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A common misconception that occurs when people read about hydrogen fuel cell technology is the belief that the hydrogen gas is the energy source. In actuality, hydrogen is an energy carrier that stores and delivers energy that can be used. Although hydrogen is available in the natural environment of the Earth, it does have to be produced from existing compounds that contain hydrogen in order to then use it as a renewable energy source.

How Do We Obtain Hydrogen?

There are a number of resources than can be used to produce hydrogen. These include but are not limited to using fossil fuels, natural gas, biomass, nuclear, and other alternative energy sources such as hydroelectric, solar, wind, and geothermal energy production sources. One of the reasons behind the significant amount of research into hydrogen as an alternative energy source is the abundance of the resource. When hydrogen is produced, it can be at a centralized plan that is hundreds of miles from where the hydrogen will be used or in small distributed locations such as a refueling station or local power site location.

How Do We Produce Hydrogen?

There area several methods and technologies used to produce hydrogen to include natural gas reforming, renewable elctrolysis, gasification, renewable liquid forming, nuclear electrolysis, and photobiological and photoelectrochemical methods.
Harvesting Hydrogen from Natural Gas
Hydrogen can be harvested from the methane found in natural gas. The process is referred to as steam methane reforming and is used to produce approximately 95 percent of the hydrogen used in the United States today. An alternative method is called partial oxidation which harvests the hydrogen by bruning methane in the air. Each of these methods creates a synthesis gas that is then reacted with water in order to produce even more hydrogen.

Renewable Electrolysis and Gasification

The electrolysis method of hydrogen harvesting makes use of electric current in order to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. An even greener manner of this type of harvesting is to use an alternative energy source such as solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, or wind in order to produce the energy used in the harvesting process.

Gasification is the hydrogen producing process that uses coal or biomass and applies heat while putting the substance under pressure with steam present. A number of chemical reactions then occur which produces a synthesis gas that is then combined with the steam in order to produce additional hydrogen. Using this method is more efficient than directly burning coal to harvest hydrogen. Researchers continue to work on new methods to separate and store the carbon dioxide that is produced in the currently used process in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that currently result from gasification.

What Are the Barriers to Hydrogen Harvesting?

The largest barrier to wide-spread hydrogen harvesting for energy use is reducing the cost of the harvesting process and transportation. The goal of research and development is to reduce the cost of a gallon of gasoline equivalent of hydrogen to approximately $2 to $3 USD before tax. Current technology is not quite there yet, but photobiological and photoelectrochemical harvesting techniques are still in the early stages of research and may have the most potential to be the cheapest and cleanest means of hydrogen harvesting for use in fuel cell technologies as an alternative energy source.

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