Hydrogen fuel station opens
Updated on 17 April 2008
Britain's first hydrogen fuel station has opened at Birmingham University.
The campus will have its own fleet of five fuel-cell vehicles and the filling stations could be rolled out across the country if the experiment is a success.
Around a third of Britain's CO2 emissions are from transport and they are arguably the most intractable. They are certainly the ones rising fastest.
Birmingham University's experiment is designed to check out the practicalities of hydrogen-powered cars.
Basically, they are electric cars, with a fuel cell providing the power.
There will be no point in switching to hydrogen if the gas is made using fossil fuels and right now, most of it is produced from natural gas, heated with steam through a catalyst.
Even so, scientists have found cars running on gas-derived hydrogen still emit up to 30 per cent less CO2 per kilometre than petrol or diesel cars.
All the major car-makers are investing heavily in hydrogen cars. Most are still concept or pre-production models, but some are starting to come to market.
Honda will start leasing its hydrogen FCX-Clarity model to Southern Californians this summer at some $600 (£300) a month.
Mercedes plans to start small-scale production of its F-600 car, based on its B Class vehicle, in 2010, it is already being tested in Sweden.
BMW has a hydrogen car too. But rather than a fuel cell, it's a hybrid with a standard internal combustion engine that has been modified to run on either petrol or hydrogen. They plan to build 100 of them.
Trouble is, it is all a bit chicken and egg. There is no point in mass producing hydrogen cars if the infrastructure isn't there to fuel them and no one wants to build the infrastructure if there are no cars on the roads.
No one is really sure how much it will all cost, but one recent study found that if 40 million hydrogen cars are on the roads, concentrated in Europe's urban areas, by 2030, they would need 19,000 fuelling stations, costing anything between £4.8 billion and £19 billion, which sounds a lot but is comparable with recent investment in mobile phone or broadband infrastructure.
