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Asked by 865kgrf25 to Jarrod, Adam on 11 Jun 2016.
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Adam Drake answered on 11 Jun 2016:
Yes and they already have done this! It’s called a Hydrogen fuel-cell car. Hydrogen is obtained from water and used to generate electricity in the fuel-cell. The only by-product is water! This is what powered all the electronics on the spacecraft that took men to the moon, all those years ago.
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Jarrod Hart answered on 12 Jun 2016:
Yes!
Water itself contains energy, but not very much. In order to use it to drive a car you really need to find a way to add energy to it…
One way is to heat it up… if you heat it till it boils the steam you get wants to expand and then you can use the steam to push a piston and make the car go…
…of course this exists already – the steam engine was one of the best inventions of the industrial revolution – and some key improvements were made where I live in Cornwall, by Richard Trevithick, a famous Cornish engineer, who used steam to pump water out of mines.
Another way to put energy in water is chemically – a car battery for example is water with chemicals added to it, which can react to release electrons and make electricity.
Another way is to separate water into its elements: hydrogen and oxygen – it takes energy to do this – but when they recombine, the energy is released. You could therefore make hydrogen from water and electricity, then fill your car’s tank with this hydrogen (instead of petrol).
The best thing about hydrogen as fuel is that when it burns, it goes back to being water!
The main problem holding us back on this is that the gas tank needs to be made of extremely thick steel to contain the hydrogen safely!
The other problem is that the electricity you use to make the hydrogen might have been made by burning coal or some other nasty way – ruining the beauty of the whole thing.
So when you drive your hydrogen car in a few years time, make sure you use a sustainable source of electricity to make the hydrogen!
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