Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The fate of the enormous
Hindenberg
passenger zeppelin did not inspire
confidence in hydrogen-powered transportation.
many engineers in the early part of the 20th century were excited by
its possibilities. It received a very bad setback in the 1937 Hindenberg
disaster, when the hydrogen-filled German zeppelin burned up, killing
many of its passengers. Interest in it revived in the 1970s with the rise
in oil prices and the susearch for alternative fuels. Pro-hydrogen fuel
enthusiasts have waxed lyrical about “the hydrogen economy”, the scale of
which is partly due to hydrogen's abundance, but also a recognition that
its use as a fuel would require an infrastructure revolution. (One writer,
Jeremy Rifkin, wrote a book with the wonderfully understated title of
The
Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the
Redistribution of Energy on Earth
.)
The problems of storage and infrastructure that would have to be solved
for a hydrogen economy to emerge have become more and more evident
over the years. Hydrogen has to be stored at pressure, and requires special
pipelines or containers for transport. (Some people thought in the 1970s
that the natural gas pipeline network could be used, with an increasing
ratio of hydrogen fed into it - an impractical idea for many reasons). Talk
of the hydrogen economy seems to be partly a celebration of hydrogen's
abundance, but it's also partly a recognition that its use as a fuel would