What if you could use your garden hose to power your car? Once upon a time, people used water, heated by wood or coal, to run the engines of pumps, trains, and ships. With the discovery of oil as a fuel source, this steam heat was pushed aside. Gasoline was cheap, easily transportable, and plentiful. There was no concern about carbon emissions or the environment. But today, with rising gas prices and global warming, the focus is on alternative fuel cars, saving gas and increasing gas mileage.
This may seem like a daunting task, but the major car companies pursue these goals. They have developed hybrid cars, which run on both gasoline and electricity, increasing gas mileage. They have developed a hydrogen fuel cell, which runs on ethanol and only hydrogen, and it will be a water-powered engine.
Ethanol is a renewable fuel. But when used by internal combustion engines, its efficiency drops dramatically. Blending ethanol with gasoline requires that all of the water be removed from the ethanol. This is a difficult and time-consuming process. A hydrogen ethanol fuel cell is being developed to improve the efficiency of ethanol By converting the water contained in ethanol into hydrogen, its efficiency increases several times. Hydrogen is an element that comes from the splitting of water molecules. In this combination of hydrogen and ethanol, there is no need to remove the water from the ethanol. The hydrogen comes from both the ethanol and the water already contained in the ethanol. Therefore, hydrogen ethanol fuel cells triple the level of competition from ethanol as a fuel.
Hydrogen-only fuel cells are also being developed. The hydrogen fuel cell uses water as fuel, separating hydrogen from water. Hydrogen is the most abundant element on earth and is found in water. Conventional gasoline engines rely on internal combustion and a battery to create power, using gasoline as a catalyst. The hydrogen fuel cell combines the negative and positive battery theory and uses hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is pumped into the fuel cell, oxygen is taken from the atmosphere, the negative charge splits the hydrogen cells, separating the electrons. The electrons pass into an external circuit, forming an electrical current that drives the car forward. The hydrogen cells, devoid of electrons, as well as the electrons used in the external circuit, combine again with oxygen and form water.