Can hydrogen-powered cars lead a transformation to a clean-energy economy?

While Toyota ostentatiously introduces the Mirai, a hydrogen car named with the Japanese word for “future,” enthusiastic media reports are celebrating hydrogen cars in general. The Mirai’s engine gets energy from hydrogen gas, yielding electricity for power, but only water—safely drinkable water!—for exhaust.

Where, though, does the hydrogen come from? At what cost financially and environmentally? It’s one thing to establish a boutique-scale hydrogen-car network around San Francisco or Boston. It’s quite another to realize what a Toyota executive, quoted in Fortune, extols as the “vision of a hydrogen society.” In that sense, are hydrogen cars really delivering the future?

It’s a discussion more than a decade old. In the 2003 state of the union address, President George W. Bush declared , “I’m proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.” With this new national commitment, he predicted, “our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom, so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.”

A few days later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof praised the president as “dead right” for “pushing toward a hydrogen economy.” A few days after that, a Times letter to the editor asked a starkly obvious question: “What research must be financed and conducted before we have any idea how to produce hydrogen cleanly and cost-effectively in economy-transforming volumes?”

That stark obviousness was already well understood among scientists and engineers. A year later in Physics Today, the question got a thorough analysis from George Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory, Mildred Dresselhaus of MIT, and Michelle Buchanan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They argued that “to achieve the benefits of the hydrogen economy, we must ultimately produce hydrogen from non-fossil resources, such as water, using a renewable energy source.” To bring hydrogen and fuel cells to the level of impact seen in past major energy sources and carriers, they wrote, “is a fascinating challenge and opportunity for basic science, spanning chemistry, physics, biology, and materials.” Crabtree also coauthored the 2007 Science magazine Perspective article “Don’t forget long-term fundamental research in energy.”

Crabtree, Dresselhaus, and Buchanan were explaining, for anyone who cared to listen, what would be required for heeding the principle that in willing an end, it’s wise also to will the means. You can’t get a hydrogen economy if you don’t yet know how to produce hydrogen cleanly and cost-effectively in economy-transforming volumes. In the late 2014 hubbub about hydrogen cars and the future, many in the media are scanting that principle.

Some are even gushing. In a breathless blurb, the Boston Globe’s Boston.com enthused , “There may be drawbacks to the [hydrogen] fuel cell-powered electric vehicle, but the positives of a cleaner environment, meeting future miles-per-gallon standards, and cutting dependence on oil-based energy seem to be no-brainer advances.” The Los Angeles Times went in a direction opposite from recognizing the hydrogen-production challenge, unskeptically repeating a Toyota boast that hydrogen fuel “can be made from almost any ‘feed’ stock, including natural gas, wind power” or “even garbage!” The Times did at least use the word boast, but didn’t mention that while the boast is technically true as far as it goes, drawbacks limit large-scale applicability for each of the extolled production methods.

The business site Forbes.com has recently run at least four hydrogen-car pieces omitting any mention of the production challenge, though a fifth article noted the present financial and environmental costs. “Even made from renewables,” it said, “hydrogen right now is expected to cost approximately as much as $4 per gallon gasoline.” The headline included the phrase “quixotic plan to sell hydrogen cars.”

Here’s a list of links to other recent major media coverage lacking mention of the production challenge: the Wall Street Journal , the Financial Times , Al Jazeera America , CBS , the Telegraph , the Guardian and the publication that calls itself “Canada’s #1 weekday and weekend newspaper,” the Globe and Mail . It’s easy to find more of the same via Google News.

It’s also possible, though less easy, to find at least some recognition of the production challenge. A commentary at the Detroit News declared, “Fuel cells are problematical because harnessing hydrogen is not simple or cheap.” Similar statements appeared at the Australian and the Daily Mail . Grist reported that new production technologies “are in the early stages of development, while others are getting cheaper and better quickly—but none of them are ready for prime time.”

Somewhat outside the popular press, that unreadiness for prime time seems more widely recognized. IEEE Spectrum, reporting on research published in Nature that could possibly lead in the future to simplification of the difficult process of separating hydrogen gas for fuel cells, emphasized that “it is extremely costly and energy intensive to isolate” the gas. In a recent three-part series, Scientific American reported an analyst’s view that using natural gas for hydrogen production is “unsustainable long term” and explained that the “challenge will be to take the promise of renewable energy-powered electrolysis” for taking hydrogen out of water “from the pilot level to commercial scale.”

But the opinion editors of the New York Times haven’t gotten that message. Their 30 November editorial sums up much about recent effusive media engagement of hydrogen as an energy carrier and prospective economy-transformation agent.

The editorial takes off from the Times‘s 18 November Science Times front-page piece “A road test of alternative fuel visions: Hydrogen cars join electric models in showrooms.” Times science reporter Kenneth Chang made clear the drawbacks to hydrogen production, including by summarizing the view of former US energy secretary Steven Chu. Chang says Chu remains skeptical, though less so than a few years ago.

In the “Science Times” a week later, a letter asserted that the “discovery of effective ways to produce hydrogen fuel by splitting water overcomes past obstacles to replacing oil with hydrogen.” Overcomes? Not just “diminishes”? How did Chang miss this huge news when he surveyed the hydrogen-power landscape?

The Times‘s hydrogen-celebrating editorial did stop at one point to recognize the production issue, if not the production challenge:

The editorial’s final line probably explains what’s really going on: “There is little doubt that the world will need many transformative technologies to deal with climate change.” In other words, let’s not spoil a happy prospect by examining the means actually needed to attain the desired end.

In researching this media report, I didn’t see a single article in the popular press pause to consider what Crabtree, Dresselhaus and Buchanan a decade ago called the “basic science, spanning chemistry, physics, biology, and materials” required for hydrogen to reach the level of impact seen in past major energy sources and carriers.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.