Petroleum in Hydrogen fuel cell cars?

Elbert Donatelli: Need petroleum to:make the plastics used throughout the vehicle. make lube oil for the motor and transmission. power the trains and ships to transport parts to assembly linemake the rubber for the tires.Other materials: steel, aluminum, copper, cloth or leather, wood, glass....Show more

Tyree Allenbrand: In addition to parts of the vehicle 95% of the hydrogen produced today is from fossil fuel sources. A breakdown may look like this: "...48% of hydrogen production (for industrial processes) is from natural gas, 30% is from oil, 18% is from coal, and 4% is from electrolysis." see "Production" under: http://peswiki.com/index.php/PowerPedia:Hydrogen So at least 30% of the fuel is made directly from oil and another 48% will compete with the natural gas used as a cleaner industry fuel. Most of the electrical energy used to refine/produce those fuels comes also from coal, oil and gas. Additionally tires, plastics, transportation of parts and some! of the energy used to produce parts all depends upon oil.A large expense in the production of hydrogen fuel cells is platinum used as a catalyst. Alternatives are sought as there is not enough available platinum for even a percentage of the current fleet of vehicles on our roads, regardless of the expense. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21838/?a=fNo fuel cell vehicles are presently sold. Some are available for lease. Estimates of the cost of current fuel cell vehicles ranges from about $100,000 to more than $2,000,000....Show more

Ignacio Imbier: no, you can't make a car that runs on a mixture of petroleum and hydrogen economically. H2 is far to expensive so adding even 1 ounce of H2 to a mixture cause the cost per mile to go up.

Floy Fague: That and making a full sized car powered on pure hydrogen isn't exactly an easy task, so most of the time people tend to make a mixture. A car that runs on a combination of petrolium products and hydrogen.