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Hydrogen fuel is used to propel NASA rockets into space, and certain car manufacturers are placing their bets on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles to advance sustainable mobility. Despite these promising applications, hydrogen fuel has yet to achieve widespread adoption.
Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan delves into the mechanics of hydrogen fuel, its potential for cleaner energy, and why it is still not the answer to our energy challenges.
Excerpted from Peter’s Sept. 21 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:
Is the hydrogen economy really the future? Or Is it all a farce? I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but it’s somewhere in between…
All the math and science behind using hydrogen checks out. And yes, it removes the carbon question from the equation, but where do you get the hydrogen from? Ideally, we would use clean energy sources to separate water molecules, but that’s too energy-intensive for solar and wind to get us there this century. We could source it from fossil fuels, but it would be more carbon-intensive than what we do now. So no utopia for us quite yet.
Some bridge technology uses ammonia to create hydrogen, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Ammonia comprises one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms; unfortunately, nitrogen is critical for much of the world’s fertilizers. And when you have to choose between having food with dirty energy or starving to death w/ clean energy…the answer is pretty straightforward.
So while this is interesting technology and SHOULD be experimented with, that does NOT mean we should start implementing this tech at scale. We’re working with finite resources here, so the tech needs to be thoroughly vetted and proven before we take that next step.
