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Greene 7 (2:06)
Topic(s): Biofuels / Future Transport / Hydrogen
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Video Transcript
Well, hydrogen, I think, is a very interesting long-term
technology and hydrogen vehicles are not anywhere near ready
for the market yet. They're too expensive, the fuel cells are
not durable enough, and of course we have problems of how do
you store sufficient amount of hydrogen on board the vehicle.
So I don't think, in the next 10 or 15 years, we're going to
see any significant impact of hydrogen on the transportation
system.
But there's been a lot of progress in the technology over the
past decade or so and it is one of the few options available,
electricity is probably the other, where we could have clean
energy for transportation and the quantities of energy we need
for transportation because hydrogen can be produced from many,
many different sources. We can produce it by dissociating
water by electrolysis, but right now that's quite expensive.
We can produce it by gasifying coal and capturing the
hydrogen. We can produce it from natural gas. We can produce
it from biomass. You can even use nuclear energy and thermal
processes to dissociate hydrogen and oxygen in water and
produce hydrogen that way. So there're many, many ways to
produce it, and there's no shortage of water from which to
make this hydrogen or, you know, materials containing
hydrogen.
So hydrogen has a lot of potential, but it also has very
serious technological challenges on the one hand to overcome,
and it also has this problem that it's a completely novel
energy system. And we would have to replace all of the
infrastructure on the fuel supply side, essentially. There's
nothing useful that we're doing now for hydrogen.
