The Coming Hydrogen Economy?

This will only be scalable if we are clever enough to use dedicated renewable energy to produce hydrogen in situ, rather than grid connected power at those dedicated locations

The Hydrogen Future Ultimate Green Power?

To achieve this future requires the same kind of national committment that allowed manned lunar landings? Do we still have the leadership ability to do this?

The benefits of a hydrogen economy, relative to the current situation are large!

Barriers to achieving this Future:

Production of Hydrogen.

About 95% of the hydrogen we use today comes from reforming natural gas. The remainder, high-purity hydrogen from water electrolysis, is produced using electricity mainly generated by burning fossil fuels.

We can do much better than this by more fully utilizing the following techniques:




Some important equivalencies to consider in your regional energy portfolios if you want to seriously consider hydrogen production.

In principle, you could use a wind farm to make X number of liters of liquified Hydrogen or X number of KG of hydrogen on site. You could then transport that hydrogen, someway, to individual houses, and recover 90% of the KWHs that went in to producing it. This is cheaper than trying to build a 1000 km transmission line from a wind farm to an urban area.

Once standards are developed for handling and distributing hydrogen, the industry is going to wake up to this financial reality.

Some infastructre already exists:



Bottom Line: All of this is possible, but it will take 20 years of steady investment in compression technology, hydrogen distribution facilities and dedicated hydrogen production sites. It can be done. Will it be done?