What are some problems with using hydrogen gas as a fuel?
Hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Currently the main place we get hydrogen from is natural gas, and the process emits as much CO2 as burning the natural gas directly, so there’s no benefit. Theoretically you can get hydrogen from water via electrolysis; however, electrolysis is currently an extremely inefficient process, and you have to put in a lot more energy than you can get out by burning the hydrogen as fuel, so there’s no point. So the first problem with hydrogen cars is that we don’t have a good source of hydrogen fuel. The second problem is that even if we did have a good fuel source, we don’t have any transportation or storage infrastructure set up. There are no hydrogen refueling stations, and to build such infrastructure would cost billions of dollars. On top of all that, there’s already an alternative fuel with the infrastructure in-place and the technology advancing rapidly – electric cars. Because of all those reasons, it will at least be a few decades before hydrogen
