Are hydrogen fueled vehicles for real?

You may ask yourselves if hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are for real. If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said may be ‘but’. And there was a big ‘BUT’. The ‘BUT’ was about the hydrogen vehicle itself. It was the cost of acquiring the vehicle that was the biggest hurdle. Today, I am pleased to say that things have dramatically changed.

So if you ask me today if hydrogen vehicles are for real, my answer to you would be ‘how many hydrogen vehicles do you want?’. I can supply you with 20, 30, 100, 1000 hydrogen vehicles!. So if you are looking for a hydrogen vehicle, the good news is, you finally can buy it.

I am pleased to say that hydrogen vehicles are off the shelf now and they are here to last. The only problem now is that you would need to wait sometime to get it as there is a waiting list. But who cares as the vehicles are available. It is the lead time that is the issue, with an average of six month waiting time. This is not too bad when considering that a year ago you had to beg a manufacturer to sell you a vehicle.

Well time has finally changed and everyone can purchase such hydrogen vehicle. But I would say that these are still not for the wider public. I am sure you guessed why. Their cost is still high when compared to your standard vehicles, hence not accessible to everyone and especially to the wider public.

But even if the cost is high, there are many applications for these hydrogen vehicles. Among these are simply the defense sector (hydrogen fuel cell cars are silent), public sector and the delivery sector such as the mail, shopping delivery, with owners of fleets being the main target for such vehicles.

Why are they so good for the delivery sector? Well it is quite simple, you can have the production of the fuel and its consumption in the hydrogen vehicle completely free of emissions. You can also produce your own fuel! So if your fuel is costly you large sums of monies and that you have a fleet of vehicles, then you can produce what we would effectively call free fuel.

Let us have a look at this. Let us first investigate the production of the fuel. Hydrogen can be produced from water using a process called electrolysis. When you electrolyze water, you simply inject current into a water tank by energizing two electrodes. When the electrodes are energized, they split the water into hydrogen and oxygen (they divided water ‘H2O’ into H2 and O2). You store the hydrogen as the fuel.

Let us take the idea of electrolyzing a bit further. If we use green electricity, such as electricity from a hydro, wind or solar system, and you use that electricity to power up an electrolyzer, then you effectively produce green hydrogen fuel. The formula is quite simple really; green electricity is used to electrolyzer water which then produces green hydrogen fuel.

The produced green hydrogen can then be dispensed into a hydrogen vehicle tank through a hydrogen fueling station. If the hydrogen is of green nature (produced from green electricity), then the vehicle can be badged as being ‘green’.

The best part here is that if the vehicle uses a hydrogen fuel cell, then there is no CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle and its fuel. The reason is that a hydrogen fuel cell only by-product is water. So if you look at the full cycle of our fuel, we start with water to produce the hydrogen using an electrolyzer and we end up with water coming off the hydrogen fuel cell installed in the vehicle. The complete cycle from water and back to water is achieved. Such cycle is completely green if you use green energy in the first place.

In conclusions, hydrogen vehicles are now available for anyone to purchase. They are still very expensive and not available to the general public. However, they provide a unique selling point to companies that aim to have zero carbon emissions. Hydrogen fuel can be produced using green electricity and the hydrogen vehicles are completely free of emissions. So if you have a fleet of vehicles that you want to run on free fuel and completely free of emissions, or you just want to buy a hydrogen vehicle, then just click on this link to find out more.