3-4 years for hydrogen cars

Am I mis-remembering things, or was the Volt once shown at Test Track?

 

That volt concept is, to me, a joke. First off high current lithium chemistry batteries are very expensive. A single power pack to run a small remote control airplane weighing maybe 30 ounces can cost well over $100. That has enough capacity to fly the plane for about ten minutes, typically. Extrapolate that to a full sized car with practical capacity and you're looking at at least half the cost of the car being the batteries alone (which will only last about two years, lithium batteries do NOT age well, even if you let them sit and do nothing with them they'll still lose capacity over time). And I think that's a very conservative estimate. Power packs for medium sized electric planes can end up costing over a thousand dollars.
And I'm uncertain about the idea of using the fuel cell only to charge the battery.. it seems to me it should drive the car directly, although that may be wasteful. I need to read up more on fuel cells. But at the moment I don't think hydrogen cars are the answer yet, a hydrogen fuel cell is essentially just burning hydrogen (the end products are the same). At the moment we can only get significant amounts of hydrogen from natural gas. And that process releases CO2 just as if we were burning the gas itself. The only benefit is that the fuel cell should be more efficient, but.. if you have to charge up a battery then you're introducing a loss into the system again.

I have to admit that I've completely rewritten this post. Initially I said that I thought hydrogen fuel cell cars were a mistake at this point, that all they were doing was finding a new fossil fuel to burn (essentially). The article suggests that the process will somehow reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help the whole reliance on foreign oil thing.. but.. it'll still emit co2 in the conversion process, and natural gas is far more scarce than oil! Start widespread use of natural gas powered cars (again, essentially, they may technically run on hydrogen but the hydrogen at the moment would all come from natural gas) and the price of natural gas would skyrocket and we'd run out of it in record time.

However after I wrote it I did a search online on a concept that my dad sort of came up with one day. The idea of using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. He didn't know how to accomplish this, of course.. but just suggested the idea to me, and I've been thinking about it ever since. After I'd written the post declaring hydrogen vehicles a pointless technology for years to come I did a quick web search on the idea of using light to split water and found at least two different technologies that exist now that could do it!
Both involve nanotech objects, one uses nanotubes and one uses something that I've never heard of before and don't understand.
Suddenly I'm feeling optimistic.

See, this would allow us to make something like the solar cells we have now.. but instead of generating electricity it could generate hydrogen directly. I'm uncertain of the total efficiency of the systems.. but I think it's an interesting idea. I had initially suggested that an electric car (with a gas backup motor for long range use) powered by solar cells mounted on your house's roof might be an interesting option, the idea being to still power the car from a zero emission power source. But this would allow for a roof mounted cell that could generate hydrogen instead, and that fuel could also be used to power the house itself. Although there's always the hope of more efficient solar cells coming out that could at least partially power the house as well. You wouldn't have to grow your own hydrogen, of course.. but I've long felt that as long as our houses are being bombarded with solar radiation that we're trying to keep from heating up our houses we might as well capture it and use it for something else.

Perhaps I was wrong to be so skeptical. Is it just that all the news sources focus on the high profile actions of the big automakers rather than what's going on at the national renewable energy laboratory (NREL) at Golden, Colorado? It seems that the focus on energy issues has directed some additional funding to groups like this. At the same time I found out about the nanotech hydrogen generators I also ran across some discovery that's supposed to double the efficiency of solar cells for electrical generation.

Anyway, my main point is that I think the hydrogen fuel source is more important than the hydrogen car. If you can find a headline that says "3-4 years until widespread zero emission hydrogen generation sufficient to fuel the nation's cars" then I'll get excited. Until then the hydrogen car is just another way to creatively burn up fossil fuels and pump out CO2.