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				Hydrogen Hopes Part 1 - A Hydrogen Sponge One major question to resolve if we're to use hydrogen is how to store it. Stan and Iris Ovshinsky invented a solid metal alloy that soaks up hydrogen like a sponge.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: In Germany recently, we checked out a car that's powered by a fuel cell and runs on hydrogen. Much of the auto industry is betting that cars like this are the future, reducing dependency on oil and, by putting out only water from their exhausts, reducing the emission of carbon dioxide, linked to global warming. It smells good, you know? Really, it smells like a laundry room. "Fresh laundry" is what we call it. Nice, moist air-- yeah, it's really nice. That'll turn out to be, like, a thing that people do, you know, smelling each other's tail pipes. ALDA: The car I was sniffing is also powered by hydrogen, but it doesn't employ a fuel cell. This is a Ford Focus, modified so that it's internal combustion engine runs on hydrogen instead of gasoline. It's also a hybrid, employing an electric motor to supplement its engine. ALDA: We've got hybrids on the road now that use gasoline and electricity, but here, electricity and hydrogen-- that... that seems like... it seems like we're standing next to a car of way in the future. I mean, how far in the future is this... is this car? The technology here is all conventional technology utilizing a new fuel. If we had fuel available, this car would be out in a very short period of time. ALDA: And that's the big roadblock to replacing gasoline with hydrogen-- actually, two big roadblocks: first, getting the hydrogen and second, distributing and storing it. We're going to tackle the storage issue first. Like most experimental hydrogen-powered vehicles being tested today, this one runs on compressed hydrogen gas stored in a high-pressure tank. But hydrogen gas takes up much more room than the equivalent amount of gasoline, as well as raising concerns about safety. Last year, we met a husband-and-wife team who've been thinking about hydrogen for over 40 years, and they believe they already know the best way to store it-- as a solid. And you have an all-hydrogen car with solid hydrogen. Now, what's Iris got here? I brought a piece of your solid... ALDA: The sample Iris Ovshinsky has brought over is a proprietary metal alloy that soaks up hydrogen gas the way a sponge soaks up water. How do you get the hydrogen out of this into the car? Very easily, because we put it into a tank, which is back here... ALDA: Stan and Iris claim that their Ovonics tank can store twice as much hydrogen as a typical high-pressure tank containing hydrogen gas. ALDA: What's keeping us from having these in... either in our cars or at the gas station to produce hydrogen? What's... what's the roadblock? Uh... we're the best-kept secret. Now that we're on television... ( laughing ) maybe that'll change! ALDA: We were so intrigued by Stan and Iris Ovshinsky that we decided we'd go visit them. So here we are, a year after I drove off in their solid-hydrogen-powered Prius in California, arriving in the same car, borrowed for the occasion, at Stan and Iris's corporate headquarters in suburban Detroit. ALDA: Hello, Stan. Great to see you again. How are you? Good to see you. So nice to see you again. ALDA: We're starting at the place that's the heart of the Ovshinskys' now far-flung empire and an alchemist's dream. Here, a mix of metals is brewed into unique alloys that have in common a passion for hydrogen surpassed only by Stan and Iris's. When these alloys encounter hydrogen, they embrace it to form metal hydrides. The best known is the nickel metal hydride in the rechargeable battery of your cell phone or camera. 1,500 Celsius. ALDA: Stan Ovshinsky has spent decades tweaking the formula of these alloys, allowing hydrogen to slip into and out of their embrace in different ways. STAN: The hydrogen economy started right here years ago when we started building nickel metal hydride batteries. Before us, no one had ever built them before. Right, right. They tried to do it but they failed. It's kind of fascinating that the same stuff you make a battery out of you can store hydrogen in to run the car off of pure hydrogen. That's exactly right, yeah. Wow, that's... and just changing the recipe of this block of stuff. That's what we're about-- we invent the materials, we invent the products and we invent the production technology. ALDA: At the foundry, Stan told me that the production technology in this case involves soaking the alloy block in hydrogen to make it brittle. After we got the big chunk... Yeah, then you broke it up with hydrogen, and then you ground it up into a powder, and that's what you've got here? You're the expert now. How many elements do you have in each? Seven or eight. Seven or eight elements. Yes. And every particle of powder has those elements, yeah. That's right. ALDA: Stan wanted us to see close up how the hydrogen-absorbing powder can be loaded into a fuel tank. They're... they're wearing gas masks. ALDA: The next step is a reminder that this is a project still in the process of invention. We wanted you to see how realistic everything is, so there's no hidden things there. You can... obviously, in production, you would not be doing it that way. ALDA: When you mass-produce these, you won't have two guys pouring it into a measuring cup. That's what I'd like to make sure that the public understands. Yeah. This is not a science fair. What's amazing to me about this is that it is all done in a fairly simple way, and up here is where all the work was done. I mean, that's where the magic is. What I'm... ALDA: This little canister is already filled with Stan's magic powder. This canister we're going to charge with hydrogen, and you can actually hold this. We have a thermocouple here, so you can actually feel the hydrogen go in. Yeah, now it's getting warm. Yeah, so this is because the hydrogen is mixing with those particles. Yeah, it's reacting with the metal and it's forming the metal hydride, which is exothermic-- it generates heat. Uh-huh. So you can see the temperature rapidly climbing. ALDA: Now you could fry an egg on my hand. Okay, thank you very much. And, of course... ALDA: To avoid melting your fuel tank every time you fill it with hydrogen, this heat has to be got rid of, and of course Stan has a solution for that, too. We'll go and show it to you. Yeah, but what about this? I mean, they're liable to be watching. No cameras! Oh! ( laughter ) ALDA: The secret that Stan doesn't want competitors seeing is that inside each fuel tank is an elaborate heat exchanger-- these shiny things you can just barely see from back where you are-- a heat exchanger that when you fuel up with hydrogen will have water pumped through it. ALDA: Okay, now you need the water so that the... when you put that in it doesn't overheat-- when you put the hydrogen in. Right. Should I stand back? No. Want to do it? Yeah, is this all right? Sure. Just... just jam it on here? MAN: Just push it on. ALDA: A real hydrogen filling station would have to have a single nozzle with both water and hydrogen lines. But once you fueled up... How far can I drive on that tank? Well, this... that present one tank there is about 140 miles, right now with that present alloy that we're using. However, I'm working on other alloys and... When you say you're working on other alloys, you must have a list of things that you'd like to figure out. Stan always says he likes to use the materials from the mind rather than from the mines. ( Alda laughs ) STAN: And... And you do. ALDA: We'll be back later in the show to see how Stan plans to make hydrogen as well as to store it. Meanwhile, we're visiting a country that's perfectly placed to become the world's first to run itself entirely on hydrogen.

				Hydrogen Hopes Part 2 - Fire and Ice Iceland is furthest along in abandoning oil for hydrogen, thanks to its vast reserves of geothermal energy.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: Nowhere is the dream of hydrogen's becoming the fuel of the future more alive than here, perhaps one of the last spots on earth you'd expect such a revolution to unfold. We're in Iceland, whose tiny population of less than 300,000 is entirely dependent on imported oil, oil that provides the fuel for its large fishing fleet as well as its cars, trucks and buses. But if Iceland has no oil of its own, it does possess another underground resource-- hot magma from the earth's mantle welling up beneath a surface that is itself the product of volcanic oozings in the not-too-distant past. In many places, the magma comes close enough to the surface to heat the groundwater to well above its boiling point. We're walking in one of those spots now, where a borehole was recently drilled to test the potential of the geothermal energy just under our feet. ( steam hissing ) This is just one of many boreholes in the country. Yep. And you could make many more, you could put one pretty much anyplace? Well, I wouldn't say anyplace. It's more or less around the crack where the Atlantic Ridge goes through the island. It's remote controlled. We can open the borehole from away, so just push the red button and we'll see. ( steam continues hissing ) ( hissing gets much louder ) ALDA: The noise is shattering and a dramatic reflection of the power Iceland is sitting on, power in the last 50 years it has increasingly tapped, first to provide hot water for heating homes, and more recently to produce electricity. In fact, one of the country's major tourist attractions-- the Blue Lagoon, packed year-round with bathers-- is actually the waste pond for one of a half-dozen or so geothermal power plants in Iceland. SKULASON: This is more or less 100% renewable power, and then we can actually use that to make hydrogen. So we have a big resource to make a lot of hydrogen to power our own vehicles and our own ships, and then in the future maybe vehicles and ships in some other countries. And be able to transport the hydrogen, which is a way of transporting... Electricity. Electricity, and in turn that's a way of transporting your geothermal resource. Yep, yep. ALDA: In the last few years, Iceland as a nation has committed itself to this vision of becoming the world's first hydrogen economy, freeing itself entirely from imported oil. Jon Bjorn Skulason heads a venture jointly owned by the government and several major companies with an interest in hydrogen. It has as its symbolic beginning a rather lonely fuel station on the outskirts of the country's capital, Reykjavik. So, it looks like it's all set up for a car to pull up and fill up. It's actually ready. You can actually... it's... the station is full of hydrogen and if we had the vehicles here, we could actually fill our vehicles right now. So... it's ready for use. Now, where is this hydrogen coming from when it comes out? Well, we've got to go inside and show you where all the machinery is. So inside here you have all the major components of the electrolyzer, actually the mother of the station as we can call it. ALDA: The electrolyzer is actually simply a reverse fuel cell stack, producing hydrogen from electricity and water, instead of electricity and water from hydrogen. This is right next to, or part of, a regular filling station where they sell gasoline, right? And you can add a little building like this and produce hydrogen at a filling station and sell it. Yup. That's what we think, actually, will be part of the future is actually on-site production of hydrogen. You can see all these oil tankers driving around all over the world. If we designed the future like this, we don't need oil tankers driving around anymore. We still need the wires in the air with the electricity and of course the water system or pipeline system for the water system, but the distribution is on site. ( speaking Icelandic ) ALDA: A few weeks after our visit to Reykjavik's hydrogen filling station, it had a customer-- a delivery van loaned for the ceremonial opening of the station by one of the partners of the venture, DaimlerChrysler. But while Iceland is bullish on becoming a hydrogen economy, it does have unique advantages most of the rest of the world lacks-- a small, politically cohesive population and above all, of course, an abundant, cheap, clean and renewable source of electricity that can be made into hydrogen on site in stations like this one. ( crowd applauds ) In the United States, hydrogen is made today from fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal. But in the future, the hope is-- as in Iceland-- to make it from renewable sources and so eliminate the climate-warming gases generated by fossil fuels. And the ultimate renewable resource, of course, is the sun-- as we'll see next.

				Hydrogen Hopes Part 3 - Sunshine Hydrogen Alan checks out two ways to make hydrogen from the sun's energy -- first using solar panels, then using sunlight to grow algae that in turn are converted to hydrogen.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: The sun gets its energy from hydrogen, squeezing the hydrogen atoms until they fuse. So there's an appeal to the idea of using the sun's energy to make hydrogen here on earth. The idea caught Stan Ovshinsky's imagination in the early 1960s, when he sketched it out on a blackboard for his wife and business partner, Iris, and began experimenting in his storefront laboratory. His plan was to capture solar power to make electricity, then use the electricity to split apart water into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen. We went to the first solar meetings that we could and I'll never forget, they gathered together, had a big magnifying glass and burned pieces of wood and saw smoke coming out and thought they were using sun. And sold solar cigarette lighters... And things like that. STAN: So I said, "Well, that doesn't make much sense." And so I thought that we would approach it much differently. And I started then the idea of the hydrogen loop, complete loop, that... Well, where do you get your hydrogen? Start with solar energy from the very beginning. ALDA: Today the solar energy business is booming, with billions of dollars being spent on solar panels to make electricity. Almost all these photovoltaic systems employ cells made from delicate and expensive crystals of silicon. But from the very beginning, Stan and Iris Ovshinsky had a radically different kind of solar device in mind. Here, in a huge factory filled with machines Stan mostly invented himself, photovoltaic panels are made not from silicon crystals but from multiple layers of the exotic metallic alloys the Ovshinskys use in all their creations. Turned out literally by the mile, these solar panels soak up more sunlight than conventional cells and are far more forgiving. ALDA: So these holes you've put in here to show that it doesn't damage the... Yeah, for example, you couldn't do that... Why don't you bring that over. This is conventional crystalline. Very heavy and breakable. Now, would this produce the same amount of energy as this? No. Through the day you get more energy out of this than you do for that. And if you damage one little part of this, the whole panel is out, right? Now, here you've damaged a dozen places. Now, this is hooked up to this radio? And that's your only source of light? Yeah. ( radio begins playing ) ( laughing ) The radio goes right on! And you can actually take this out in the rain, and it'll turn that radio on? I do it all the time. I get my clothes all wet. ( laughing ) Because everybody says that, and then when we get back to the office if it's raining, I rush out ahead, they wonder what... Then I meet them with rain coming down, and I'm playing the music. ALDA: Several large structures all over the world are now clad in Ovshinsky's solar panels. While they're less efficient in bright sunlight than conventional solar panels, their ability to go on making electricity even in dim daylight-- for instance, in the early morning and late evening, as well as while it's raining-- makes them an attractive alternative. Stan's latest invention is an extraordinary machine longer than a football field that's able to make six strips of his solar panels at a time, each a mile and a half long. His goal is to make solar electricity as cheap as that made from coal, then use the electricity to make hydrogen. ALDA: When you first proposed to your people that you wanted to make something a mile long, what did they say? They thought he was crazy. They thought I was crazy. ( chuckling ): Crazy? Yeah, you know... I don't ask for... When I introduce a brand new thing, I never ask for taking a vote. We feel that we offer solutions here to what people think are the most serious problems right now: pollution, climate change and wars over oil-- as well as building new industries. So I think if you want to change the world, this is a better way than making political speeches. ALDA: Stan Ovshinsky's dream is to make hydrogen from the sun via solar-generated electricity. But there are other ways the sun could create hydrogen. Here on the roof of the power station for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the test of a plan to make hydrogen from sunlight using the everyday miracle of photosynthesis. The gas making the bubbles in these green tubes comes from the power plant's smokestack, and the green stuff is algae. Ancestors of the algae here once grew in the ocean, but now the microscopic plants are feeding on the flue gases and growing in the sunlight. Imagine a black box, that flue gases are coming into this box. What's coming out of this box is renewable energy and clean gases, okay? So instead of a black box, it's a green triangle. That's the only difference, okay? ALDA: The algae in Isaac Berzin's green triangle absorb most of the pollutants in the flue gases, leaving the gases some 80% cleaner. Every day, the tubes are drained to collect the last 24 hours of growth. They're harvesting the algae in there? How do they... BERZIN: They just drain... ALDA: They just drain it out. BERZIN: It's like a cow. They take a little milk from the cow, and you leave enough there for the new generation to catch up. ALDA: The algae in the buckets have done a job power plant operators usually have to install expensive pollution control equipment to do and that's to remove nitrogen oxides from their stack gases. The algae have also consumed most of the carbon dioxide, or CO2. Now, this has a lot of bad stuff in it. You wouldn't want to... No, actually not. Once the carbon... once the CO2 is turning into organic carbon, there's nothing bad in it. You mean a person could eat this? Yeah-- actually we start every... I'm shocked that the producers haven't made me eat this. Listen, I want to tell you something. We start every morning with a glass of algae drink. Get out of here! I don't believe that! No, come on. Listen, you can get it in Whole Foods. It's called a "Green Machine," or there are all kinds of generic names for it. It's basically algae drink. It's good for you. It's a health product. So after the algae eats all that bad stuff, it's just a nice piece of algae and... Because the chemistry changes. You're not making this to sell in a health food store? No, no, no. What do you do with it that makes it profitable to the company that uses this machine? Okay, very simple. You can take this and use it as a renewable energy source. But the first thing you have to do is to dry it. How will you dry it? Well, the flue gases are very hot, so use this excess heat to dry this goo stuff into something that looks like a powder. Okay? And if you... Okay, so you feel now in your hand the transfer of CO2 from a gas that no one knows what to do with it to a viable product-- you feel it in your hand now. Yeah, yeah. Okay? So that's a miracle. ALDA: And that's because the product can produce hydrogen. Today, power plant operators pay money to get rid of nitrogen oxides from their stack gases. And one day in the future they may pay to get rid of carbon dioxide, too, as evidence continues to mount that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels like coal is contributing to global warming. Isaac's idea is that power plants will install large arrays of his green triangles, earning money by cleaning the gases and also providing the raw material for what's called "bio-gasification"-- a process for turning plant material into hydrogen. This process does end up putting carbon dioxide back into the air, but... In a way, you've used the carbon twice. Correct. Exactly. So you get two hits at it. You get twice the use of the same amount of carbon. So this doesn't prevent carbon from going into the atmosphere, but it makes more efficient use of it. Exactly, so that's one of the reasons we think it's going to catch, because if you want to make an environmental revolution, you have two ways. Okay, one way is take stones and throw stones on the bad guys. Another way is, "Look guys, let's make more money. Yes, it's environmental, but let's make more money." So it's making a more efficient use of the current infrastructure of power production in this country. ALDA: So in Isaac's vision, a by-product of burning fossil fuels would be hydrogen created from waste gases and sunlight captured by his algae. Let me see you go first. Okay, cheers, guys. ALDA: And that seems to be a vision well worth a toast. You can turn this into hydrogen? Yeah. All right, I'll drink to that. ( laughing ) ( all laughing )