Why a Hydrogen-Based Economy Makes Sense

Strangely enough, using oil, coal, methane, and LPG we are using nature's own method of binding up Hydrogen in a safe and relatively compact form (well, liquified-or-gasification coal fuel anyway, the rocks are cheaper to just burn it out but that's another tech...). Problem is, of course, that all this 'fossil' and 'vegetation' based renewable fuel is just solar power storage using plants. The obvious 'problem' with that is that you need to have an environment that supports plant life to use it.

So I suppose we don't really need to go too far into the 'Deep' future, as we are already in a Hydrogen-based economy, at least on Earth, though our natural Hydrogen does seem to be a bit tougher to get-to as it's all bound to Carbon. Space exploration may well be better off using the Hydrogen-cycle of water with solar used directly to break it up and reuse it, it just seems our nice protective atmosphere is blocking us from doing this quite as efficiently down here on the surface.

Now...how to push a bit of it our earthly liquid or gaseous Carbon+Hydrogen 'fossil' or 'renewable' fuels through a Fuel Cell membrane to reap the electricity and use the heat wisely without the NOx and CO and so forth? That appears to remain a bit of a challenge to bring cheaply to market.

At least nobody's serious any longer about CO2 being 'bad' for anything, especially not for the environment that needs it's release in order to grow green, lush vegetation, and now that 'Climate Change' has been demonstrated as such an orders-of-magnitude red-herring. On to the next breakthrough!

The article is a philosophical discussion. However, the "devil is in the details". I agree that we will need to go this direction ultimately; even substituting natural gas for coal and most of the other fossil fuels will only last a modest number of years (while reducing the carbon dioxide output per unit of energy). Problems I foresee include making the technology available with minimal centralization of licensing fees/profits, some valid safety concerns regarding flammability and explosion risks, and leakage because of the much smaller molecular size and correspondingly easier migration through small gaps between mating parts.

A philosophical problem would be from a widespread adoption of generation by individual users--anything that puts power (in all its meanings) to the people is a threat to empire, big business, etc.

--JMM