Future Fuel Business

If you have an experience to fly into any major city around the world and you will be greeted with a familiar sight: a sheen of brown smog that floats over the city. This smog comes mostly from cars etc.

Along with this smog comes carbon dioxide, the gas that's principally responsible for climate change. The steady increase in pollution has caused governments around the world to create legislation that will limit the volume of greenhouse gases that we can put into the atmosphere. The Australian Government has committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by between five and 15 per cent below year 2000 levels by 2020.

In addition to reducing pollution, many nations, such as the United States, have talked about energy independence. That is, being able to generate energy, especially renewable energy, domestically without having to rely on imported oil either from unstable regions of the world or from regimes deemed unfriendly.

Today we are worried about our cars that if we will be able to run them in the future or not? Don't worry, the car will not disappear. But there may be chances that our current cars may be modified or entirely useless which is of the great concern. It may also happen that in future cars may be so costly that only few in a city would be able to buy them. Even as you read, today's scientists are researching tomorrow's fuels. Here are the three most promising candidates.

Hydrogen as a fuel

• Good: More energy rich per kilogram than petrol or battery-powered electric cars • Produces only water as exhaust • Refuels faster than electric cars
• Bad: Very expensive to produce • Difficult to store and transport • Incompatible with current infrastructure
• Bottom line: Although on paper it's an extremely promising fuel, high costs and problems with storage means that a lot needs to be done to make hydrogen the fuel of the future. This shows that a car will be a dream for many in future.
  

In many ways hydrogen is an ideal fuel. In fact, when scientists really needed a fuel that would go the distance, they turned to hydrogen to generate power on NASA's Apollo missions — hydrogen was used as a propellant for the Saturn V rockets, while hydrogen fuel cells were used to power the electronics inside the command modules — including the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the moon in 1969.

As hydrogen is gas under normal conditions, it's typically compressed under high pressure, in a similar manner to the liquid petroleum gas (LPG) that's commonly used in Aussie taxis and other high mileage vehicles. While taxis burn LPG instead of petrol in a normal internal combustion engine, hydrogen fuel cells are quite a different beast.

While fuel cells may sound fancy, they are actually quite similar to batteries. Like batteries, fuel cells generate electricity, meaning that any car that runs off a fuel cell is actually an electric car. Also like batteries, fuel cells mix two chemicals that react to produce an electric current.

However, the important difference with fuel cells is that, unlike batteries, they do not store energy internally. Rather, they have their "fuel" fed directly into the battery "cell", thus the term fuel cell. To simplify things, think of fuel cells as batteries that eat out, rather than bring their lunch.

Now keep on reading my blog for more information and Future guidance.