Hydrogen is not a source of energy - it’s a way to store energy. Specifically, as a response to Peak Oil, hydrogen is a way to store electrical energy as a liquid fuel that in turn can, in theory, be used to power vehicles. In this way, it’s seen as a partial substitute for gasoline.

But hydrogen is not a naturally occuring substance - it has to be generated, most commonly by electrolysis: using electricity to break up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be liquefied and put (under ultra-high pressure) into specially-designed vehicles. Output from the tailpipe is, indeed, water vapor. (For those who think hydrogen will solve climate change, remember that water vapor is, in fact, the most common greenhouse gas, responsible for 1/3 to 2/3 of the global greenhouse effect. What effect hundreds of millions of hydrogen cars would have on the atmosphere is a subject left to other websites to explore.)

There are several key problems with hydrogen as a liquid fuels substitute. First, it’s difficult to maintain the pressure needed to keep and transfer it — to use it on a mass basis, every service station in the world would have to be re-outfitted. It’s also highly corrosive, meaning that it can’t, for instance, be pumped through existing natural gas pipelines - an entirely new infrastructure of pipelines would have to be built for delivery to all those new service stations. Furthermore, the technology to build a mass-produced hydrogen car has and continues to be 15 years away, and would require unprecedented leaps in technology. Acknowledging that, BC’s own Ballard has sold its automotive fuel cell assets to Daimler and Ford - in effect getting out of the car business, which won’t be profitable in the foreseeable future.

But the biggest problem with hydrogen is EROI - Energy Return On Investment. It always takes an investment of energy to get energy, whether it’s oil, electricity, or Count Chocula cereal. The question is, how much energy do you get back for the energy you put in? Globally, conventional oil is probably at a ratio of between 11 and 15 to 1 - that is, 11-15 barrels of oil back for every barrel’s worth of energy you invest. Gas and coal are higher, nuclear is lower; ethanol is probably 1 to 1 (that is, you get back about what you put in) and the tar sands may very well be less than 1 to 1 when all the energy subsidies are included.

And in that same range is hydrogen - there’s a net loss of energy involved in creating it, and then burning it to get the energy back. This is why Ballard and other companies see the economic future of hydrogen in large-scale storage, where it may be helpful in shifting to intermittent sources of power like wind and solar, and guaranteeing backup power to corporations in an era when our electrical supply may become increasingly unreliable.

But will there ever be a “Hydrogen Highway”? No. It’s PR, and worse, another waste of scarce money and resources when there are very real solutioins (like Europeanization that we need to be pursuing in the short time we have left to get the Lower Mainland ready for Peak Oil.