Just say no, to hydrogen

So hydrogen fuel-cell cars aren't likely to have a positive impact on the global-warming problem in the next few decades?

The current costs of the fuel cells are about 100 times the cost of internal-combustion engines. Right now, they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. And getting them, frankly, to be within a factor of 2 of a regular car will be a stunning scientific achievement. I'm not expecting that to happen for at least two decades. These are probably going to be quite expensive cars. So, as a solution to global warming, if you want to reduce emissions, there are other things that you can do.

The second point is that any clean energy fuel that you might make hydrogen out of, like natural gas or renewable energy, can achieve a lot more emissions reductions, a lot more cost effectively, on the grid.

So let's say, if you've got natural gas, you can save a lot more carbon dioxide and other pollutants by displacing coal plants. And that gets you far more CO2 savings than going to all the trouble of converting the natural gas to hydrogen, shipping it to your car, squeezing it into your car, and running your car.

It's pretty straightforward and cheap, compared to going to all the trouble of building a massive hydrogen infrastructure, and buying all these new cars.

Is hydrogen distracting us from what we should be doing now to slow down global warming?

I think it's a distraction now. Distractions are not fatal. But if people actually start spending a lot of money on cars or infrastructure, then I think that we're seriously talking about a diversion, and in fact a sidetracking of what should be our central focus.

I do think that hydrogen research and development is useful, because we're going to need a substitute for oil in the long term, and hydrogen is one possibility. But it's not the only one. So, it deserves research and development funding for probably another two decades, before we're ready to do much more.

What do you think, then, of Schwarzenegger's "Hydrogen Highway" in California or Bush's Freedom Fuel initiative?

The Bush administration is mainly spending money on R&D. I ran the program at the Department of Energy that does all this R&D, and when I was there I was part of a team that increased spending on hydrogen by a factor of 10, and now we're increasing it more. I certainly welcome people who want to increase spending on energy R&D. What troubles me is the people who want to start building infrastructure.

That would be like California's program?

To be honest, the governor has said that infrastructure is going to be built, but they haven't put up any money for it, because the state doesn't have any money for it.

But anyone who wants to build infrastructure now, I think is just way premature. We don't even know what the best infrastructure would be.

Hydrogen is a very diffuse gas, and there's a reason why essentially all vehicles in this world run on liquid fuels. They're easy to transport and they store a lot of energy, which they can release very quickly. We have not solved the problem of how you can store enough hydrogen on board to make your car go the distance that we've come to expect: 300 or 400 miles.

If you push the cars out now, you're essentially saying you're going to push cars with very high-pressure storage, which means that you for instance would have to buy a car where you would be maybe a foot or less away from a compressed hydrogen tank, which might be 5,000 or 10,000 pounds per square inch of hydrogen. And I don't think that most people are going to be very comfortable about that. And if you talk to most automakers, they don't think that the public is going to accept that.

The other thing is that you would have to build infrastructure that would fuel up the tank at super-high pressure. So, instead of just pumping out gasoline, you'd have to have very high-pressure devices that would squeeze out ultra-high-pressure hydrogen. And I think again that that is a very specialized infrastructure. And if it so happened that 10 years later someone came up with a better storage method, all that infrastructure would be stranded.

If you have followed the alternative-fuel-vehicle issue over the past many years, we've failed at deploying electric vehicles and natural-gas vehicles and ethanol vehicles, not because of the vehicles, but because the fuel providers are afraid that if they build this infrastructure, and the vehicles turn out not to be popular with the public, they're stuck with all these assets that never get their money back.

In the case of electric vehicles, didn't they succeed in building some infrastructure, at least in California, but now there aren't any cars?

Well, they built the infrastructure, and GM in particular and some others delivered the cars, but the cars weren't good enough to attract enough drivers to sustain the infrastructure.

After all, if I build a fueling station to provide an alternative fuel, I need a certain number of customers in order to make my money back. If one or two show up everyday, I'm probably stuck with an asset that's not going to get me any money back. This is the famous chicken-and-egg problem. How do you convince the infrastructure people to build the infrastructure until the cars are a proven success? But how do you get the manufacturers to build the cars until there is an infrastructure? Because obviously you're not going to buy a hydrogen car unless you know that you can fuel it.

And it's an even bigger problem with hydrogen, given the existing technology. We don't have a solution to the storage problem, so most hydrogen cars have a limited range. If you combine a limited range with limited fueling options, you're going to be fairly paranoid all the time that you're going to run out of hydrogen. Because, unlike gasoline, if you run out of hydrogen, you're out of luck. Someone can't just pull up with a can of hydrogen and stick it in your car. It's going to need a very specialized device or station in order to do it.

Next Page: Wanna save the world? Drive a hybrid

• View blog reactions