Electric Vehicle Forums - Hydrogen conversion kit for cars? Fiction?

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Hydrogen conversion kit for cars? Fiction?

Quote:

How does this sound -- a conversion kit that would allow your car to run on clean, plentiful hydrogen? It's in the works in New Mexico, and the name of the guy who is building it may ring a bell. He's Bob Lazar, and 16 years ago he told the I-Team's George Knapp about Area 51 and said scientists there were studying UFOs. He dropped out of sight, but George caught up with him.

As a teenager, Bob Lazar built a jet-powered bicycle, then a jet Honda, then a jet dragster. These day's he's focused on a different propulsion system. Bob Lazar, former government scientist, said, "Every vehicle we have here is powered by hydrogen."

At his new home in rural New Mexico, Lazar has been working on a conversion kit that will turn any car into a hydrogen hybrid. His two vehicles have already been converted and can travel up to 450 miles on hydrogen, then switch automatically back to gasoline. Lazar wants to take it a step further.

This guy seems like he's on the "semi-wacko" side of reality, but his idea is interesting.....

http://www.klastv.com/Global/story.a...1&nav=168YaIon

Re: Hydrogen conversion kit for cars? Fiction?

The fiction is this: Hydrogen is not plentiful.

If electricity is plentiful, or unlimited then, sure hydrogen is also, but unless you have vast amounts of energy to put into the production of hydrogen there's no hydrogen to be had. Currently most of the electric grid is using natural gas, burned to produce electricity, as well as some nuclear, coal and hydro. The only thing I can think of is to generate hydrogen at night when the power plants are sitting idle, still running (because they can't shut down) but offline, disconnected from the national grid. This waste energy could be used to generate hydrogen for use in the daytime at filling stations, but this is still very dependent on the amount of electricity we have available to convert into hydrogen.

There are other ways of making hydrogen, but the only other way that's commercially viable right now is the steam reformation with natural gas, and in this process there is as much pollution created as would be created by driving around in a gas vehicle, the only difference is that the pollution is being created at the refinery instead of the car.

Our government is putting hydrogen stations on a stretch of highway that will be used for the 2010 Olympics and they are working on a fleet of hydrogen fuel-cell busses and cars for use on this highway. We have clean hydroelectric power here, in excess (we sell to the US) so hydrogen is still relatively clean, but not very efficient use of energy because of the low efficiency of the electrolysis process. It's better at this time to use electricity directly, or even something like the air cars that use electricity to compress air and extract the energy from the compression. Hydrogen may have a future, but it's no direct replacement for oil as a source of energy because it is not a source of energy, rather it's a carrier of energy, like a battery.

Re: Hydrogen conversion kit for cars? Fiction?

I believe his system was a home hydrogen generator, the proposed system ran off of either solar panels or a wind turbine. The system stores hydrogen continuously and then when you came home at night you would refuel your car similar to charging a battery. According to him the refueling process is slow.

If the system is for real, that is about as green as it gets and is plentiful enough for daily use.