Hype or Holy Grail? The Future of Hydrogen in Transportation
Abstract
In 1875, the great futurist Jules Verne wrote The Mysterious Is-
land. [1] In one dialogue, Verne’s main character, Captain Cyrus
Harding, suggests that in “two hundred and fifty or three hundred
years” the world would run out of coal and turn to hydrogen for
fuel. The hydrogen would be produced from water “decomposed into
its primitive elements” and the “coalrooms of steamers... will, instead
of coal, be stored with [hydrogen and oxygen gases], which will burn
in the furnaces with enormous calorific power.”*
Although Captain Harding failed to anticipate the 20th century
emergence of petroleum and natural gas, his prescience may finally
be appreciated in the early part of the 21st. Over the past several
years, clean-burning hydrogen has emerged as the “fuel of choice” for
solving civilization’s long-term, sustainable energy supply problems.
In fact, hydrogen advocates in industry and government are promot-
ing hydrogen as a panacea for the environmental, energy security,
and natural resource dilemmas facing society.
In the transportation sector, fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) operating
on hydrogen show much promise, and public funding for FCV devel-
opment has followed. In the U.S., for example, the government re-
cently committed $1.5 billion over ten years to support the Freedom
Cooperative Automotive Research (Freedom CAR) initiative. Freedom
CAR is aimed at developing clean, efficient, and affordable hydrogen
FCVs in 10-15 years.
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