Question: Would your cars that run off water have any negative effects on the environment?

Jemma Rowlandson answered on 15 Jun 2014:

Hey!

That is a great question and yes there certainly could be. We actually split the water using electricity to make hydrogen gas, which is what goes into the car itself. When you burn hydrogen in an engine it produces water so this is not really a problem.

The main problem will be that although 70% of the Earth is covered in water, most of this is oceans. Less than 1% is water we can use to drink, heat our homes or in this case, turn into fuel. There are large areas of the world which do not have enough water. Using cars that run off water in these areas could mean more people do not have enough to drink.

Another problem is that at the moment we cannot produce enough hydrogen from water to run these cars, instead we have to use fossil fuels to make the hydrogen. Using fossil fuels is not clean and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This leads to global warming which causes nasty events likes floods, droughts and melting of the polar ice-caps to happen. That’s why scientists all over the world are researching ways to make more hydrogen from water, so we do not need to use fossil fuels.