As you point out, inexpensive electricity is the key ingredient. My personal belief (and probably not a popular opinion) is that the (medium run or long run) answer is probably controlled nuclear fusion, which has been worked on for decades already.

By the way, I am not at all a fan of carbon sequestration (burying CO2). I think of leaking landfills and believe it to be a silly idea.

Jonathan

Your question about producing the hydrogen is a key question IMO. I just heard a talk by a scientist with a 30 year career at Haliburton. He said currently hydrogen is produced from methane, which is the cleanest of the hydrocarbons, and the carbon can be sequestered in the manufacturing. On a related note, crude oil has too high of a carbon content (relative to hydrogen), so extra hydrogen is also added from methane.

It is easy to make hydrogen from electricity, but then where is the electricity from? I know there are efforts to produce hydrogen via biological and/or solar methods but I don’t know how they are doing.

Aric

On April 6 (last week), the ClimateProgress.org blog had an article titled: The Breakthrough Technology Illusion. If you scan back to April 6, you can find it.

I have lifted a very small part of the article to make the point that hydrogen fuel cell cars are not likely to soon be even one percent of the global market:

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A critical historical fact was explained by Royal Dutch/Shell, in their 2001 scenarios for how energy use is likely to evolve over the next five decades (even with a carbon constraint):

“Typically it has taken 25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.”

Note that this tiny toe-hold comes 25 years after commercial introduction. The first transition from scientific breakthrough to commercial introduction may itself take decades. We still haven’t seen commercial introduction of a hydrogen fuel cell car and have barely seen any commercial fuel cells — over 160 years after they were first invented.

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Now perhaps things will not be quite as slow as in the future as they were in the past. That would be nice.

By the way, did anyone explain how we are manufacturing the hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells?

The last that I remember, it was created by breaking apart hydrocarbons, which probably raises the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Not good for global warming. Very extensive systems (not computer systems) analysis needs to be done to make sure that some new initiative isn’t overwhelmed by the law of unintended consequences.

Sincerely,

Jonathan

What a perfect comment! A hard rock song about a plug-in would be perfect. The Chevrolet Volt has a name that should work fine. Gettin’ a jolt, drivin’ my Volt!

David

Warm Regards,

HJB