The Drive for Hydrogen

It appears that Honda will be the first company to achieve what many call the “holy grail” of greener driving. The car manufacturer announced at the end of October that it will begin producing the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell car in 2008, years before most estimates on the viability of such a project would have predicted. Hydrogen fuel cells enable silent drives with zero emissions and are therefore widely held to be crucial to help solve motoring issues in the future. Unfortunately, hydrogen fuel still faces a significant number of hurdles. First of all, it is less energy efficient than gasoline, which means that any given amount of hydrogen required to travel a certain distance will take up more space than its gasoline equivalent. There is currently a lack of infrastructure for fuel cell cars - hydrogen filling stations and pipelines, for example, will have to be built before the technology takes off. Furthermore, hydrogen is not in itself a primary source of energy, meaning that it requires oil, coal and natural gas to be produced. For this reason, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will be difficult to achieve. In the meantime, other car producers will continue to push for further development of hybrid-electric cars instead, due to their ability to run on existing infrastructure. BusinessWeek has an interesting piece comparing hydrogen- and battery-powered cars across a number of relevant characteristics. Also, check out this article by The Times for an overview of car companies’ recent developments in technology.