Question: What do hydrogen fuels do; what service does it provide?

Alexander De Bruin answered on 24 Nov 2021: last edited 24 Nov 2021 1:26 pm

Hydrogen can be used two ways. First, it can be burned, similar to natural gas in a household boiler or LPG (liquid propane gas) in a car, which wouldn’t produce CO2, but would potentially produce harmful gases like nitrogen oxides. The option that I work on uses hydrogen, oxygen from the air, and a catalyst to create electricity that would drive an electric motor. You can think of a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle as an electric car that gets its battery continuously charged by a chemical reaction.
The big benefit of hydrogen fuel cells is that you can refuel the tank in a similar time to filling up a petrol tank and get a similar (or greater!) range to a normal petrol or diesel car. A neat secondary effect is that due to the filters needed to bring air into the fuel cell, combined with the reaction simply producing water, the air coming out of the exhaust pipe is cleaner than the air that went into the fuel cell!