00:00 Hydrogen
powered car on country road
c.u.
exhaust pipe with water vapour emission
Wide
of car on road
Guide Voice: Is Hydrogen the fuel of the
future? Many are starting to think so – Hydrogen is
considered a clean fuel and would have minimum impact on the
environment, its only emissions being water vapour. It is safe to
manufacture, reliable and environmentally friendly. But it’s
not exactly new technology.
00:21 SOT: Professor Kevin Kendall,
Professor of Formulation Engineering, University of Birmingham UK
-“Well it’s a very old concept, because
hydrogen stores a lot of energy, and for example if you’re
operating a space craft then hydrogen is a natural fuel for a space
craft and it’s been used for many, many decades. In a home
it’s more difficult to, to persuade people to use hydrogen
because we’ve got plentiful supplies of natural gas right
now, or even oil, and previously coal. So these fuels have
dominated and hydrogen has not been very popular. But in the future
because it has these advantages of cleanliness and of efficiency it
will gradually take over and substitute for natural gas and for
these other fuels like oil”.
00:56 Exterior,
University of Birmingham
Researcher
conducting experiment
c.u.
Hydrogen storage coil
c.u.
temperature gauge
Guide Voice: At England’s University of
Birmingham, research centres around the storage of Hydrogen, as
this is key to creating a safe hydrogen infrastructure. Researchers
at the University are in little doubt of the importance of their
work.
01:09 SOT: Professor Rex Harris,
Professor of Materials Science, University of Birmingham UK
-“There are, in my mind, three main drivers for
wanting hydrogen as the fuel of the future. One is security of
supply, so that I mean, for instance if we are dependent on natural
gas from remote areas and areas of political instability then that
can be a major problem; there is the fact that fossil fuel and
particularly oil will be largely exhausted in fifty years time, and
that’s not very long; and thirdly there’s the problem
of global warming. Now my view is that probably the third one is
the main imperative for moving to something that does not produce
CO2."
01:51 Researcher
demonstrates Hydrogen fuel theory
Guide Voice: So how does Hydrogen work as a
fuel source?
01:56 SOT: Dr Trevor Shields, Research
Fellow is Sustainable Development, University of Birmingham, UK
- “What we have here is a renewable energy
source in the form of solar panels; we’re taking the
electricity that those produce to split the water into Hydrogen and
Oxygen in the electrolysis cell. What you can see bubbling round is
the Hydrogen and Oxygen, then they go down to the fuel cell itself,
where the Hydrogen is further split into H ions and electrons, the
electrons can’t pass through that so they have to pass
through our electric circuits and do some useful work for us. The H
ions can hop across to the other side, recombine with the electrons
and the Oxygen, to produce water as a by-product so it’s a
very, very clean energy system.”
02:40 Fuel
Cell Bus, in Madrid, with graphic showing 9 cities
Fuel
Cell Bus in London
London
Fuel Cell Bus pulls away – project partners logos shown
Fuel
Cell Bus on Madrid streets
Guide Voice: Nine major cities in Europe are
currently taking part in trials for Hydrogen powered buses –
a project that brings together over 40 organisations concerned with
public transport and Hydrogen supplies, fuelling and storage
facilities. Looking for a cleaner, more efficient way to handle
mass transport in the 21st century. But using Hydrogen
as a fuel is not restricted to transportation.
03:04 SOT: Prof. Kevin Kendall
- “Well my particular interest is in hydrogen in
buildings, because buildings right now are using natural gas or
even oils fuel, and these do create various emissions, sulphurous
emissions, nitrogen oxide emissions, and these are polluting. So
hydrogen will clean those up. Additionally hydrogen will produce
much more efficient conversion into electricity than those other
fuels like natural gas, so we’ll gain a double benefit. If
every house had hydrogen in this country in a fuel cell, you
wouldn’t need any power stations."
03:35 Wide
shot, Hydrogen Fuelling station
Man
attaching fuel pump to vehicle
c.u.
pumping Hydrogen fuel
Guide Voice: So – is Hydrogen a clean and
efficient fuel who’s time has finally come, or just an
interesting piece of old technology that has no real relevance for
our future?
03:45 SOT: Prof. Rex Harris
-“The consequences of not going to hydrogen as a
fuel source really don’t bear thinking about. If we leave it
too long, let’s put global warming to one side, the fact that
the oil is going to be in such short supply raises horrific
political problems of wars based on fighting for diminishing
resources. We should note that at the moment the average Chinese
uses something like 3% of the energy of the average American, so
when you look at the growth of the Third World, and the rate at
which the Chinese economy is growing at the moment – nine or
ten percent per annum – then you will get a feeling of the
sort of pressures that will be on the world’s system in, in
the very near future in fact, and so we owe it to our children and
our grandchildren to invest in these new resources as soon as
possible."
04:48 Ends
