Posted by Dave Klecha - Greenedia Editor on February 27, 2008 at 09:46:38 PM

One of the obstacles to what some call the hydrogen economy is the prospect of refuelling infrastructure.  Most naysayers for hydrogen envision that hydrogen will become a one-to-one replacement for gasoline--my car will have a hydrogen tank in place of the gas tank, I'll go to the hydrogen filling station when I need more, and we'll have to find some way to distribute hydrogen from massive refiniries to the filling stations.

But hydrogen isn't oil.  It's a major component of water, for instance, and thus in theory can be made anywhere.  The prospect probably puts a chilling fear into the hearts of oil company executives everywhere, but their goose is likely cooked any way that you slice it.  The future of transportation is not in fossil fuels, or any other sort of resource like it, unless ethanol becomes a lot more viable than it is right now.  And there's possibility there--hydrogen right now is no more or less viable than ethanol--but hydrogen has the advantage of orders of magnitude greater abundance going for it.

QuantumSphere Inc. seems ready to take one of the next steps forward in promoting hydrogen, however, using nanoparticles to increase the efficiency of electrolysis.  Electrolysis is the process by which hydrogen is extracted from water, and requires a great deal more energy put in than is gotten out.  And unfortunately, it's unlikely that more energy will be realized from the process than is put in--thanks to one of the laws of thermodynamics.  But hydrogen, in this case, is essentially about providing the sort of range that gasoline provides a car.  In that case, the trade-off of a slight amount of energy loss is worth it, so long as batteries fail to offer the same kind of range.

The nanoparticle-enhanced electrolysis could happen on such a small scale, the company hopes, that the entire process could be contained within the vehicle.  The car would still need to be plugged in at night, say, for the hydrogen to be generated, but there would need to be no new equipment to come along with the car and, indeed, no filling stations.  In the same way some are promoting the idea of home hydrogen fuel cells to make rooftop solar power a more realistic alternative; surplus solar energy during the day would electrolyze hydrogen, then used to power fuel cells at night or during days of extreme cloud cover.

Good for the consumer but bad for the big, powerful energy industry, including oil, would be this libertarian aspect to a hydrogen economy.  In fact, that trillion dollar collection of companies would cease to meaningfully exist, unless they moved into the manufacture and distribution of the necessary hardware.  The ability to generate power, the power to drive, the power to live in comfort, would be entirely in the hands of the people.