Could hydrogen-powered cars be the green answer to carbon emissions?

Today, there are 1.5 billion cars on the roads worldwide that are responsible for at least half of global carbon emissions. While green militants cry, “Ban the car!” engineers say, “Build a better one.” And hydrogen might just be the answer.

“We are talking about a truly green system where the only real requirement is logistics for the compressed tanks of hydrogen,” Gil Shavit, the chief business development officer and co-founder of GenCell, told i24NEWS. “This has gone from niche to mainstream, not just for cars, you'll see it also for heating. I think hydrogen as we see it will be the future.”

Traditional electric vehicles (EVs) have been pushed as the solution to carbon emissions. But their batteries are hard to produce and certainly not green to do so, and the electricity used to charge them often comes from coal, making many EVs steam engines with extra steps.

But hydrogen fuel cells don't have the same limits.

“We start to get an electrical current as a result of making water. Hydrogen comes in one side, oxygen from the other, and they become water inside. As they combine from two separate elements they release an electron, and that becomes electricity,” said Shavit.

So as long as you have a supply of hydrogen — which can be produced from water and any electrical source — so solar, wind or nuclear — you can generate power — and the only emission is water. Additionally, it's energy efficient.

“An internal combustion engine is only operating at 25% efficiency,” Shavit noted. “A fuel cell has about 52% efficiency — that's a big change. Because you lose a lot of energy in heat and external vibrations and mechanical motion, but here it's a quiet process, no vibration, low temperature — you gain a lot from this quiet electrochemical process.”

So if the technology is so perfect, why haven't hydrogen cars and hydrogen power taken over the world yet? The issue is a combination of logistics, costs and perception, but one Israeli company believes it has the answer.

“We need to be realistic. Oil and gas will be with us until at least 2060, no doubt. We have 4 decades to build new infrastructure, but it needs to be smart because right now we have centralized infrastructure and millions of miles of pipes,” said GenCell CEO and co-founder Rami Reshef.

That's point one: Drive down the street, how many gas stations do you pass? Compare that to how many hydrogen stations. Building a nation's worth of pipes is easier said than done. 

So what if you didn't need to?

“You can take this shelter here with the batteries inside, with the converters and the inverters, take it to the middle of nowhere and still have a high speed charge for an EV,” said Shavit.

That's one of Gencell's answers — standalone hydrogen powered charge stations — compatible with any EV on the road. Another issue though is costs, as hydrogen fuel cells cost tens of thousands of dollars, and hydrogen isn't produced at scale.

“At this stage, it's more expensive than oil and gas. And this is the main hurdle of adopting this technology, but in the long term it will be more competitive than oil. The goal is in ten years for one kilogram of hydrogen to be one dollar. The moment we get there, hydrogen will be on every street corner,” said Reshef.

Another GenCell innovation has been slashing the cost of the fuel cells themselves. The tech was originally designed for the Space Shuttle and uses a lot of platinum - $14 thousand a pound. GenCell has found a way to get the same results with Nickel - just $9 a pound.

But, while hydrogen cars do exist even now, for example, the Toyota Mirai and Hyndai Nexo, neither has been a huge market success. And that’s because hydrogen has a bit of a bad rap. Yet, the bottom line is that hydrogen is safer than the cooking gas we use at home every day. There are 20 million tons produced every year - there is safety regulation and infrastructure out 

OECD data backs that up, but until hydrogen is a regular part of people's lives public perception is unlikely to change. However, standalone infrastructure like hydrogen powered charging stations have already been rolled out at power stations and hospitals worldwide.

Give it a few years, it might just roll into your garage too.