London Buses Powered by Fuel Cells
I was glancing through my copy of “Chemistry in Britain” and I noticed a small article saying how this year three London buses will run with fuel cells as a trial for future deployment! I ran straight to google and came up with this.
Excellent news! I thought it was smashing that London was promoting electric and hybrid cars (see blog below), but this is even better. In my opinion the London air is toxic, the most pressing reason to get vehicles using alternative fuels is to clean up the polluted London air.
As I’ve said before all the cars in the world do not create that significant an amount of polluting gas. All the aircraft in the world, all the fossil fuel power stations and all the gas producing primary industry are many times more concerning. I don’t personally understand why the Environmental Agencies are attacking the motor industry so much:
Friends of the Earth’s Higman said: “It is great but the motor industry cannot take its eyes off the shorter term. It’s not enough just to have the promise of new technology tomorrow, we need to see real improvements on fuel consumption on the vehicles that are sold to ordinary people.”
The problem is that ordinary people get irritated by the concerns of the Environmental Lobby. The average person doesn’t care about his meager contribution to global smog, and for he reasons I outlined above, perhaps he shouldn’t care either. Concentrating all their effort on cleaning up industry, areospace and electricity generation would be far more fruitful and stop the public thinking Environmenal types are “killjoys”.
But don’t get me wrong, cleaning up cars is necessary for reasons other than lowering lung diseases, it just shouldn’t be our primary concern.
This made me chuckle:
Because fuel cells rely on chemistry rather than combustion, emissions from this type of system would still be much smaller than exhaust from the cleanest fuel combustion processes.
And what do internal combustion engines rely on if it isn’t chemistry? Magic?! I know it’s mostly physics when you need to understand engines but it’s chemistry that causes the bang. Fuel cells are no more chemistry than petrol engines!
The article implies that fuel cells produce zero pollution, which isn’t strictly true; they produce water. I know what you’re thinking, water’s not a pollutant right? Well that depends, a pollutant is something that is produced somewhere it doesn’t naturally occur, and if you start to produce vast quantities of water concentrated in a small region you are effectively polluting the region with water and that could have all sorts of negative effects ont he region, at a guess I’d say the local climate would go up the spout.
Of course the problem would unlikely lead to the earth having too much water since we would probably get the hydrogen and oxygen the fuel cell requires from the sea in the first place so the water pollution would be many times more preferable than that we face today.
I’m proud that London is doing at least something to protect our planets future. Even if it’s too late. And too little (currently). At least we haven’t stuck a finger up at our descendents, unlike the Bush administration.
London.gov.uk - official announcement, suggests the US is looking to H2 as a fuel..
tbus.org.uk - very interesting analysis of potential fuel cell transport in London.
jxj.com - all of Europe is game!