Hydrogen: hype or hope?

Hydrogen is the most abundant element on our planet and has been heralded as the clean fuel of the future. However, in order to obtain hydrogen in a form that can be used as a fuel, we need to use up energy. Lots of it. We need to use electricity to make hydrogen; we then need to store and transport that hydrogen; and then, using a fuel cell, turn it back into electricity to run a car. This paper shows that the current focus for the car of the future is plug-in electric vehicles, but there is still a lot of support for hydrogen fuel cells to be part of the solution.