Question: could you use hydrogen to make energy to power something such as a car factory

Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:

Yes, definitely. And in many ways.
The easiest way is to ‘burn’ the hydrogen. If you heat it up, it will react with oxygen and form water (H2O mean 2 atoms of hydrogen for one molecule of oxygen). That’s the jet fuel we use to launch rockets in space! That produces a lot of energy, very quickly. The problem with it, however, is that it’s very explosive (have you ever seen a rocket taking off?) and difficult to control (I mean, you don’t want to blow up the whole car factory!!). The other problem is that it’s very expensive to get the hydrogen, compared to the amount of energy you get out of it. That’s because the easiest way to get hydrogen is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen (something called electrolysis, you can do it at home, see instructions here:

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Still in the near future, maybe some cars will be powered with hydrogen, I know there is a lot of research being done in this direction.

The second way, which is much cooler, is to do nuclear fusion. That is when you take 4 hydrogen atoms, and you fuse their nucleus together to make helium. That is what happens inside the sun, that’s where it takes it’s energy from. So this produces A LOT of energy. The problem is that with our current level of technology, we can’t do it in a stable way at cold enough temperatures that it’s feasible in a plant. But maybe in the far future we will master the technology, and that would be absolutely amazing. (For example, that would be a way we could power spaceships to to interstellar travels!!)