Something that caught my eye last week was the testing of a hydrogen fuel car in Queensland where the hydrogen was derived from ammonia – making it a truly carbon-free fuel.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Over the past ten years, research has been undertaken to produce ultra-high purity hydrogen using a unique membrane technology.
This breakthrough means that hydrogen can be safely transported and used as a mass production energy source.
Australia’s current renewable energy sources solar and wind can be used to produce the hydrogen, but until now the highly-flammable element has been difficult and dangerous to transport long distances because of its low density.
By turning the hydrogen into ammonia, the problem of mass transportation is effectively solved.
As with electric cars, most of the major vehicle manufacturers are already developing vehicles that can take hydrogen fuels – the problem has been how to get the hydrogen to the fuel outlet.
The advantages hydrogen has over electric are the distances travelled on a tank and the time taken to fill up.
So how does it work?
Colourless, odourless hydrogen gas passes through a fuel stack, where it interacts with oxygen, a process which generates electricity and creates water, the car's only emission that dribbles out of little tube at the back.
Like electric cars, hydrogen cars using hybrid technology are quiet to drive.
But the hydrogen models such as the Toyota Mirai, which holds five kilograms of compressed hydrogen in its tank, are quicker to refuel and have a longer range. Some of the current vehicles being tested take about three minutes to refuel and have a range of 550 kilometres.
The other big hurdle is refuelling infrastructure. Like electric cars, Australia is not yet ready to go with another fuel source for vehicles.
The infrastructure to set up for hydrogen refuelling does not come cheaply and is estimated at more than $2 million to establish a refuelling station.
It's worth pointing out hydrogen fuel cell technology is not new — NASA used them to power rockets for decades — but car manufacturers can now make fuel cells small and mobile enough to fit inside passenger cars.
But don’t expect to see a hydrogen-fuelled car on our roads any time soon. At present there are only around half-a-dozen demonstration models in Australia and they are constrained by a lack of refuelling options.
