Where Does Hydrogen Come From?

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Ron Crogan with greencar.com. Today we're going to explore where does hydrogen come from. You know, we hear a lot about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen internal combustion vehicles. Those are going in a very good direction. There's a lot of work there. What we really don't hear too much about is where does the hydrogen come to fuel these vehicles. There are a handful of stations around in a couple of major urban markets, but for the most part hydrogen stations are very few and far between. The hydrogen that comes these days is normally made in a not sustainable way from natural gas. Natural gas is reformed, the hydrogen is extracted from the methane and you end up with hydrogen for industrial uses and also for the vehicles that we're seeing in demonstration now on the highways today. In the future that will need to be dealt with. There are great ways to make hydrogen. Hydrogen is all around us, but it has an infinity for other things. You can't just mine hydrogen. You can't just go find it and capture it. You have to create it. An example would be water. Water is H2O; two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. If you split it you end up with oxygen and hydrogen; an ideal thing. It takes a lot of energy to split water into those components. Today that electricity would come from the grid. Very energy intensive, not very efficient as far as the economies; it's not typically made that way. In the future as we use more and photomotaics in all likelihood as more nuclear plants are used in this country to provide more power for the grid there will be an abundant amount of electricity to split water and to create hydrogen. The ultimate way to create hydrogen is solar hydrogen or wind hydrogen where you're creating the electricity through those sources to power the electrolyzing process that separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. There are other ways as well to get hydrogen. We're going to see this evolve over time. In the end for hydrogen transportation to work it's going to have to be sustainable. The industry knows that. The automakers know that. The energy companies that are focused on oil, but have their eye on the future for hydrogen know that as well. In the end as hydrogen vehicles come to the market in the years ahead hydrogen is going to be created in more sustainable ways to go along with it."