Can’t you just break down water, use the hydrogen to power the electric motor, and I don’t think O2 as a byproduct is bad, now this is of course an ideal condition, but why hasn’t this been looked into more?
Can’t you just break down water, use the hydrogen to power the electric motor, and I don’t think O2 as a byproduct is bad, now this is of course an ideal condition, but why hasn’t this been looked into more?
As a lot of people have already said, breaking water down into hydrogen and O2 requires more energy than that produced by running a car on hydrogen.
Luckily, there’s some promising research underway, on solar panels that converts water vapour in the air into hydrogen. Last I read, they’re approaching kilowatt scale, but it takes a big system to produce just 500 grams of hydrogen in a day. Which will only produce around 2kW of output power.
Assuming they can somehow make all of that much smaller, and produce much, much more hydrogen from that smaller system, there’s the secondary problem of storing and pressurizing the hydrogen produced, for use in a vehicle. That will take more energy again.