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Is hydrogen the fuel of the future? Maybe, but not in the near future. In fact, it may be quite a while. The big problem is finding an efficient method of production. This should be obvious, if you know how to make hydrogen. Using today’s technology there’s electrolysis of water, natural gas conversion (commercially the largest source), and microbial processing of biomass. Electrolysis of water requires electricity, the vast majority of which is produced by coal, and natural gas conversion requires the production of steam which is either via electricity or by burning natural gas. Both of these methods produce hydrogen at a net energy loss, it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than the hydrogen is capable of yielding. Only ‘biohydrogen’ production would be at a net gain depending on the method used, but production volume and efficiency is impractically low.

So what sense does hydrogen make today? Other than for research and technology growth, fueling transportation with hydrogen today makes no sense at all. It makes much more sense to fuel transportation with the raw fuel we’re using to produce most of our hydrogen, natural gas. Sound ridiculous? We’ve been fueling vehicles with natural gas for 60+ years, in fact the Honda Civic GX – fueled by CNG (compressed natural gas) is the lowest emission production vehicle with an internal combustion engine in the world.

I’ve been saying this for years, I guess I’m not alone.

Gas to Hydrogen a Fallacy
By John Gartner

A hydrogen fueling station in Palm Springs has been upgraded so that in the future it will accommodate consumer vehicles, according to The Desert Sun. The hydrogen for the SunLine’s Thousand Palms fueling station comes from HyRadix of Illinois, which converts natural gas. Obviously it takes energy to convert the natural gas, so there is a loss of energy efficiency.

Converting natural gas — the cleanest fossil fuel around — to hydrogen is not the most logical choice. Honda’s Civic GX CNG is rated as the cleanest ICE vehicle by the EPA emitting almost zero pollution, and according to Honda, it is the only sedan certified as a Super-Ultra-Low-Emission Vehicle (SULEV) in all 50 states.

According to the DOE, natural gas “has a favorable hydrogen to carbon ratio (4:1) compared to coal (0.7:1) or biomass (1:1)” and “is the most affordable near term resource for producing large amounts of hydrogen.”

That may be true, but affordable financially is not the only factor. We use natural gas today in buses, cars and taxis as an alternative to the more polluting and mostly imported petroleum. So by converting natural gas to hydrogen, and losing energy efficiency along the way, we are reducing the amount of oil we can displace compared to burning natural gas in an ICE.

And when we get competitive electric cars, the same argument of increasing pollution and decreasing energy efficiency can be made for hydrogen from electrolysis.

I’m still trying to believe that hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles will eventually make sense, but the justification doesn’t seem to be there (unless microbes do the work instead of electricity).