Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Just a few years ago, hydrogen fuel cells were portrayed as the wave of the future. President George W. Bush created a billion dollar initiative to have fuel cell powered cars replace gasoline powered cars, but, four years later, few people have even seen a hydrogen fuel cell car.
Hydrogen fuel cells work through producing electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen. They are similar to batteries, except that they consume their reactants, which batteries do not. The only product of the reaction, besides energy, is pure water. Hydrogen is necessary in order to power a fuel cell, which is one of the major problems with the proliferation of fuel cell technology. There is no infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cells like there is for gasoline powered engines, which, according to Michael Schirber of livescience.com, has created a “chicken and egg” problem. There are few hydrogen fuel stations that have been built so far, mostly in places such as southern California and New York, compared with over 170,000 gasoline stations nationwide. Consumers will not by hydrogen fuel cell cars when there is now way to fuel them, especially not when they have the option of buying the far more feasible gas powered car. However, the number of hydrogen fuel stations will not increase if there are so few hydrogen fuel cell cars on the road (www.livescience.com).
Are hydrogen fuel cells the right path to take? It could be many years until fuel cells are developed enough to be feasible for mass production, and even then it will be difficult to create an infrastructure for them. According to some estimates, hydrogen stations “might not be profitable for the first 10 to 20 years” (www.livescience.com). On top of that, hydrogen fuel cells are not truly as good for the environment as car companies would have consumers believe. It is true that the fuel cells themselves produce no green house gases, but the production of the hydrogen fuel itself is done through the combustion of natural gas, which produces just as much green house gas per mile as a car running with an internal combustion engine would. A pound of hydrogen fuel (equivalent to a gallon of gasoline) would cost around $2-3, meaning that consumers would not save a great deal on fuel, but would have to spend a great deal more on a car. So not only is the hydrogen fuel cell economically infeasible, it is not helpful to the environment and does not make sense logistically.

Bibliography

“Whatever Happened to Fuel Cells?” Livescience 5 Nov. 2007
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