The Road to Hydrogen

Even though Hydrogen Cars have been testing for quite awhile now,  the gears have never been really set as to when these steam belchers will finally line up for commercial mass production. And though science will always be on our side, the bumps in the road along the way will hinder its development.

Although the hydrogen test cars have been all over the news in the past decades, people in general seem to be largely uneducated with it and how it is handled. In this article, I will try to summarize what I know about Hydrogen and the factors that has caused  the delay in the development of the Hydrogen Car, a machine that scientists highly regard as the only foreseeable green alternative.

One, the fuel source. Hydrogen fuel does not occur naturally on Earth and thus is not an energy source; rather it is an energy carrier. It is always bound to something else like it is to oxygen, forming water. The hydrogen fuel cycle goes through stages from separation or liberation from other bonded elements, then compressed or liquefied for storage and transport, then “burned” in a device called a fuel cell, in which energy is captured from the hydrogen as it combines with oxygen from the air to form water. The captured energy can be used to power electric motors and generators, and the only emissions are pure water. So it takes an investment of another form of energy to free hydrogen from its existing bond and make it available as a stored fuel.

 Two, getting hydrogen cars on the road in mass numbers will be no easy task. Imagine the building a new economy of some sort. We will have to redo everything, the hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipeline,  hundreds of thousands of service stations and depots, hundreds of millions of vehicles, the stock market,  everything that involves the car. Nothing in our current fossil fuel infrastructure is compatible to the Hydrogen stations. Everything will have to be put up independently.  Ironically, this mammoth endeavor of change would require a mammoth amount of fossil fuel to complete.

Three, the investments entailed in making all these changes. The infrastructure will take Trillions of Benjamins, an amount too big to be passed on to consumers. The investment needed will be too big, it will be more practical to spend it on developing other forms of alternative energy like Solar or Wind.

Fourth  is Politics. A new energy source, a new kind of redtape. Somehow bought are inseparable. Much like Solar Energy, Hydrogen is an unusual source of energy. When government doesn’t know anything about it, they either let you be if you’re lucky  or throw a blanket of redtape around you just to slow you down, that way they can catch up and learn how to tax you.  And yes, we have the superpowers and their age-old partners to deal with. I guess they are not ready to part with fossil fuels, right? Not at this point when the business is at its peak.

Well, so much for the greenest alternative. Hydrogen technically for now isn’t really the new carbon free fuel. But if we go past the four hurdles,  we should see a Hydrogen Car burst out of the mass production line. When? My  answer is as good as yours.

Source: Wikipedia; Popular Science