Could hydrogen fuel cell cars be commonplace in the near future? They could if Toyota has something to say about it. 

Toyota president Akio Toyoda said that the company’s next step will be hydrogen fuel cell cars and the company head believes Toyota could mass market the vehicles some time in the not-so-distant future.

The company started work on the fuel cell technology two decades ago but because of the high cost of manufacturing, the cars were nearly $1 million each. Now Toyota is focused on more economical technology, in fact, their new hydrogen fuel cell car, the Mirai will be available in Europe for $62,000.

“This is not an alternative to a gasoline vehicle,” Scott Samuelsen, an engineer and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California at Irvine told Business Week. “This is a quantum step up.”

Hydrogen fuel cell cars run on hydrogen gas rather than gasoline so they emit heat and water rather than greenhouse gases. They can go 300 miles before needing to be refueled. While the cars look similar to traditional cars on the outside, they contain a fuel cell stack that converts hydrogen gas and oxygen into electricity to drive the electric motor. The cars can fuel in less than five minutes.

“The automobile industry can contribute to the sustainable growth of Earth itself,” Akio told Business Week. “At Toyota, we are looking out 50 years and even more decades into the future. I do believe that [the] fuel-cell vehicle is the ultimate environmentally friendly car.”

But as with EVs, the main drawback to the technology is a lack of infrastructure in place to refuel. There are currently nine fueling stations in California and 13 in place nationwide. And it becomes a battle over which technology deserves more funding. Additionally, while you can charge EVs at home, that’s not possible with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Some experts also dispute whether or not fuel cell technology is good for the environment. Elon Musk said at a conference in Tokyo that since U.S. hydrogen production comes from burning natural gas, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are indirectly burning fossil fuels.

Akio Toyoda’s response: “There’s a high possibility that there will be many sources of hydrogen in the future, such as solar energy and even waste.”

Undoubtedly, these technologies face challenges for a society still addicted to oil but when these great minds come together, there’s hope that in the future we won’t be focused on fossil fuels. But rather, on modes of transportation that don’t emit planet warming greenhouse gas emissions and don’t involve destroying ecosystems. All in an effort to find a fuel source that beyond being dirty is downright out-of-date.

What do you think? What will your morning commute look like in a few decades? Are you excited about the technology ahead?

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Image: Joseph Brent

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A million years ago when I was young, photosynthesis was one of the first “big words” I learned. And, unlike antidisestablishmentarianism, I even knew what it meant. Sorta. It was the way plants ate, right? How they turned sunlight and water into, uh, plant food? Yeah. I knew it was all very green and very complicated. But how complicated? I had no idea.

For years, scientists have been trying to understand how to reproduce photosynthesis artificially, which is the way plants produce energy from sunlight and water. A leaf does some incredible things with those two down-to-earth ingredients; most notably it makes sugars. What the folks in white coats reckon is if they can recreate the process, they might be able to divide water into its two main parts (hydrogen and oxygen). This is big science, and a big deal.

Hydrogen is one of best sources of energy we have that isn’t a fossil fuel. Unlike coal and oil, which emit carbon dioxide when burned (read: greenhouse gas), burning hydrogen releases only water vapor. Problem is, hydrogen don’t come easy and switching to what has been referred to as a “Hydrogen Economy” – featuring hydrogen-powered, cars and boats, electronics, buildings, everything – is going to take some serious work to get off the ground. Using sunlight (of which we have plenty) to get the sought-after hydrogen out of water would be a super sustainable way to feed our bottomless energy stomach without screwing up the environment any more than we already have.

So, back to the leaf.

An artificial one that could capture solar energy and use it to change water into hydrogen fuel would be smart. And here’s the news: Some of those white coats recently announced that they figured it out. At the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), held in March in San Francisco, a team offered their “recipe” for the “Artificial Inorganic Leaf,” which combines the action of a natural leaf with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a chemical already known as a photocatalyst for hydrogen production.

Complicated? Well, consider a) the team that created the new method: Tongxiang Fan, Ph.D., Di Zhang, Ph.D. and Han Zhou, Ph.D., representing the State Key Lab of Matrix Composites at Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China., and b) the Rube Goldberg meets Paul Klee diagram below:

Says Fan: “Our results may represent an important first step towards the design of novel artificial solar energy transduction systems based on natural paradigms, particularly based on exploring and mimicking the structural design. Nature still has much to teach us, and human ingenuity can modify the principles of natural systems for enhanced utility.”

Our pals at Mother Nature Network translate this nicely: “In the end, an intriguing partnership between cutting-edge science and the most ancient of organic technologies – photosynthesis – may prove to have the real answer for powering a clean future.” There ya go, eh? Not so complicated, after all.

Image: linh.ngân

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