There are many different ways to make hydrogen fuel. Some of these involve burning trash to generate the heat required to break hydrogen out of natural gas or water. You won’t be able to drive on a banana peel, but that peel can be used by a hydrogen production facility to produce the fuel that your hydrogen powered car can use to operate.

There are multiple ways in which an automobile can be powered by hydrogen fuel. The same internal combustion engine that is used today in gasoline-powered cars can also power cars that use hydrogen fuel, with a moderate amount of modification to convert it to burn hydrogen.

An existing auto can be modified to use only hydrogen fuel, completely eliminating the need for gasoline as the fuel source. You can also buy a kit or instructions to make a kit for your car that will add hydrogen to your car’s current gasoline-air mixture. Installing such a kit will reduce your vehicle’s pollution output and greatly improve its gas mileage.

Hydrogen powered cars leave no carbon footprint, thanks to being approximately 300% more efficient with fuel than vehicles using traditional gasoline fuels. Electric vehicles can also be made to use hydrogen fuel for on-board power generation. Built-in holding tanks can feed the hydrogen into fuel cells which in turn convert it into electricity and supply power to all vehicle systems.

Hydrogen fuel is an efficiently produced energy source. While gasoline production in the United States currently requires about three hundred billion gallons of water, the production of the same amount of hydrogen fuel takes about one hundred billion gallons. What this translates to is that hydrogen fuel production only costs roughly half of what it costs to produce the equivalent amount of gasoline.

The number of hydrogen powered cars will increase steadily as hydrogen fueling stations become more available. Starting in 2008, several hydrogen powered vehicles will already be available in limited numbers. Even now, every major automobile company is working on designing and engineering its own model. Some car makers are also trying to develop in-home systems that produce hydrogen, meaning that we could conceivably not only have pumps in the driveway to fuel up hydrogen powered cars in the future, but we could also supply hydrogen fuel to supply electrical power to our homes.

As far as safety concerns you can rest assured hydrogen powered cars are as safe, or safer, than their gasoline fueled counterpart. The high-pressure tanks used to contain the hydrogen have undergone extreme testing to ensure they will resist any leakage in even the most severe accidents.

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