Governor Arnold has initiated a project to build 200 refueling stations for hydrogen cars in California. Perhaps he believes, as many do, that hydrogen is a plentiful source of clean energy. However, that is not true, because there is no free hydrogen on earth. All hydrogen is chemically bound into compounds like coal, oil, natural gas, and even water, which means that it will require as much or more energy to extract the hydrogen as the energy you can obtain from it. Therefore, hydrogen is not an energy source at all; it is merely a portable form of energy storage, like a battery.
The most economical source of hydrogen is natural gas. But you can run cars on natural gas directly, so why bother with hydrogen? One possible reason: the source of the pollution (that is, the process of cracking the natural gas) can be physically removed from cities. City traffic run on hydrogen would then be pollution-free, but at tremendous cost; current hydrogen fuel cells cost nearly 100 times as much per unit of power produced as an internal-combustion engine.
Some have proposed to produce hydrogen from water, using the energy from renewable energy sources . However, Hydrogen is very costly when produced that way. A February 2004 ExxonMobil study showed that hydrogen is five times more expensive than gasoline when produced from wind, and 17 times more expensive when produced from solar energy.
Nor is hydrogen production the best environmental use of renewable energy (for those who care about carbon dioxide). A unit of wind or solar energy that is used to displace coal in electric power generation saves 2.5 times more carbon dioxide than using the same unit of wind or solar energy to replace gasoline with hydrogen in cars.
From the standpoint of energy policy, it makes no sense to run cars on hydrogen taken from oil or natural gas because those energy sources can better be used to run cars directly. So under what conditions would hydrogen ever be used in cars?
If we had to rely entirely on energy sources that could not be used in cars (like coal and nuclear, for example), then maybe we would need H-cars. That day won’t come in Governor Arnold’s lifetime, if ever.
Bottom line: Government doesn't pick winners in the marketplace, just losers.
Related article: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=15549