Hydrogen highway: it's a long, hard road ahead

Remember when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger kept talking about a hydrogen highway so he could combat global warming and still drive a Hummer?

Well, although several manufacturers are hooking up Hollywood stars with hydrogen-fueled cars, and they're apparently (pardon the pun) a gas to drive, if you thought that the Hydrogen Highway would open sometime soon, well...sorry, but there will be some delays. Oh, and it turns out the Hydrogen Highway is a toll road.

A new study released today by the National Academies of Science spells out the bad news. The only way switching to hydrogen-powered cars would have much of an impact on greenhouse gases is if they took over a large share of the auto market. But the NAS report says the maximum practicable number of hydrogen vehicles that could be on the road by 2020 is 2 million.

Not until 2023 would the total cost of fuel cell vehicles, including the cost of hydrogen fuel over a vehicle's lifetime, become competitive with conventional vehicles. At that point, the number of hydrogen vehicles on the road could at last grow rapidly, to nearly 60 million in 2035 and 200 million by 2050.

And who's going to pay for the cars until the price drops? "According to the committee, government support via strong policy initiatives as well as funding would be needed until at least 2023," an NAS press release says. "The cost to the government would be about $55 billion between 2008 and 2023; private industry would be expected to invest $145 billion over that same time period."

[St. Petersburg Times photo by Stephen J. Coddington]

In the meantime, though, continuing to drive petroleum-fueled vehicles isn't just bad for the environment. It's also "bolstering autocratic governments in a handful of petroleum-rich countries, emboldening them to challenge U.S. objectives and weakening their own democratic movements," reports the Los Angeles Times.

"This is perhaps the largest shift of wealth and resources in the history of the world economy," Andrei Illarionov, who was an economic advisor to former Russian President Vladimir Putin and is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the paper.

--Craig Pittman