Internal combustion engines that use pure hydrogen as fuel are known as H2ICE’s.

Hydrogen also plays an important role in ammonia engines, as blending component in methane fuel (hytane, H-CNG), and it is important in refinery processes to create e-fuels, or upgrade raw fossil and bio-based fuels to final products.  

The prevalent direct use of hydrogen in the transport sector is with fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). This topic, however, is not covered by AMF.

Using hydrogen as the fuel with internal combustion engines is nothing new. In fact, the first engine that operated without manual operation of valves etc. invented by William Cecil 1820 ran on hydrogen, some 40 years before Lenoir introduced his first commercial engine in 1860, also this operated with hydrogen-rich gaseous fuel. The Otto engine, invented 1876, was run with a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, generating severe knock and hence it limited compression ratio to 2.5:1. It did not have a spark plug either, it was only 15 years later the Spark Ignition was introduced and gasoline became the fuel of choice with the invention of the” modern” carburetor by Daimler and Maybach.

Use of hydrogen in internal combustion engines has been proposed ever since but used mainly in research and demonstration vehicles. The main problems have been availability and affordability. There is not an already developed and existing infrastructure like the one for electricity, and furthermore, hydrogen has always been more expensive than the base source products, would it be natural gas or sustainable electricity. Thus, there has not been any economic incentive to move to hydrogen.

The AMF TCP has only recently initiated work on pure hydrogen as motor fuel, however, hydrogen-based fuels have been handled extensively under the topic Electro-Fuels.