Hydrogen Facts and Myths.

The world wide interest in Hydrogen and using it as a fuel has created a lot of confusion about what it can and can not do.

Here are a few Facts and Myths about Hydrogen:

Fact: Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.

About 75% of the known universe is made up of hydrogen.

Myth: Hydrogen is Dangerous

Hydrogen is less dangerous than many other fuels that we currently use. If you compare Hydrogen with gasoline and natural gas for example you will find that Hydrogen burns almost 10% cooler than gasoline and because of it's buoyancy any leak will disperse away very quickly making it difficult to ignite. Hydrogen disperses 10 times quicker than gasoline fumes and 4 times quicker than natural gas. Also hydrogen needs to be constrained to be able to ignite - remember the experiment in the science lab when you ignited hydrogen in a test tube. It has to be constrained and concentrated to ignite and even then it is much more likely to burn than to explode.

Myth/Fact: Producing Hydrogen is inefficient and uses more energy than is generated.

This is a tricky one and can be myth and fact. Be Objective...

Some say that all methods to generate energy uses more energy than it produces. If it was not like this it would be possible to make a kind of perpetual motion machine and generate energy out of nothing. Some say that they have done exactly that and they have been laughed at and publicly mocked for doing that.

At what point does the earth orbiting around the sun become perpetual motion?

You definitely can not get something out of nothing or generate more energy than what you put in and anyone saying that they can should examine it a little deeper...What you can do is to use what you have to it's optimal efficiency and when we do that it will definitely look exactly like perpetual motion and free energy. Imagine if your car engine was running at 100% efficiency.

Take the simple school girl motor which has won numerous science fair prices all over the world. It yields more energy than the electric energy that is put into it. What is not so obvious at first is that the motor also uses gravity, which is free energy and that is the reason why the motor is so efficient. It does not produce more energy than is put into it. The Electric energy + the Gravitational energy = Output energy. But the Electric Energy (which is not free like gravity) is smaller than the Energy that is produced.

Back to Hydrogen...

There are a few different ways of producing hydrogen and all of them are inefficient but they are no more inefficient than the production of petroleum fuels or the generation of electricity at coal power stations(only 30% efficient). If we don't produce Hydrogen because of it's inefficiency we should also not produce gasoline or electricity from coal for the exact same reason.