Green Technologies Electric Cars with Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Henry Ford, good roads, cheap gas

"I will build a car for the great multitude," declared Henry Ford in 1903. And so he did: the Model T, with an internal combustion engine that ran on gasoline, was released in 1908, selling for US$950. During its 19 years in production, its price tag would fall as low as US$280. No other car could compete - let alone electric cars, which, when at their peak in 1912, sold on average for US$1,950. The writing was on the wall.

Electric cars also lost out because of their limited range. At the turn of the century, this had not been a problem, as the only suitable roads for driving were in towns. But after the First World War, nations started to build highways and roads to connect their towns. Car owners soon wanted to venture out further than the electric cars could take them.

The discovery of plentiful crude oil resources reduced the price of petrol, making gasoline more affordable. But electric cars did not disappear - nor did the use of hydrogen as fuel. They simply faded out of the mass consciousness until the 1970s gas crisis and environmental concerns brought them back to the fore.

Clean energy

Today's internal combustion engines can be readily converted to run on a variety of fuels, including hydrogen. However, hydrogen fuel cells used to power cars with electric motors are two to three times more efficient than gas-fuelled internal combustion engines. Moreover, they have zero-emissions and, because they have few moving parts, are quiet and vibration-free.

Hydrogen is one of the most plentiful elements in the universe. It can be extracted from natural gas, coal, crude oil, etc., but water is the only pollution- free source of hydrogen. The hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water can be easily and cleanly split apart by electrolysis, ideally using electricity from clean sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. The resulting hydrogen can be compressed for storage and use in fuel cells.

It was a Welsh physicist, William Grove, who in 1842 invented the first simple hydrogen fuel cell. Grove recombined hydrogen with oxygen - the reverse of the process of electrolysis - to produce electricity with only pure water as a by-product.

Francis Bacon, a chemical engineer at Cambridge University in the U.K., whose interest was piqued when he read the papers published by Grove some 100 years earlier, dramatically advanced the technology in the 1950s. Pratt and Whitney licensed Bacon's fuel cell patents in the 1960s...