand this you do need to understand that the world was not created just 4,000 years ago by Adam and Eve. It's a real complicated story if need to deny the possibility that the earth is billions of years old.

Anyway, now we have Hydrogen being proposed as a fuel. It obviously burns, and it is the most abundant molecule in the universe. So why not use it instead of oil? It also produces no carbon dioxide in the burning, so no greenhouse gasses.

Hydrogen is not found floating free in our environment, so it must be extracted. The best way to extract it is is to get it out of water. Water is made of one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen. To get hydrogen, break water down into oxygen and hydrogen. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of energy to separate these components, and the resulting oxygen and hydrogen desperately want to get back together, so some effort is needed to keep them apart.

When our planet was formed, there may have been separate hydrogen and oxygen at first, but they combine so quickly to form water, that almost from the start, all the hydrogen would have combined with oxygen. We know today that there must have been more oxygen than Hydrogen, because we have free oxygen left over, and all the hydrogen is locked up in water molecules.

When oxygen and hydrogen get together, they release energy, and that can serve to propel a car or motorcycle. You would carefully (more carefully than the Hindenburg, for example) carry your hydrogen supply with you, and arrange to suck oxygen from the air, which releases energy as it combines with hydrogen, then expel water as vapour out the tailpipe.

The various laws of physics and chemistry state that you cannot get more energy out of the hydrogen than you put into breaking it free from water. Also, you get exactly the same amount of water back from combining oxygen and hydrogen that you used in making the hydrogen in the first place.

The summary? Hydrogen is not a source of energy because there is no free Hydrogen to be found. It can be used for storing energy, and that may be a good thing, because our current methods are not very good. The environment will not suffer no matter how much hydrogen we use, as any water we use making it will be released when we burn it. But what we most desperately need is a source of energy, so the whole hydrogen thing is a bit of a red herring to the average person who believes that hydrogen is a substitute for gasoline as an energy source.

You can think of it this way. If we had to make gasoline by pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, we would not have to worry about the carbon dioxide produced by cars running on that gasoline. What we would take is equal to what we would make.