Environmental Engineering Reference
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require an infrastructure revolution. As a result, a classic chicken-and-egg
dilemma has arisen: the car companies do not want to make hydrogen
fuel-cell cars until there is a network of garages stocking hydrogen, and
the oil companies do not want to build this network of hydrogen stations
until there are cars to use it. There have been discussions between car and
oil companies to break this impasse.
Furthermore, electric batteries have enormously improved, thereby
reducing hydrogen's storability advantage over electricity. Hydrogen cars
are essentially just electric cars with their electric battery substituted by
a fuel cell and a little storage tank of hydrogen. If that hydrogen is going
to contribute to mitigating climate change, it will have to be renewably
produced. And that energy source will almost certainly be renewable elec-
tricity. Is it not, therefore, rather a detour to use renewable electricity to
produce hydrogen in order to get renewable electricity out of a hydrogen
fuel cell - particularly when a substantial amount of renewable electric-
ity could be put straight into a car battery and reliably stored within it?
Moreover, the progress in on-board electric battery storage for cars comes
A bus is refilled with hydrogen fuel in China's first hydrogen station, located in
Beijing Hydrogen Park. Jointly built by BP and its Chinese partner Sinohytec,
the station provides 100 kilograms of hydrogen a day, enough to fuel four
hydrogen-powered buses.
 
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