Hydrogen hype?

It's hard to argue with the relentless logic presented by Joseph Romm in his new book The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate (Island Press, $25). Hydrogen and fuel cells have enormous potential for freeing us from the environmental nightmare and strategic disaster that is dependence on fossil fuels, but technical hurdles will likely keep them off American roads until 2040 at the earliest. While the cell itself is a proven technology, making it work in the difficult moving environment of the automobile is a huge challenge, compounded by our current lack of standardized hydrogen refueling. What's more, we've yet to find a way to separate hydrogen from its chemical bonds without expending large amounts of energy and releasing copious amounts of greenhouse gas. Renewable strategies for hydrogen are promising, Romm writes, but still cost-prohibitive. He argues that we should be putting more effort into getting motorists into hybrid vehicles like Toyota's Prius and the Partial-Zero Emission Vehicles (PZEVs) that are turning up in states that follow California's stringent emission rules.