pg104 essay first draft 200900220 Tae Eun Kwon

Hydrogen-powered vehicles        What's the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of a hydrogen-powered vehicle? It may be the car. As fossil fuels made serious environmental problems, people started to find an alternative energy to replace the fossil fuels and the most possible energy became to be the hydrogen. Hydrogen-powered car seems to be the future of the environmentally friendly auto industry.        Hydrogen is a green energy, since it doesn't emit harmful materials to the air besides nitrogen oxide.  Also as it is abstracted from water and recycled into water, there is no need to be concerned of depletion and pollution. However, in order to get hydrogen energy, a huge amount of electricity is needed. As we get the power from pollutive electricity generation, the process of acquiring the required amount of hydrogen may cause more pollution. In addition, the hydrogen storage tank is too big and heavy to put into a car. As a result, many countries stopped doing research in this area. There is another alternative energy rather than hydrogen. It's liquefied petroleum gas. LPG is one of the alternative energy which is now used in buses in Korea and some other things. It is a clean energy, but it can't be recycled and it has the risk of explosure. Recently, a LPG bus exploded because of the deadly hot weather. So, it's an unstable energy to use as a fuel. A 'fuel cell vehicle' was invented by a Canadian company named 'Ballard Power Systems' and solved the storage problem. So, in spite of the disadvantages, we should keep on searching for a way to take advantage of hydrogen.        For now, hydrogen seems to be the most possible alternative energy. It may take some time to develop and commercialize the technology, but we should keep on working on the hydrogen-power if we think of the future environment.