June 8, 2005
Fuel Prices for Truck Drivers are Outrageous - What to do?
The Department of Energy predicts that truck drivers will have to pay $2.22 per gallon of diesel this summer. This price is a whopping 45 cents higher than last summer. Where will the inflation stop? Maybe hydrogen is the answer. A hydrogen internal combustion engine works much in the same way as traditional combustion engines. The biggest difference is that the combustible material is not gasoline or diesel but hydrogen.Diesel and gasoline fuels are very expensive to produce. The raw crude oil must first be located somewhere underground. After it is located, it must then be drilled for and extracted from the Earth. We still don’t have anything usable. This crude oil must then be processed and refined to produce the conventional fuels that we use today. Now the finished product must be distributed via tanker truck to gas stations across the nation.
Hydrogen fuel is much easier to find. We all drink it every day. Water! Water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen. I remember in high school when my teacher took some water from the tap and put it into 2 test tubes. In one tube he put a positive lead from a battery and in the other he put a negative lead. In one tube he had oxygen and the other he had hydrogen. He then put a flame to the hydrogen and scared the pants off of the class with the ensuing combustion. It couldn’t be any simpler.
Hydrogen fuel is much cleaner burning too. There are no hydrocarbons or “greenhouse gasses†produced from the combustion of hydrogen. The main byproduct of hydrogen combustion is water. That’s right, the same stuff that you started with. Imagine a world in which a driver goes to the pump (water hose) and fills up his/her tank for a long haul going from Florida to California. Owner operators could actually make a profit again without spending all of their profits on diesel.
Hydrogen is definitely a part of our future. It is already a part of our present with Ford coming out with a new hydrogen powered car and BMW making great strives in hydrogen technology. BMW’s H2R produces 232 horsepower propelling the vehicle from 0-62 mph in 6 seconds with a top speed of 187 mph. If a sports car can be made to run on this technology, surely a big truck can be engineered to perform as well as conventional diesel trucks in the coming decades.