Hydrogen is an excellent energy CARRIER, however it’s 100% impractical as an energy SOURCE.

I hope you include yourself in that snide little comment. Read my above post, Hydrogen is not that explosive in normal atmospheric conditions. Go look at video of the Hindenburg burning. It doesn’t disappear in a huge explosion, it burns like a car that has had its gas tank ruptured would.

Now you do have a point with a 10,000psi bottle rupturing, that can cause quite a bang. But consider that people all the time walk around with bottles of medicinal oxygen at around 2000 psi. That is a true bomb ready to go off at the slightest spark. At work we had to attend a safety class for dealing with high pressure oxygen safety. It can be some scary stuff.

To travel ~300 miles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles need about 5 kg of H2. At room temperature in its gaseous form, that’s enough to fill up a small room. Compressed at 10,000 psi, the tank will still take up your entire trunk. Liquid H2 is also inefficient, as about 1/3rd of the energy in H2 is spent converting it from gaseous to liquid form, wasting energy and volume.

One of the more promising methods of hydrogen storage is storage in complex metal hydrides – which are solid state alloys that absorb hydrogen at high pressures and release hydrogen at high temperatures (vehicle operation temperatures). These hydrides come in forms like LiBH4 or NH3BH3. The two problems concerning researchers in this field are a.) finding high storage density hydrides that release in the correct temperature window and that b.) release hydrogen fast enough. This is really the bottleneck – once a material is found that satisfies these parameters, the hydrogen revolution will almost inevitably continue.

A quick reply to the article and other comments: the infrastructure doesn’t exist because hydrogen vehicles are not yet practical. Once the technology is found to make hydrogen vehicles practical and cheap, the infrastructure will come about quite naturally.

As for hydrogen generation, many interesting renewable methods are being developed to do it via H2O electrolysis with solar power and excess wind-power. But like I said earlier, the driving force right now is still on finding a solution to hydrogen storage, rather than these other things that we will worry about later down the road.

- I’ve tried posting this two or three times, if there’s a time delay sorry if this comes up several times.

To travel ~300 miles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles need about 5 kg of H2. At room temperature in its gaseous form, that’s enough to fill up a small room. Compressed at 10,000 psi, the tank will still take up your entire trunk, and about 1/3rd of the energy in H2 is spent converting it from gaseous to liquid form.

One of the more promising methods of hydrogen storage is storage in complex metal hydrides – which are solid state alloys that absorb hydrogen at high pressures and release hydrogen at high temperatures (like vehicle operation temperatures). These hydrides come in forms like LiBH4 or NH3BH3. The two problems concerning researchers in this field are a.) finding high storage density hydrides that release in the correct temperature window and that b.) release hydrogen fast enough. This is really the bottleneck – once a material is found that satisfies these parameters, the hydrogen revolution will almost inevitably continue.

A quick reply to the article and other comments: the infrastructure doesn’t exist because hydrogen vehicles are not yet practical. Once the technology is found to make hydrogen vehicles practical and cheap, the infrastructure will come about quite naturally.

As for hydrogen generation, many interesting renewable methods are being developed to do it via H2O electrolysis with solar power and excess wind-power. But like I said earlier, the driving force right now is still on finding a solution to hydrogen storage, rather than these other things that we will worry about later down the road.