Hydrogen should be a fuel for the car of the future, according to a June 2010 report by the U.S. National Research Council or NRC. We spoke with Vernon Roan, who chairs the committee for the NRC on hydrogen cars and fuel.
Vernon Roan: Eventually, we are going to be forced into some kind of synthesized fuel economy. And hydrogen is by far the most likely, because it’s a super fuel. We’re going to wind up there, because we’re going to run out of fossil fuels. It’s not going to happen in the next decade. But eventually it’s going to happen.
Hydrogen fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. The technological problems of doing that efficiently and economically are yet to be solved.
Vernon Roan: We do recognize that this is a long term technology. It’s going to take years of continued research and development, and a lot of effort on the part of industry as well as on the part of government.
Roan said that the ‘gas’ tank of a hydrogen car is an active area of scientific research. There’s still not a good way to carry significant amounts of hydrogen for long distances. And there is the problem of where to get the hydrogen. Today, nearly all hydrogen for cars comes from fossil fuels. But the research is on to get it from wind and solar. And while the costs of making fuel cells remain high, Roan said they’ve dropped by 30 percent in the last two years.
Dr. Roan spoke described for EarthSky the state of the hydrogen car today, in 2010.
Vernon Roan: The hydrogen fuel cell car is now operating around the world. In the majority of countries, and certainly the Western countries, there are fuel cell powered cars running around on hydrogen. The state of this is that these are still demonstration vehicles. And they’re still being fairly carefully controlled. For example, General Motors made 100 of the Chevrolet Equinox, converted these vehicles to fuel cell power and hydrogen fuel. They have been put in the hands of typical users, 6-8 weeks at a time, and then they return them to General Motors, and General Motors passes them on to someone else. And so there are people getting experience. And the National Laboratories and NREL have been collecting data so that we have some idea of what some of the problems are and where additional efforts need to go into resolving some of the issues that remain.
Building a transportation system around hydrogen, said Roan, requires thinking about the pumps as well as the car.
Vernon Roan: This is a huge problem. We actually produce quite a bit of hydrogen right now in this country. But it’s all captive hydrogen. It’s being used in processes, in refineries, and in making cooking oils, and there are lots of processes that use hydrogen. But we really don’t have much of a infrastructure for it What we have missing is the capability to produce massive amounts of hydrogen and the capability to distribute it to the appropriate locations, in other words, where we need it.
Vernon Roan is right in this interview. Not only General Motos is switching their hydrogen powered Chevron Equinox, the same does BMW with their Hydrogen 7. This has an combustion engine (ICE) propelled by hydrogen. Still, the “trick” is the same, to distribute cars (BMW had in the peak 15 of the Hydrogen 7`s, now only a hundful is still operating) to celibrities, but take them away from then, once the media hype is over and the cameras are switched of. The more or less same attitude is to be observed with Honda.
Progress in the commercialization of hydrogen and fuel cells cars (and buses)will has to come different, more serious and much more market orientated. But to achieve this, we need much more serious people,who “know, what they are doing..” The management, specially in the automotive industry, appears to be sometimes a little overstrained with this challenging goal.
However, there are still hopefully enough people in research instititions, smaller companies and companies, who are not even founded today, who will win the race. All the best to all of them!
Yeah, sure….they can’t even give us an estimate for when this could happen.
The solution to moving, storing and dispensing hydrogen lies with the liquid hydrides that numerous companies are currently working on.
Hydrogen is made from other energy sources much like electricity and is basically a storage medium. Electricity is already ditributed right to our homes in most parts of the world and electric cars are relativly simple and very efficient. Why the push for a new, expensive, inneficient distribution network if not for profit.
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There is a technical issue to solved with Hydrogen fueled automobiles producing the byproduct of water. This may seem to be ideal…produces water as its only byproduct (wow, great !!!). But in northern regions of the country that byproduct of water turns to ice about 4 months of the year. If you consume (burn) lets say 20 pounds of hydrogen to move an automobile around town for the day and that produces 180 pounds of water. The results of this abundance of water for lets say a million automobiles in a northern city,would result in every road becoming covered in thick ice. Maybe an icecube maker could be employed but that would require icecube collection methods.
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