Hydrogen: The Emerging, Clean Energy Commodity

Recently, an energy insider who should know better made the following comment, ‘The fundamental reason there will not be a hydrogen economy in your life is that the fuel providers have no incentive to build the infrastructure.  At the very best, they would be wasting money creating a  competitor  to a fuel they already make a large profit on, and, more likely, they  would end up spending tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure  that never  makes back its cost.  Nobody has ever proposed a solution to this chicken & egg  problem  and that of course is why hydrogen cars will  never be mass produced.’This statement is riddled with flawed logic.

 The last time I checked, the ‘fuel providers’ were not in charge of government energy policy; at least not officially. But then, the big energy players like Exxon Mobil do shape public policy to a dramatic extent through the unmatched influence they exert over our elected representatives.

Number nineteen on the American Film Institute’s list of all time famous movie quotes comes from a character named Howard Beale in the movie, Network. Beale exclaims, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’   That line pretty much sums up my attitude. Those of us who recognize the critical role hydrogen will play in building a sustainable energy future must not sit still and allow distortion and misinformation to shape the public discourse.  Unhindered, cream always rises to the top. In just the same way, hydrogen will emerge as a key component of the world’s clean energy future, not 20 or 30 years from now, but over the next decade.

My friend who is now driving a hydrogen fueled, Chevy fuel cell Equinox is experiencing the future first hand.  He finds it exciting and reassuring.  How soon it becomes reality for the rest of us is far more about politics than about technology. The technology is sufficiently advanced now.

President-elect Obama tells us change is coming on the energy playing field. We hope and expect that means he will be featuring both electricity and hydrogen prominently in his transformative game plan. 

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