Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells look like they could bring us clear skies tomorrow, because we’d no longer have to worry about either CO2 emissions or an oil shortage. Major oil producers don’t want to be left out, so they’ve developed a system that converts gasoline to hydrogen in order power a fuel-celled car. But if we start with oil, how will that change things?
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The head of one of the world’s biggest oil companies admits that the threat of climate change makes him “really very worried for the planet.” Ron Oxburgh, the chairman of Shell, says, “No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present?with consequences that we really can’t predict but are probably not good.”
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With high gas prices and impending fuel shortages, how will cars of the future be different from the ones we have now?
We won’t have hydrogen propelled cars any time soon. Although they were first through of in the 1840s, and they emit harmless water vapor, extracting hydrogen from water uses up lots of gas. Hydrogen in the form of gas escapes easily and cannot be contained within engines. It’s also highly explosive. Auto industry expert Garel Rhys says, “General Motors has spent a billion pounds on fuel cell technology but the cost needs to be reduced by 80% if they are to rival petrol engines.”
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Americans may feel that the recent Al-Qaeda attacks inside Saudi Arabia serve the Saudis right, since they’ve enabled and even funded the 911 terrorists, as long as they did their dirty deeds in some other country. However, this is also yet another way of attacking the U.S., since it causes the price of oil to rise. If terrorists succeed in getting control of the Saudi oil fields, the price will go sky high.
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