While the ongoing research into hydrogen fuel cell cars is showing promising progress, we are still a long way from having hydrogen powered cars available for sale at our local car dealership. In theory, running a car on a hydrogen fuel cell is the ideal way to provide motive power. The fuel cell combines hydrogen with oxygen and produces electricity in the process, which is then used to battery batteries which run an electric motor to power the car. The process is clean and efficient and does not emit any greenhouse gases.

But, there are technical hurdles which must be overcome before hydrogen powered cars will be ready for the market. The first problem is coming up with an economical source of hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen can be produced abundantly by running an electric current through water to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen (the exact reverse of the process whereby electricity is generated in the fuel cell). Unfortunately, generating hydrogen in this way is expensive and causes greenhouse gas emissions if the electricity comes from a natural gas or coal fired power plant. The next difficulty to overcome is the problem of storing hydrogen for use in the car. Hydrogen is very difficult to contain and requires enormous pressure to store enough of it in a tank to be a good fuel source. There is research going on to try to store hydrogen in various solid forms, which might eliminate the need for high pressure tanks. The last major challenge is getting battery costs down to a low enough point to make a hydrogen fue cell car economical to buy.

None of these problems are insurmountable, but it may be several years before the first mass-production ready hydrogen fuel cell cars roll off the assembly line.