In Iceland, geothermal energy is used to produce hydrogen fuel which in turn powers cars.

While most of the major car companies are looking ahead to replace gasoline with hydrogen, not all of them are waiting for fuel cells to be perfected. Alan visits Ford's research center, where engineer Bob Natkin and his team have spent months tweaking and tuning a regular Ford Focus engine to run on a hybrid of hydrogen and electricity instead of gasoline. Like its purely hydrogen-fueled counterparts, the re-vamped Focus acts and feels like a regular car but emits no exhaust.

Natkin says the Focus hybrid would be on the road in no time if hydrogen were as easy to create, distribute, dispense and store as gasoline is today.

At the Challenge Bibendum, Stanford and Iris Ovshinsky tell Alan they have a solution to the storage problem--storing hydrogen as a solid.

Alan learns more about Hydrogen fuel from Jon Bjorn Skulason, an Icelandic scientist.

A decade ago, Stan invented the nickel metal hydride rechargeable battery used today in everything from computers to the Toyota Prius. Today, he and Iris show Alan an example of their new hydrogen storage device, a proprietary metal alloy that soaks up hydrogen gas like a sponge. They claim that the solid can store twice as much hydrogen as a typical high-pressure tank. In addition, hydrogen as a solid is more stable than gas or liquid.

But where will the hydrogen needed to fuel these new cars come from? In Iceland--which currently is entirely dependent on imported oil--scientists have identified a powerful potential source: hot magma from the earth's mantle.

Using boreholes to tap into groundwater heated by the magma, Icelanders now use hot water to heat homes and produce electricity. They hope to harness this same geothermal energy to produce hydrogen fuel.

In Reykjavik, Jon Bjorn Skulason shows Alan a hydrogen fuel station, which looks remarkably like a traditional gasoline station. But instead of drawing gasoline from tanks underground, this pump draws hydrogen from an electrolyzer--a reverse fuel cell stack that uses electricity to extract hydrogen fuel from water instead of generating electricity and water from hydrogen.

The United States lacks the vast geothermal reserves that Iceland has, so identifying how hydrogen fuel will be made and how it will be distributed pose trickier questions here. Though hydrogen can be made directly from natural gas, coal or even petroleum, the environmental effects of these methods must be considered. And as in Iceland, hydrogen can be made with electricity--which itself can be generated in many different ways.

Despite these questions, Larry Burns of GM feels good about the future of hydrogen cars. Borrowing a line from the movie "Field of Dreams," he tells Alan, "If you build it, they will come."

For more on this topic, see the web feature:
Meet the Ovshinkys