What About Hydrogen?

To date we have mainly focused on comparing electric vehicles with their traditional petrol and diesel counterparts to give consumers all the facts they need to make an informed choice to avert the climate crisis, while also saving money and aiding public health.

Of course, we’ve also done our bit to highlight how harmful hybrids are too – something so often overlooked.

But today we’re turning our attention to an alternative and emerging fuel source: hydrogen.

How could hydrogen be used in transport?

Despite the fact that it is easy to disprove the myth of range anxiety that has been so readily attached to electric vehicles, there remains an interest in having vehicles that have a greater capacity for covering longer distances without needing to refuel.

Is hydrogen sustainable?

This is still the big unanswered question that is still holding back the industry, and at the time of writing this article there are few assurances that the use of hydrogen could ever be as clean and efficient as electric vehicles run directly from renewable energy.

The issue lies in how the hydrogen is created and how it is stored.

To avoid going too deep into a chemistry lesson, despite being the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, hydrogen is rarely ever found on its own. It is always seeking to bond with something else.

Therefore, to get a constant supply of hydrogen – and stop it from bonding with another chemical – you either need a large amount of gas to create heat and pressure, or a lot of electricity.

Typically the most affordable method to do so is to use precious metals such as aluminium, which also require extraction and create emissions to be processed.

Once stored the hydrogen can either then be transported via pipelines – which are a common threat to local ecology during construction, and vulnerable to natural events like earthquakes or wildfires thereafter – or transported via ships and trucks to the point where it can be used by the consumer, much like with oil-based fuels.

These fuel miles greatly reduce the efficiency of hydrogen and require more fuel to be made to offset these inefficiencies.

What’s the cost?

On top of the potential for greenwashing around emissions, the financial cost of hydrogen is a major obstacle to its potential adoption.

On a consumer level, electric cars are currently available on the market from around €21,000, while the cheapest hydrogen fuel cell vehicle starts from €60,000. While many, somewhat understandably, bemoan the cost of EVs, hydrogen is far beyond the means of most people.

Meanwhile, the energy-intense process of extracting hydrogen for fuel cells means that the price to source the fuel is currently prohibitively expensive, and the cost is even higher where it is extracted using renewable power, as the investment in those energy sources needs to be offset.

And that’s before you take into account the investment in infrastructure to full up your car, ship, train or plane with hydrogen at the nearest pump

However, it is expected that the cost of hydrogen will drop in the coming decades as the technology becomes more refined and more readily available.

Will hydrogen be a viable emission-free fuel source? There are many advocate who would have you believe it, and in time they might be proved correct, but in the midst of 2020 and with just a handful of years to tackle our emissions before the full onset of climate cataclysm, it may just prove to be a costly distraction that we can ill afford.

What To Read Next