Properties of the Diatomic Gas
Hydrogen gas is diatomic (its molecules contain two atoms), but it dissociates into free atoms at high temperatures. It has a lower boiling point and melting point than any other substance except helium. Hydrogen melts at -259.2 degrees Celsius (-434.56 degrees Fahrenheit) and boils at -252.7 degrees Celsius (-422.99 degrees Fahrenheit). At zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) with 1 atm pressure, hydrogen is a gas with a density of 0.089 g/L. The atomic weight of hydrogen is 1.00797. Liquid hydrogen, first obtained by the British chemist Sir James Dewar in 1898, was colorless.

History of Hydrogen
Several hundred years ago, scientists were just beginning to understand hydrogen. Henry Cavendish, a British chemist, demonstrated in 1776 that Hydrogen was developed as a byproduct of the action of sulfuric acid on metals and also showed at a later date that is was an independent substance that combined with oxygen to form water. The British chemist Joseph Priestly named the gas "inflammable air" in 1781, and the French chemist Atoine Laurent Lavosier renamed it hydrogen.
The pioneer for using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine was Rudolf Erren. He began investigating the hydrogen combustion process in 1926. He received his first patent for a hydrogen engine in 1928. In 1930, Erren presented his research and data at the World Power Conference in Berlin. Later he founded the Erren Engineering Co., Ltd. in London, England. The term "errenizing," means to inject slightly pressurized hydrogen into oxygen inside the combustion chamber, rather than sucking the air-fuel mixture via a carburetor into the engine, which could result in a violent backfire (NOX). Errenizing became a scientific term in the 1930s due to his popularity and research. It became a patent system, which involved the addition of special fuel injection and control mechanisms, but left the other engine components intact. The Erren system eliminated backfire and achieved much better combustion of hydrocarbons with higher output and lower specific fuel consumption. Erren converted over 1000 vehicles to run on hydrogen in the 1930s.

Hydrogen as a Fuel Source
Hydrogen used as a fuel source for aircrafts began in the beginning of the 19th century. The first airplane ever to be fueled from liquid hydrogen was a B-57 twin-engine jet bomber engineered by Daniel Brewer at Lockheed Corporation. Lockheed and NASA were the first corporations to ever attempt the design and construction of a hydrogen-powered aircraft. The B-57 flew for two years, burning hydrogen during flights for as long as eighteen minutes. The plane flew at high altitudes and cruising speeds with no problems. One of the original design challenges for the aircraft was the placement of the hydrogen storage tanks. Engineers believed that the best place for the tanks would be on both sides of the wings. This idea was later abandoned due to aerodynamic obstacles during flight. NASA has also fueled their spacecrafts with hydrogen.
Hydrogen prospered with early 20th century engineers such as Roger Billings. In the 1950s, Billings spent three months and 800 working hours to refurbish a Model A Ford truck to run on hydrogen. In 1970, Billings joined the Clean Air Race sponsored by the California and Minnesota Institutes of Technology. Later, Billings and his staff converted many other cars to use hydrogen fuel, including a Winnebago, Recreational Vehicle. In addition to fueling the 440 cubic-inch (7.2L) V-8 engine, the gaseous hydrogen was also used to fuel a space heater, cooking range, refrigerator, air conditioner, and power generator. During the 1960s and 1970s, Billings and the Perris Group made the most successful attempts to power a car on hydrogen fuel.
With the successful history of hydrogen, the consumers today are becoming interested in redesigning their cars to use hydrogen gas. By redesigning all of the existing cars to use hydrogen fuel, the hydrogen fueling infrastructure will be built to support the emergence of hydrogen internal combustion engines (ICE) cars and fuel cell cars.

Hydrogen Production
Hydrogen must be produced by extracting it from chemical compounds. In order to extract hydrogen from water, an outside source of power is needed. America's industries produce hydrogen from coal and oil and have plans to use nuclear energy in the future. These methods of hydrogen production are referred to as black hydrogen. Creating a clean sustainable energy using polluting nonsustainable energy defeats the original plan to produce clean energy. Although nuclear power plants can create lots of energy, their radioactive waste can cause birth defects and other health problems for years. In addition, the nuclear industry has still not solved the problem of nuclear waste disposal. Coal and oil also creates pollution and health hazards. It is necessary to produce the hydrogen using a clean and renewable source of energy.

Air Pollution
Thousands of chemical molecules are created from natural resources (like forest fires) or human activities that cause air pollution. These chemicals react with other chemicals in the air to create pollutants. These pollutants are an external cost to our dependence on oil.
Poor air quality can harm the body's respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Pollution causes subtle biochemical and physiological changes, such as dispnea, wheezing, and coughing. It also aggravates existing cardiac and respiratory conditions. These health effects cause an increase in pain and suffering, and even premature death.
Until the 1980s, air pollution was thought to only be a problem in large cities. By 2002, however, the Worldwatch Institute studies on air pollution have discovered pollution all over the world in both urban and rural areas. More than one billion people (one sixth of all humanity) live in communities that do not meet World Health Organization's air quality standards. Air pollution causes as many as 50,000 deaths per year and costs as much as $40 billion per year in health care and lost productivity in the United States. "Lakes, streams, and estuaries are dying because of acid rain, 35% of Europe's forests are showing signs of air pollution damage, and crop losses in the U.S. caused by harmful emissions are estimated to be 5-10 percent of total production-more than five billion [dollars] a year," wrote Hilary F. French, a researcher at the Washington D.C.-based organization and author of Clearing the Air: A Global Agenda in a Press Release on January 20, 1990.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. s/s 7401 et seq. 1970) is in place to regulate air emissions. This Act was set back, however, in 1977 when it had to reset the deadlines of National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) because many cities in the country could not meet them. The 1990 Clean Air Act was intended to address problems such as acid rain, ground-level ozone, stratospheric ozone depletion, and air pollutants. The original Clean Air Act failed to meet its goal because the government agreed to lower its standards several times.
Oil spills from overseas oil transportation have devastated animal habitats and ocean life around the world. The Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990 strengthened the EPA's ability to prevent and respond to oil spills by requiring oil storage facilities and vessels to submit their disaster plans to the federal government.

Electrolyzers
An electrolyzer uses electricity to separate water into its main components: hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity enters the water at the cathode (a negatively-charged electrode), passes through the water, and then leaves at the anode (a positively-charged electrode).
The Hydrogen released from one gallon of water can produce the same energy as one gallon of gasoline.
The energy required to produce hydrogen via electrolysis
(assuming 1.23 V) is about 32.9 kW-hr/kg. A kilogram
is about 2.2 lbs. For 1 mole (2 grams) of hydrogen the
energy is about 0.066 kW-hr/mole. Because a Watt is
Voltage x Current, this is equivalent to Power x Rate x
Time. The power in this case is the voltage required to
split water into hydrogen and oxygen (1.23 V at 25
degrees Celsius). The rate is the current flow and relates
directly to how fast hydrogen is produced. Time, of course,
is how long the reaction runs. It turns out that voltage and
current flow are interrelated. To run the water splitting
reaction at a higher rate (generating more hydrogen in a
given time), more voltage must be applied (similar to pushing
down on the accelerator of a car; more gas is used to make
the car go faster.) For commercial electrolysis systems that operate
at about 1 A/cm2, a voltage of 1.75 V is required. This translates
into about 46.8 kW-hr/kg, which corresponds to an energy
efficiency of 70%. Lowering the voltage for electrolysis,
which will increase the energy efficiency of the process, is
an important area for research.
As hydrogen engineers research and develop more efficient electrolyzer technology, the cost of electrolyzers will decrease. This is similar to the evolution of computers: the first computers were huge, available only to large corporations, and extremely expensive. Computers have now become more affordable, compact, and accessible so that almost every American household has one.
Once the cost of electrolyzers comes down, more people will be able to afford them. Although the government claims that there are little funds set aside for clean sustainable hydrogen research and development, the government has already spent $115,570,928,976 on the war in Iraq. This huge amount of money could have been used to supply every neighborhood (12 homes each) in America with an electrolyzer. The United States government is currently spending 1,000 dollars every second to finance the Iraq War. If each of these electrolyzers created enough hydrogen for each of the 12 homes (4 people per home) and if each electrolyzer costs approximately $2,000.00 each, consumers could power their cars, dryers, homes, furnaces, and other gas appliances.
The electrolyzer must be powered by clean energy. Solar power is one of the most sustainable and clean sources of energy. The hydrogen produced from an electrolyzer powered by solar energy would have no harmful emissions. This would also eliminate oil and air pollution and decrease global warming and climate change problems. Unfortunately, electrolyzers can also be powered by unsustainable dirty energy sources like fossil fuels or nuclear power (black hydrogen). It is important that the source of energy used to power an electrolyzer is clean and sustainable.
We are moving towards a hydrogen economy and it is clear that the United States has adopted hydrogen as the alternative fuel to replace petroleum. Using clean hydrogen to power homes or business facilities would completely eliminate our dependence on oil and improve the current state of our environment.

Refueling Stations
Today, there are several refueling stations: SunLine Transit Agency, near Palm Springs, California; the California Fuel Cell Partnership in Sacramento, California; and the City of Las Vegas, Nevada.
The term "Hydrogen Highway" is used when discussing refueling stations. In the future, there will be hydrogen refueling stations every 25 miles along the hydrogen highway according to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In April 2004, Schwarzenegger signed the Executive Order S-7-04 that assumed the establishment of hydrogen refueling stations. The map below shows existing and future refueling stations in California.

Transporting Hydrogen
Hydrogen can be pumped through pipelines, carried in high-pressure cylinders as compressed gas, or liquefied and transported as a cryogenic liquid. Hydrogen flows through a pipeline 2.8284 times faster than methane. In the Ruhr Valley, between Germany and France, there is a hydrogen pipeline about 30 km long that has operated without problems for over 35 years.
Hydrogen pipelines must be well insulated (vacuum tight). Short lengths of vacuum-insulated pipelines for transporting liquid hydrogen have been used for many years in the space program and in liquid hydrogen plants. Lines consist of a center pipe for carrying the hydrogen, surrounded by a 2-5 cm layer of aluminized Mylar plastic. Each layer is separated from others by a layer of nylon net. An outer piece encloses the Mylar super insulation and forms a vacuum-tight container. Hydrogen is transported at pressures ranging from 150-400 atm (atmospheres). A steel cylinder weighing 2030 kg will hold only 1 kg of hydrogen at 150 atm pressures and 2.5 kg at 900 atm.

Hydrogen Storage
Hydrogen can be stored in four different ways: liquid storage, hydrogen gas compression, slush, and metal hydrides.
Liquid hydrogen is colorless and volatile. It is one fourteenth as dense as water and it boils at about 20.3 Kelvin (-252.85 degrees Celsius). Since liquid hydrogen is cool enough to condense all other gases but helium, it is necessary to assure that no air enters the storage area.
Liquefied hydrogen is mainly used in the space industry, aircraft, and rail transportation. While gaseous hydrogen is the actual product that is used, the liquid form of hydrogen is the most practical means of storage and transportation due to weight and bulk considerations.
Liquid hydrogen is usually stored in a double thermos called a Dewar. The Dewar is made up of two vacuum tanks. The liquid hydrogen is stored in the innermost of the two. Separated by liquid nitrogen, the hydrogen remains at a low temperature. If liquid hydrogen is suddenly subjected to a vacuum, it will evaporate with a subsequent cooling of the liquid mass. This causes the temperature to fall below freezing point of -259.2 degrees Celsius and solid hydrogen is produced. Some of the largest storage systems are located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These systems are spherical containers each with a capacity of 850,000 gallons. Estimations conclude that the storage capacity to supply a hydrogen-fueled aircraft in an airport would be around 3,000,000 gallons.
Hydrogen compressors are operating satisfactorily today in large numbers at industrial gas handling facilities and in chemical and oil industry applications. The compression ratio for one hydrogen compressor stage has the optimum value for v = 1.1.
Slush is a mixture of liquid hydrogen and solid hydrogen. Slush provides more dense storage of hydrogen than liquid hydrogen.
Metal hydride systems store hydrogen in the interatom spaces of a granular metal. Various metals can be used for this type of storage. The hydrogen is released when heated. Although heavy and expensive, these systems are reliable and compact.

Hydrogen Safety
When Nicolaus Otto invented the internal combustion engine (ICE), he believed that hydrogen was the safest and most powerful fuel for the ICE engine. Because hydrogen is lighter than most molecules, it hydrogen leaks, it will just disperse into the air at a rate of 17,000 miles/hour. Carbon tanks filled with pressurized hydrogen (500 pounds/square inch) have been penetrated by high-velocity bullets to test the durability of the tank. The tests resulted in no explosions or fires. Hydrogen can explode, if contained in a small area, when mixed with as much as 4 percent of air. Gasoline can explode when mixed with as little as 1 percent of air.
Engineers have said that if the World Trade Center was hit by hydrogen-powered planes, the buildings would have not collapsed. The gasoline spilled out onto the floor, which melted and weakened the steel building. If they planes were fueled by hydrogen, it would have dispensed into the air within seconds. This clearly demonstrates hydrogen is safer than gasoline.
Hydrogen has been blamed incorrectly for the destruction of the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg was a luxury aircraft that was powered by hydrogen. The outer material of the blimp caught on fire because of a spark. Most people still believe that the Hindenburg caught on fire because of the hydrogen fuel. Dr. Addison Bain has proved that it was an electrical spark that caught on fire the outer flammable fabric of the blimp. The blimp burned from diesel fuel, not hydrogen gas. He is educating people about the real cause of the Hindenburg disaster.
Safety technologies for hydrogen have progressed in several areas. The Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA have advanced gas detection, measurement capability, and hydrogen flame detection. The safe production and storage of hydrogen has been proven. Hydrogen energy safety is based on three primary elements: codes and standards, regulated safety measures, and proper use of equipment to minimize risks. Dr. Jay Keller, Sandia National Laboratories, recommends that internal combustion engines be redesigned by licensed engineers who are trained to understand the safety, codes, and procedures to prevent unnecessary problems. The public is still leery about hydrogen safety because of the misunderstanding of the Hindenburg disaster.
Hydrogen leaks are only dangerous if in a contained area. If outdoors, it simply goes into the air. Ignition often occurs because of hydrogen's extremely low ignition energy in combination with the very wide flammability range is a contained space. The rate that hydrogen leaks through a small hole in a pipeline is comparable to the rate at which natural gas leaks. An undetected leak in hydrogen piping and equipment is a risk within the industrial gas industry because of the relatively high probability that a continuous leak will eventually become exposed to an ignition.

The Future of Hydrogen and its Leaders
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has proposed the 2010 initiative, a plan to establish at least one refueling station every twenty-five miles along California's major highways. He has also vowed to convert his Hummer to use gaseous hydrogen as well. The goal is to have the refueling stations in place and operating by the year 2010. By setting an example in California, he hopes to encourage other states (even other countries) to establish similar goals.
Currently, there are few refueling stations in California. These stations have been constructed for demonstration purposes rather than for commercial use. The governor of California has expressed a desire to commercialize these refueling stations. This will require help from State funding and require hydrogen suppliers. This can create jobs in California; hydrogen research, development, building, and operations will establish a new employment industry. New businesses that produce and sell hydrogen will fuel the hydrogen economy.
Canada has recently invested 215 million dollars in their hydrogen economy. Alan Rock, Minister of Industry, and Herb Dhaliwal, Minister of Natural Resources, are interested in building refueling stations from British Columbia to their border shared with Washington. Development will hopefully continue south and connect with California.
Which comes first, the chicken, or the egg? This question and dilemma is used to describe the hydrogen economy. Which comes first, the hydrogen refueling stations, or the cars that run on hydrogen? The hydrogen refueling stations need customers to buy their fuel, while car manufacturers do not want to produce cars while there are no refueling stations to fuel these cars. Both want the other to go first.

Redesign of Internal Combustion Engines (ICE)
Why should consumers convert their cars to use hydrogen fuel now? Converting your car will produce several benefits. The first benefit is the life of the engine. The engine will have a longer life if powered on hydrogen because there will be no carbon build up on the cylinder walls and spark plugs. Second, there is also no sulfur in hydrogen, so no corrosive acids will be produced to eat away at engine parts. Third, the car will have reduced or negative emissions. The air actually becomes cleaner when you drive. No more oil changes. Simply replace the oil filter and top off at regular intervals. Forth, hydrogen ICE cars start in the coldest weather. Fifth, dependence on foreign oil can be reduced. Lastly, the gasses that produce global warming will be a reduced.
While consumers are waiting for new hydrogen fuel cell cars, the United States is still using and depending on oil to run their current internal combustion engines vehicles. If consumers redesign their current cars to use hydrogen gas, they will positively affect our environment and promote the hydrogen economy. By moving to the hydrogen economy sooner, everyone will be moving towards clean air, eliminating pollution and health problems, stopping global warming and climate changes, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
To learn more about what companies redesign the ICE cars, contact Kids 4 Hydrogen. Then, go to a hydrogen redesign shop to get an estimate. Locate a near-by hydrogen refueling station or purchase an electrolyzer to produce your own hydrogen. Be proud of what you are doing to decrease air pollution, eliminate negative health affects, and live in a clean environment. Encourage everyone to do a hydrogen redesign of their car. Be a role model and mentor in your community and help others to participate in the drive to create a hydrogen economy. Lastly, make sure that everyone you know signs up as a member of Kids 4 Hydrogen, so they can be educated about the hydrogen economy and counted as a member in this revolution.
It is important that Americans redesign their existing vehicles. Consumers should not attempt a redesign on their own. Hydrogen internal combustion engine shops, similar to ICE shops, will be available to the consumers nationwide to handle the redesign of their vehicles. If a consumer's transmission needs to be repaired, they would not do it on their own. They would take it to an auto shop to get the job done professionally. Similarly, the redesign of an internal combustion engine must be done at a specialty repair shop. It is not recommended that consumers redesign their own cars. The materials, equipment, and instruction are not ready for the public yet. Car manufacturers will need to cooperate with auto parts and auto shops to open up this redesign industry. Companies including H2 Car Company will convert cars for the consumers. It is strongly recommended that the consumer commission the redesign with expert companies. If professionally trained mechanics or engineers redesign vehicles, it will be safe.
Any type of car can be converted to use hydrogen gas. Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chrysler, and BMW already have cars that run on gaseous hydrogen (example, the Honda FCX runs on compressed hydrogen, BMW 745h). Ford working with Ballard Power Systems, has produced a hydrogen internal combustion engine that is used to generate electricity. This engine is a modified V-10 engine.

Conclusion
By developing and improving renewable energy technology to produce hydrogen, we can move to a cleaner economy. The United States' D.O.E. is conducting research in new storage technologies that will make hydrogen a more viable transportable fuel. In order to overcome the hydrogen barriers, advanced storage concepts, beyond the conventional methods (compressed or liquid hydrogen), need to be explored further. A renewable hydrogen economy must have an infrastructure that allows hydrogen to be transported and delivered as efficiently as electricity or gasoline. All elements of the infrastructure (production, storage, and transportation of hydrogen) must be improved before hydrogen use can become an economic reality.
The redesign of all American's cars is necessary to ensure the financial and developmental path to our hydrogen economy. We need leaders in the hydrogen economy to educate the public about hydrogen opportunities in research and business. Hydrogen as the next alternative energy carrier, will save our environment and the United States from our dependence on oil from Middle Eastern countries. By providing domestically-produced, clean, sustainable hydrogen, the United States will become the world's respected pioneer in energy production.

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