The lowdown on hydrogen — part 1: transportation

‘The hydrogen economy had been written off as a failure by most industry watchers, writes independent energy expert and former software engineer Roger Arnold. Lately, however, hydrogen seems to be making a comeback. Not because of any special technology breakthroughs but because persistence and general advances have begun’

U.S. Department of Transportation Deputy
Secretary Thomas J. Barrett re-fuels a
hydrogen vehicle August 13, 2008 at the
Liberty Science Center in Jersey City,
New Jersey.

After more than two decades of hype about the imminent arrival of a transformative “hydrogen economy”, many veteran technology watchers — myself included — had concluded that hype was pretty much all it was. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in particular looked like a failed dream. Bright innovators like Canada’s Geoff Ballard had attacked the problem and burned through serious investment money trying to develop a product that could stand up to the rigors of the automotive market. All with little success. And beyond the cost and durability issues of fuel cells themselves, the hydrogen storage issue stubbornly resisted commercially practical solutions.

In recent years, hybrids and battery electric vehicles have appeared to hold the inside track for low carbon and zero carbon transportation. Tesla has reshaped perceptions of what is possible for battery electric vehicles. The cost of lithium-ion battery packs has been driven down, while capacity, performance, and reliability have increased dramatically. To be sure, government programs have continued to fund fuel cell R&D. If nothing else, fuel cells still hold broad appeal for military programs. But to those of us who felt we understood the issues, the barriers to broad use of hydrogen as an energy carrier looked pretty fundamental. We — or at least I — didn’t really expect to see them fall anytime soon.

Read the EnergyPost story by Roger Arnold - “The lowdown on hydrogen — part 1: transportation.”

(Privately owned vehicles for human movement has an unspoken ideal in all such stories when what we really should be discussing is how do we create an publicly owned public transit system that answers all our needs for human movement within our communities - a public transport system would be more environmentally friendly in that it would vastly lower our carbon emissions, and consume considerably less public space than that demanded,or least needed, by an exponentially growing fleet of privately-owned vehicles - Robert McLean)