# Any unintended environmental consequences of a hydrogen economy?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [May 3, 2005, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250 "2005-05-03T17:50:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/1 "2005-05-03T17:50:25Z")
It occurs to me that before we boldly stride into the world of hydrogen-powered cars, we should consider the potential environmental impacts, both positive and negative.
The obvious ones:
A benefit would be that car exhausts would be mostly water vapor, which could make city living a lot more pleasant.
On the other hand, it will take much more electricity than we’re now generating to separate the hydrogen for use as fuel. If we use coal-fired plants, this will mean an increase in air pollution produced by those plants. (Will this be offset by the reduced auto emissions?) If we use nuclear energy, we’ll have a lot more nuclear waste to store.
What about less-obvious consequences? Will releasing water vapor into the atmosphere on a large scale via car exhausts have a noticeable effect on the weather? Increased rainfall? More severe weather? A greenhouse effect?
And surely some hydrogen will be lost to the atmosphere during the separating process and the fueling process. What happens to hydrogen released into the atmosphere? Does it drift into the stratosphere never to return? And what would be the cumulative effect if we are separating hydrogen out of water and then losing some of that hydrogen into the atmosphere? Increased oxygen levels here at ground level? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Any other environmental issues we need to think about?
(And for the record, I’m not someone who’s just out looking for environmental issues to gripe about. I just want to consider all the ramifications of a hydrogen economy before we take that leap.)
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/2 "2005-05-03T18:42:02Z")
Build more hydroelectric plants!
F^ck the snail darters!
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/3 "2005-05-03T21:09:39Z")
As I mentioned in a GQ thread on this, Scientific American’s TV show spoke of getting a lot of the hydrogen from crude oil but it didn’t explain what we were going to do with the left over carbon and sulfur. LOTS of leftover carbon and sulfur. Or how this was going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Just didn’t seem fully thought out.
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/4 "2005-05-03T21:14:50Z")
Correction: It was in GD [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=309818&highlight=hydrogen](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=309818&highlight=hydrogen)
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### Author:  [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/5 "2005-05-03T21:37:58Z")
I’d like to see widespread hydrogen use combined with controlled fusion, meself.
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### Author:  [@JohnBckWLD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnBckWLD)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/6 "2005-05-03T21:57:32Z")
Scientists can’t even come to an agreement on how much impact the internal combustion engine has had on the environment and the global climate - What are the odds they’ll find accord on the impact of hydrogen powered vehicles?
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### Author:  [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/7 "2005-05-03T22:39:02Z")
> [@spoke-](#):
>
> Will releasing water vapor into the atmosphere on a large scale via car exhausts have a noticeable effect on the weather? Increased rainfall? More severe weather? A greenhouse effect?
I suspect this isn’t much of an issue. The H2O released can be though of as the same H2O that was destroyed to produce the H (and O) that fueled the car. So this effect should be not much more worrisome than setting a sprinkler out on your lawn.
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### Author:  [@Malodorous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malodorous)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/8 "2005-05-03T22:41:04Z")
A good question that I’ve never seen addressed. If every car in the US we’re turned into a fuel cell powered auto overnight, I’d think that would be a lot of water vapor released into the air. Water is a green house gas, and in the form of clouds it also has the opposite effect, it reflects sunlight back out into space.
Of course there’s already a lot of water vapor in the air, so the amount produced by a few million extra fuel cells might actually be trivial, but I’ve never seen where someone has actually crunched the numbers.
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### Author:  [@Malodorous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malodorous)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/9 "2005-05-03T22:44:46Z")
> [@Xema](#):
>
> I suspect this isn’t much of an issue. The H2O released can be though of as the same H2O that was destroyed to produce the H (and O) that fueled the car. So this effect should be not much more worrisome than setting a sprinkler out on your lawn.
Presumably the water destroyed to make the water used to make the hydrogen was sitting in a lake somewhere (and even if we get it from hydrocarbons, I can’t imagine that will effect the total amount of H2O on the planet that much). When its released out of your exhaust it will be a vapour though, presumably this will have some effect on the total amount of water vapor in the air, at least in big cities.
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### Author:  [@Spatial\_Rift\_47](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spatial_Rift_47)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2005, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/10 "2005-05-04T00:26:10Z")
Suppose you put a storage mechanism on the car instead of just releasing the water as exhaust. Then you could legislate the follow-through, either by having people use it as drinking water or by having curbside pickup for it to be dumped back in the lakes. Would this be practical? How much water would such a car produce per minute? Per hour?
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### Author:  [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2005, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/11 "2005-05-04T13:00:18Z")
Your going to be producing steam, very very hot steam. It would probably be impractical to devise a cooling mechanism for it to be collected.
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### Author:  [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/12 "2005-05-05T00:29:17Z")
I’m sure that if there are unavoidable minute hydrogen leaks, and if some of that hydrogen eventually escapes our atmosphere, it will barely be measurable versus the effects of the solar wind (in both replenishing and stripping the atmosphere,) and the addition of more hydrogen via dust.
On the other hand, if there were lots of big big hydrogen leaks, I still don’t think it would make much of a difference, but you never know.
But it’s quite possible that we wouldn’t even be able to get rid of our hydrogen even if we tried. After all, it took us decades/centuries to raise the CO[sub]2[/sub] content of our atmosphere by a fraction of 1% (of total air content), and the world’s oceans contain enough water vapour to fill the world’s atmosphere many times over.
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### Author:  [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/13 "2005-05-05T00:50:35Z")
[Here’s an old thread on this topic](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=152483&highlight=Swimming+pool)
From the thread:
> [@](#):
>
> _Posted by Sam Stone_:
>
> Whatever water comes out of the tailpipe is just a drop in the bucket (heh). Evaporation of water in and around a city is much, much greater than any water vapor cars could produce. After a major rainstorm, literally millions of gallons of water will evaporate back into the atmosphere.
>
> From [this cite](http://www.marinwater.org/poolevaporation.html) we find that an uncovered swimming pool 20’ x 40’ can lose 4300 gallons a MONTH to evaporation. When people are in the pool splashing around the evaporation is even faster. The cite above (The Marin Municipal Water District) estimates that including ‘splash out’, a 20 x 40’ swimming pool may lose 35,000 gallons of water a year to evaporation.
>
> Now think about how much water evaporation happens when people water their lawns on hot days.
>
> So let’s say that you had a car that produced 1 gallon of water per every 20 miles you drove. If the average commute in a city is 20 miles, it would take about 150 cars to release as much water vapor in a day as a single swimming pool loses in a day.
>
> Olympic swimming pools are 50 meters long by 25 wide. Going by the above numbers, a single outdoor olympic-size swimming pool could lose over 500,000 gallons of water in a single year. My city has four of these, and it’s in frigid Canada. I’m guessing there must be many more of them in warmer places.
>
> But forget swimming pools - how about lakes? Most cities have dozens of stormwater lakes and natural lakes. My house is on the shore of a large lake inside the city. These things lose hundreds of millions of gallons per year in evaporation.
In any event, later in the thread someone points out that hydrogen cars would produce on the order of 0.008 gal of water per mile, which is LESS than regular cars.
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### Author:  [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 2:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/14 "2005-05-05T02:18:01Z")
I’m going to show my ignorance here. Yes, I know gasoline is explosive when it is “carbureted” or whatever the word is (I’m electrical, not mechanical). But, there is something about hydrogen in cars, driven by cell phone talking, newspaper reading, drunk drivers that scares the hell out of me. Maybe it’s the old film of the Hindenburg zeppelin. Also, would the process of extracting hydrogen be efficient enough to give us any sort of “energy saving”?
These are serious questions, from someone who admittedly knows very little about it.
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### Author:  [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/15 "2005-05-05T03:10:20Z")
There are currently schemes to try and store hyrdrogen in a stable state so that it won’t explosively combust when ignited. Storing it inside a metal “matrix” for example or as methanol.
But one big plus of hydrogen in terms of safety is that it’s lighter than air so any flames would go up and dissapate instead of hanging around. You would get a big whoosh of a fireball but likely, very little burning.
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### Author:  [@FordPrefect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FordPrefect)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/16 "2005-05-05T14:54:43Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#):
>
> But one big plus of hydrogen in terms of safety is that it’s lighter than air so any flames would go up and dissapate instead of hanging around. You would get a big whoosh of a fireball but likely, very little burning.
A big, invisible fireball.
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/17 "2005-05-05T15:00:19Z")
[Research the past few years](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/html/e3-menu.html) suggests rather conclusively that the horrifying fire when the Hindenburg went down was started and fed by the dirigible’s skin (rubberized cloth–you’ll recall that Rutan’s private spaceship uses rubber as its fuel while the Shuttle uses it as a binder in its solid boosters) and paint (nitrocellulose dope, aka: guncotton) and powdered aluminum (flash powder in fireworks and the fuel in the Shuttle’s solid boosters). The hydrogen was wrapped in what amounts to a bomb mixed with rocket fuel and the Hindenburg is likely to have gone down in much the same way had it been filled with helium. The safety advantage hydrogen has over gasoline, and the reason non-flammable helium would not have put out the Hindenburg’s fire, is that both gases are very much lighter than air and would not hang around the fire while gasoline just sits there and burns.
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### Author:  [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2005, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/18 "2005-05-05T15:30:29Z")
There is apparently some concern that escaped hydrogen may harm the ozone layer. Or not. See [here](http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/7/6/10/1) and [here](http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=23475).
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### Author:  [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2005, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/19 "2005-05-06T04:18:10Z")
> [@dropzone](#):
>
> was started and fed by the dirigible’s skin (rubberized cloth … The hydrogen was wrapped in what amounts to a bomb mixed with rocket fuel and the Hindenburg is likely to have gone down in much the same way had it been filled with helium.
I see. Thanks for the explanation. It makes more sense now.
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### Author:  [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2005, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-unintended-environmental-consequences-of-a-hydrogen-economy/302250/20 "2005-05-06T06:44:13Z")
RE the generatlon of hydrogen - what about windmill farms which collect it into batteries/cells? Is this really feasible & what risks could there possibly be?