If all goes well with Toyota’s FCV when it will be launched in 2015, then fuel cell technology will represent the transportation form of the future.
Yes, if you are a true petrolhead this sounds awful, but burning fossil fuel to get things moving won’t last forever - the black dinosaur juice will eventually end and we will need another type of fuel. Of course, we can make biodiesel, or adapt vehicles to burn ethanol, but that will require most of our crops to be sacrificed.
So what’s there left to be used as a fuel, huh? What’s the most abundant substance on our planet that we could use as a fuel? Water. Our planet’s surface contains 1,332,000,000 cubic kilometers of water. This means that if all the land on Earth were spread evenly, the water would rise to an altitude of more than 2 km.
Of course, we can’t just burn water, but we can use its hydrogen to create electricity in a vehicle. There are at least three ways to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen - electrolysis, photoelectrolysis and photobiology - so it seems a feasible plan. The hydrogen then gets to be combined again with oxygen in the vehicle’s fuel cell and the resulting products are water and electricity which can be stored in batteries and used to power the electric motor.
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