Hydrogen on Housing?

Do you think that Hydrogen is Green?
Actually I've read that if you burn it, it has no colour! :)
We know where our diesel comes from. But what about H2?

I've heard so much about hydrogen these days. Usually associated to car industry, but now it reached other areas such as housing and construction or production of other things.
A recent news announced that the new World Trade Center construction will be powered by this new fuel. So... I really had to have a look at its potential:

There is 2 "trended" ways to produce energy through hydrogen:

1 - One is to burn it in your car instead of gas or diesel, to obtain torque energy. I read recently about some conversions like to natural gas.
2 - Another is through the hydrogen fuel cells process, to obtain electricity that can then be used to move or light anything.

On the first one, since there is combustion with lubricants (although you need much less oil in the mixture since hydrogen burns much faster that gas), we are still producing carbon dioxide on this process. While in the second one, by using hydrogen fuel cells, it is mixed with oxygen (O2) and the final product is electricity and water.
Thats the one that has more potential specially because you can extract much more energy from the same amount of Hydrogen in this way.

Everything seems beautiful but I see a problem here. Where does it come from?
I read about 2 ways:

1- Fossil fuel, they can extract H2 through natural gas. But for that it seem that they need more energy to make it than is obtained once you burning it.
2 - Photovoltaic, that will produce electricity, that you can use to remove hydrogen from the water through a common electrolysis process. But thats not a zero emissions system because there was a lot of CO2 emissions to produce the PVs. They are quite energy consumption!

Actually Toyota says that the current hybrid cars in use, are more energy efficient than the new Hydrogen fuel cells ones due to the hydrogen cost production and transportation!
Maybe to power the new WTC with this technology will be still worth considering the electricity sources in the USA.

But actually, I imagine Hydro Power Stations being the best place to Produce Hydrogen. Everything starts there and plus it is a completely zero carbon dioxide production.

Summing up, through hydro power it can be produced 2 types of electricity, but one of them will be stored as H2, which can later on be transformed into electricity through hydrogen fuel cell technology.
Should it be consider the cost of its production in that way? Of course it consumes energy to produce it, but in this case this energy is free, right! Quite weird to think on that early stage of production!

Hydrogen as a liquid green battery :)
Interesting.... I miss the future!


Helder Neves
in "Architecture cannot solve everything!"