If you live in southern California, you have the ability to lease a hydrogen car from Honda, if you are one of the "lucky" few to be chosen. The car is the Honda Clarity. The Clarity is an experimental vehicle, and if you wish, you can lease it for $600 a month for a three year lease. Can you visit your cousin in Colorado? Nope, the range of the car is inadequate, and the only hydrogen stations are in southern California. With the small volume, the vehicles cost several hundred thousand dollars each to manufacture.
According to the article I have just read (located at msnbc.com and entitled "Future murky for hydrogen powered Clarity") there are a number of car people who still think that hydrogen will be the wave of the future. Are these the same people who thought the Hummer was a world beater? The thing that I instantly notice is that there is no hydrogen infrastructure outside of a tiny geographical area. If we were to discuss plug in electric hybrids, by contrast, we would have to note that the infrastructure currently exists everywhere. The Chevy Volt is supposed to be sold (not leased) in 2010 or 2011 for a price under $30,000. No contest.
Am I missing something here? Fans of the hydrogen car, please explain to me why it has a glowing future, if mass production is realistically at least ten years away and infrstructure is nonexistent. We need an alternative fuel yesterday, not the year 2018. If they can make plug ins work, I would expect the contest to be over with the Volt and its Toyota competitor reaching the show rooms. If they don't work, well, maybe we can talk about hydrogen then. Sure, hydrogen is a zero emission fuel. But creating the hydrogen is only zero emission if you use pure renewable sources. That is not much of an advantage over plug ins, which could be powered primarily by electricity from wind or solar.
Provided that we can actually get serious about steepening the curve for solar and wind here in the USA to get those resources more fully online, thereby pushing them into the role of generating a substantial slice of our electrical need. We are of course not there yet, which is another story.
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Comments: 9
Gas stations weren't pervasive when the internal-combustion was manufactured either.
Perhaps plug ins would only be plugged in at times of day when the grid is not so stressed? In any case I've heard very positive things about plug ins, whose future seems bright.
Good question, Chris, here are some responses, perhaps not so much answers, but nevertheless ideas that are powerfull enough to keep the dream of the Hydrogen Society alive, as I see it.
Look at the Clarity. The Clarity basically is an electric car with an added fuel cell and tanks to hold compressed hydrogen, so that the car can cover longer distances. Thus, it is one way to keep the car going once the battery runs out of juice. But of course, hydrogen isn't the only way to do that, there are other ways, such as gas/EV hybrids, bigger batteries, battery swapping service (Project Better Place), Autolib' (Paris), batteries that can recharge very rapidly, etc. We'll have to see what works best. In shipping there are few other alternatives but hydrogen, so hydrogen seems secured of a place among the winners in transport, the more so as more wind turbines become available that produce lots of electricity at night when there's little demand. That surplus could easily be transformed into hydrogen and given the many off-shore wind turbines, there should be plenty of hydrogen available in ports. Similarly, wind turbines could produce electricity made available in the form of hydrogen along highways. So, there's your infrastructure, it shouldn't cost too much. There's less need for hydrogen within cities, since cars like the Clarity can drive there entirely on battery power. Yet, since so many cities have ports and will develop hydrogen supply for ships, I expect hydrogen to become more available in cities too, over time.
Economies of scale will then bring down prices of fuel cells, electrolyzers, hydrogen tanks, etc. As I wrote in some of my articles, Boeing already has a small airplane that can fly on hydrogen, so the future of hydrogen in transport seems secured and Honda is clever to be in that market early.
The hydrogen powered car is definitely feasible but does require some infrastructure or an alternative technology. Perhaps the alternative technology is the most promising where the hydrogen is produced in the vehicle while driving by extracting it from water. However, this research is in in it's infancy and has a long way to go. I believe it would be a terrible mistake to write off the perfect fuel simply because our technology has yet to arrive!
Right now, electric cars seem the best and most likely way to go and I hope to see them refined and brought down to an affordable price in the very near future. $30,000 is not at all affordable for many of us.
Ed B., mentioned trains and that is a good idea. The problem is each train requires several locomotives utilizing diesel. That means a terrible investment by a train manufacturer to coincide with the development of wind/solar facilities in specific locations. Sounds like impossible logistics to me.
Can you describe for me, the technology of producing hydrogen from electricity? Is the hydrogen extracted from water or what?