Hydrogen — The Future of Transportation
Hydrogen is often viewed as the ultimate solution to transportation’s fueling challenges. Indeed, hydrogen offers a number of advantages as an energy resource. At the same time, the technology and infrastructure needed to delivery those advantages are years away, and very costly. Even with the technological and cost challenges, hydrogen deserves a closer look.

Advantages

Supply: Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, produced from renewable sources like solar energy.

Environment: Hydrogen fuel cells emit no carbon dioxide. Hydrogen gas is odorless, colorless and burns almost invisibly.

Disadvantages

Supply: Unlike oil, hydrogen cannot be found in vast reservoirs on earth but is instead bound up in molecules with other elements. Extracting these hydrogen atoms requires energy.

Energy: One gallon of gas contains about 2,600 times the energy of a gallon of hydrogen. Hydrogen cars would need huge fuel tanks to equal the amount of energy and mileage produced from a tank of gasoline. Cryogenic liquid hydrogen (more efficient than compressed hydrogen) can go up to 250 miles per tank, if the tank is roughly twice the size of a tank in standard sedan.

Convenience: In order to keep the liquefied hydrogen at  –253 Celsius (so it doesn’t boil off), consumers would have to drive their hydrogen cars every day. A car left untouched for a week would burn off its entire tank of fuel.

Infrastructure: The infrastructure needed to support cryogenic liquid hydrogen (to be used as fuel) is much more complicated than existing fuel systems.

Cost: Retrofitting only 25% of the 100,775 fueling stations in the U.S. with hydrogen fueling systems would cost over $13 billion. Even if hydrogen fuel cells were produced in high volume, the cost would still be too high for average consumers.

Once we have learned how to produce and distribute it cost effectively, and once we have perfected hydrogen-fueled vehicle technology, hydrogen will be the best energy resource for transportation. Until then, natural gas is well on its way to delivering the many benefits of hydrogen for the near future.

Source: Popular Science, Warning: The Hydrogen Economy May Be More Distant Than It Appears, Michael Behar