Fuel cells don’t burn hydrogen the way an internal combustion engine does gasoline. Instead, a fuel cell works by peeling electrons off hydrogen atoms and then feeding the current through an electric motor. On this trip, the only noise the bus made came from the brakes and windshield wiper; the only emission was water. Nine computers monitored every performance indicator, and Jónatansson said that anyone at Ballard’s headquarters in Vancouver could turn on a computer and see exactly how the fuel cell was performing.
Ballard engineers aren’t the only ones monitoring Jónatansson’s bus. Iceland is full of international visitors studying the country’s hydrogen experiment. A delegation from Turkey preceded my trip to Iceland’s oldest geothermal plant, set in a picturesque valley thirty kilometres outside the capital. And two Scottish parliamentarians were waiting to speak with Árnason after I had coffee with him in the government cafeteria. Jónatansson has chauffeured the presidents of India, China, and General Motors in his revolutionary bus. “All kinds of goofy characters,” he says. “But the president of GM was the nicest. He wore a baseball hat. He was a very funny man.”
Hydrogen may be the most common element on earth, but since virtually all of it is bound up in molecular compounds like water, that abundance is misleading. It takes a great deal of energy to create pure hydrogen—so much, in fact, that critics claim it will never become a dominant source of energy. With soaring petroleum prices, however, the energy equation may be tilting in hydrogen’s favour. At the start of the oil age a century ago, the energy from a single barrel of oil used in the development of an oil field yielded a hundred barrels in return. Now, many fields are being pumped dry, and the global average has dropped to ten barrels of oil for every barrel expended to produce it. Alberta’s oil sands currently yield as little as one-and-a-half barrels for every barrel used to extract oil. Once the ratio falls to one-for-one, there won’t be much point in drilling for the last few drops, and hydrogen just may become an economical alternative.
Studying the competitive difference between oil and hydrogen has preoccupied Bragi Árnason (no relation to Hjálmar), a retired chemist at the University of Iceland, for years. During the opec oil embargo in the 1970s, Árnason criss-crossed the country mapping out its geothermal resources. He was one of the first to realize that the energy lying underground far exceeded the amount of petroleum his country imported each year. In 1978, he published his first paper arguing for displacing oil with hydrogen, which earned him the dismissive moniker Professor Hydrogen. Recalls Árnason, “People used to say, ‘Well, it’s a beautiful vision, very elegant, but we are just not ready yet.’”
Now seventy, with a shock of white hair and a bad back from a recent fall, Árnason is getting old. But he still plays his role as Iceland’s hydrogen ambassador. “Hydrogen costs twice as much to produce as gasoline,” he says, pronouncing hydrogen with a hard g, as in get. “But that doesn’t tell the whole story. You see, a fuel cell is twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine.” Hydrogen also contains three times as much chemical energy as gasoline, so while a car might go 400 kilometres on twenty-four kilograms of gasoline, only four kilograms of hydrogen are needed to drive the same distance.
The real competitive problem with hydrogen, argues Árnason, is storage. Four kilograms of hydrogen take up forty-five cubic metres of space at room temperature. That can be compressed, and Reykjavík’s hydrogen buses store enough fuel to drive half the distance of their gasoline counterparts. “It is a fact,” Árnason admits. “No one would buy a hydrogen car if it can’t go as far as a gasoline car.”
Recent technological advances, however, may allow hydrogen to squeeze through that competitive bottleneck. Solutions range from storing hydrogen in magnesium powder and then heating it to release the hydrogen or storing it in ultra-high-pressure tanks. “GM has just test-run a car that drove 480 kilometres on a single filling,” Árnason happily reports. “These days, I am getting calls from all the Japanese automakers who promise me, ‘Bragi, we will have hydrogen cars on the market by the end of the decade.’”
Despite importing almost all of its oil Japan faces a reluctant public that associates hydrogen with the destruction of Hiroshima in the deadliest explosion in history. On a blustery morning at the University of Iceland campus, I found myself at a seminar alongside seventeen delegates from the Japanese Society of Energy and Resources, who were looking for advice on how to sway public opinion in favour of hydrogen. The advice given by Maack boiled down to a replay of Nike’s famous slogan: Just do it. “One of the biggest differences between our societies,” she explained to her audience, “is that we don’t worry about etiquette. There are no rules in Iceland about who can say what and to whom. If I want the prime minister to bring something up in parliament, I can tell him about it when I see him at the hot tub in the morning—and I do.” She has little patience for critics. “Ours is an Icelandic solution to an Icelandic problem,” says Maack. “But I can’t save the world from running out of oil. Energy is everywhere. Figure it out for yourselves how to get it.”
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