As I detailed at length in 2009 when President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu wisely tried to kill the program, “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective.”
In this post I will focus on the climate issue. I’ll discuss the equally daunting practical issues in Part 2.
There are two huge problems with fuel cell vehicles (FCV) for those who worry about global warming and hence net greenhouse gas emissions:
In general, some 95% of our hydrogen is currently produced from natural gas, or, rather, from the methane (CH4) that compromises most of natural gas.
Making hydrogen from renewable resources like carbon-free electricity is expensive and an incredibly wasteful use of that valuable resource.
“Currently, the most state-of-the-art procedure is a distributed [on-site] natural gas steam reforming process,” explains Ford Motor company, which is working on its own fuel cell vehicle. “However, when FCVs are run on hydrogen reformed from natural gas using this process, they do not provide significant environmental benefits on a well-to-wheels basis (due to GHG emissions from the natural gas reformation process).”
It’s actually worse than that. Julian Cox at CleanTechnica has gone through the well-to-wheel (WTW) life-cycle GHG emissions of FCVs, EVs, and other vehicles in great detail in June post revealing that FCVs aren’t green. Cox notes that “90% of the Californian Energy Commission hydrogen infrastructure budget has been earmarked for non-sequestered fossil fuel production of Hydrogen in return for lip service of future environmental benefits that can never be forthcoming.”
Tesla Trumps Toyota: Why Hydrogen Cars Can’t Compete with Pure Electric Cars - by Joe Romm
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