I’ve noticed that things, sometimes, go wrong in odd and unexpected ways. Applying that thought to using hydrogen, either burnt as a fuel, or used in a fuel cell has me wondering what the environmental impact will be if millions of cars move millions of gallons of water to parts of the US that may not be expecting it.
-Will arid places like parts of Arizona have an environmental crisis due to too much humidity?
-How do we deal with another demand for clean water when parts of the world don’t have it to begin with?
-Are there environmental concerns with the raw materials needed to break water into it’s constituent elements? (a la lithium in modern rechargeable batteries)
The amount of water vapor released by cars is trivial compared to natural evaporation. A single outdoor swimming pool can evaporate thousands of gallons of water a year. A rain dumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on the ground, which evaporates back into the air. Water dripping out of tailpipes wouldn’t even be noticed.
What the rest of the world has in terms of water is irrelevant, since we don’t ship water around the world. All that matters is whether local water supplies can keep up. You can get hydrogen from salt water, so I don’t see the problem.
Currently, hydrogen is typically made from natural gas. If you move to electrical production, and use something like a nuke plant, there are no additional chemicals. You will have to do something with the salt and other chemicals that were in the water and left over.
Due to the massive amount of energy needed to electrolyze water, I think a hydrogen economy is not going to be usefull to solve climate change. Electric vehicles look more promising.
Maybe, maybe not. We don’t necessarily have to burn fossil fuels to extract hydrogen from water. We can use nuke power. we just need to build more nuclear power plants (easier said than done, blah blah blah, but you get the idea).