OK, so you have to live in Swindon, and own a hydrogen fuel cell car. But this is the start of the sensible use of hydrogen as a fuel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14983805

It's still very chicken and egg - The car manufacturers won't make a great effort until the infrastructure is in place; but people won't build filling stations until the cars and demand are there.

I'm half expecting some kind of dual fuel cars, capable of running on petrol and hydrogen, to arrive on the scene.

I am thinking more elecric / Hydrogen dual fuel.

Use batteries charged from home etc for short (sub 50 mile journeys) with the fuel cell to give you a decent range when needed

Didn't I read somewhere that it would cost about £1.5b to build enough h2 stations nationwide to fuel h2 cars just as we fuel petrol ones now? I know we're skint as a country, but I think that would be worth it.

Certainly a worthwhile investment, but there are probably more issues to be resolved than that. You can have the equivalent of petrol stations, but you have to figure out how to a) get the hydrogen there and b) keep it there.

a) is tricky because you can't really truck hydrogen round the country the way you can with petrol. Hydrogen is both very leaky and very flammable, which makes for a really tricky combination to bulk ship. I'd imagine BOC do ship hydrogen round the country but not in anything like the quantities we'd need to replace the petrol economy with a hydrogen one. That would be billions of litres a year. I'm not sure it's feasible and, to be honest, I'm not sure it makes sense either. It would be better to have the 'filling stations' near a water source and let them crack the water for hydrogen at point of sale, rather than cracking it somewhere else and then shipping it to them. But that would mean each filling station would need access to a fairly major electrical supply.

b) Is tricky for the aforementioned reason - hydrogen will leak out of pretty much anything you store it in. Hydrogen molecules are the smallest molecules you can get and therefore the smallest things you're ever likely to actually come across. They can work their way through pretty much any seal or valve. So your hydrogen filling station would need some sort of way to catch the leaking gas and (if possible) put it back into the reserve, or you are literally losing money into thin air and making your filling station a fairly hazardous place to be into the bargain. Essentially, though, I think it's unlikely the filling stations of the future will have huge storage tanks full of hydrogen standing next to them or buried underneath them.

In the end, I don't think 'hydrogen filling stations' are actually practical, at least not as in 'take a petrol station and just replace what's in the pumps'. The idea of giving the general population access to a pump filled with compressed hydrogen gas and that each station may have a dozen of them fills me with horror and fear. I think what's actually more likely is we'll develop removable fuel cells, which will operate much like the replaceable battery systems people are talking about for standard electric cars. You pull into the station and remove the empty-ish fuel cell from your car, go into the shop and they either fill it up for you in safe environment or they just give you a replacement one that's full already (and yours gets filled and given to a later bloke). I remember the old Top Gear show where James May looked a electric cars and fuel cell cars and drove that weird concept car that you could change the body on. He showed a motor bike where the fuel cell was removable and was about the size of a small briefcase. If that was able to power a reasonable sized car for a couple of hundred miles and you knew that at that point you could either refill it quickly or get a fresh one, who wouldn't go for that rather than smelly horrible expensive petrol?

Maybe in the long term we could ditch natural gas and use the existing pipes to pipe it to our homes.
H2 cooker, H2 boilers, H2 genterators for electricity, H2 (via a compressor) for fueling cars.

Can’t you hold hydrogen in some form of inert foam and release it as needed?

They are slowly making headway, now they've been able to stimulate bacteria into creating hydrogen not by inducing a current but just by adding fresh and salt water.



From BBC clicky

If that can get perfected there won't be any need to transport hydrogen.

Actually if it were small and cheap enough to be available for households to install then you may not even need to go to a filling station if you could generate your own fuel at home from water and electricity. This would only be suitable for short journeys.

I don't see why just short trips. If you have the bacteria all you need is to fill up on water.

Whatever mechanism you use, you use it in two ways - either to provide bulk H2 which you can store in a 'fuel tank', or to provide an immediate flow of hydrogen to the fuel cell to generate the electricity to turn the wheels. if the microbial system can generate H2 in sufficient quantities to allow the fuel cell to move the car, you end up filling the fuel tank with water and the microbial cracking is effectively just part of the 'motor process'. That would be absolutely ideal. You could fill your tank pretty much anywhere, all you need to do is carry a bag of salt with you. You don't need much salt to make a saline solution.

In fact... isn't it partly a largely self-sustaining system? The exhaust from a fuel cell is... pure water. If you used some of your power to capture the exhaust steam, cool it and salinate some of it, you could feed it straight back into the system.

Wow. That could really be something.

The report I read said that it needed electricity to get the bacteria to generate the hydrogen, though that energy could come from anywhere. If it were as simple as adding water then it could be much better in terms of range.

Aye it's been progressing, they did need electricity to start the process but now they can do it with just water by the looks of things.

It'll take some time no doubt but at least it looks like it's heading in the right direction.


Wow, if you think about it you could just line up toilets instead of filling stations, just take a piss in your tank.

I wonder how long it will be before you get petrol/water stations offering tap water or premium mineral water as a more expensive option for performance cars?

Remember the "fuel" in these cells is the "organic membrane" which the bacteria eats. There's no magic involved. The bacteria have to get their energy from somewhere.

From the link:

"These results show that pure H2 gas can efficiently be produced from virtually limitless supplies of seawater and river water, and biodegradable organic matter"

Presumably you might be able to crap in the tank, but I doubt one dump would get you very far. It's going to need an industrial-scale process to generate enough energy for a long journey.