HYDROGEN (CONT)

easily be liquefied. But the efficiency of the electric motor in combination with the fuel cell makes up for a lot. As regards energy volume, you need a lot less hydrogen to run a fuel cell car than petrol for a combustion engine car. Tanks will initially be bigger, but two trends that feed off one another will quickly eliminate that problem. The pressure the tanks can withstand will rapidly increase due to new composite materials that are also safer than the current steel tanks. In addition, the efficiency of cars will increase thanks to those same materials that are lighter and stronger. And more efficient cars need less propulsion power and therefore won't need more than a small fuel cell that, in turn, needs less hydrogen. And so developments feed on each other. The concept of the Hypercar was developed at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The Hypercar can travel 42 kilometres on one litre of hydrogen. See also www.hypercar.com.

Step 3: Hydrogen for sale everywhere
If more and more office buildings serve as basic fuelling stations for increasing numbers of fuel cell cars, it will become an attractive proposition for business people to make use of the same small-scale reformers located in the office buildings at other locations - e.g. petrol stations - to offer hydrogen to the growing fleet of fuel cell cars. Selling hydrogen will be attractive to these entrepreneurs because the sale will yield more than the traditional sale of petrol, as profits for petrol station owners are very limited due to stiff competition.

Step 4: Sustainable hydrogen production
As hydrogen spreads quickly through society in its capacity as the new energy carrier, the sustainable production of electricity will also increase. Solar panels will appear, first on the roofs of office buildings, then on increasing numbers of homes. This sustainable electricity will eventually make it possible to produce hydrogen sustainably using water electrolysis.

Electrolysis is still expensive - considerably more so than the production of hydrogen from natural gas using a reformer. But thanks to the quickly increasing efficiency of solar panels, the price difference will become ever smaller and ultimately disappear. Electricity produced using windmills is already competitive. However, solar panels lend themselves even better to the local, decentralised production of electricity that well matches the local production of hydrogen, which is increasing with the help of natural gas reformers. Ultimately, the natural gas reformer will be replaced by an electrolysis device the size of an electric kettle which everyone can use at home to produce hydrogen for their car and for the fuel cell that supplies their house with warmth and electricity. The decentralized production of hydrogen will ultimately create huge savings on the cost of maintenance and infrastructure installation.

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