In a preview of Obama's 2012 budget proposal, DOE Secretary Chu announced that "the Department is reducing funding for the hydrogen technology program by more than 41 percent, or almost $70 million, in order to focus on technologies deployable at large scale in the near term." In the past Chu has explained why hydrogen has poor prospects for being useful in the energy mix and is probably a technological dead end as a transportation fuel. In fact, in the quotation below, he says becoming a saint would require fewer miracles.
Joe Romm, who once headed the DOE research funding office and has written about the problems in his book The Hype about Hydrogen and extensively on his ClimateProgress blog, has posted on this again today and included a link to an interview of Chu by Technology Review in May 2009, from which the following quotation is taken:
TR: It used to be thought, five to eight years ago, that hydrogen was the great answer for the future of transportation. The mood has shifted. What have we learned from this?
SC: I think, well, among some people it hasn't really shifted [laughs]. I think there was great enthusiasm in some quarters, but I always was somewhat skeptical of it because, right now, the way we get hydrogen primarily is from reforming [natural] gas. That's not an ideal source of hydrogen. You're giving away some of the energy content of natural gas, which is a very valuable fuel. So that's one problem. The other problem is, if it's for transportation, we don't have a good storage mechanism yet. Compressed hydrogen is the best mechanism [but it requires] a large volume. We haven't figured out how to store it with high density. What else? The fuel cells aren't there yet, and the distribution infrastructure isn't there yet. So you have four things that have to happen all at once. And so it always looked like it was going to be [a technology for] the distant future. In order to get significant deployment, you need four significant technological breakthroughs. That makes it unlikely.
TR: So this is an example, perhaps, of picking a technology prematurely. Is there anything we've learned from that in terms of future policy?
SC: I wasn't there when they started making this [decision]. I'm not sure it was deeply understood what was required. Now, having said that, I think that hydrogen could be effectively a "battery" in the sense that suppose you had a way of using excess electricity--let's say a nuclear plant at night, or solar or wind excess capacity, and there was an efficient electrolysis way of turning that into hydrogen, and then we have stationary fuel cells. It could effectively be a battery of sorts. You take a certain form of energy and convert it to hydrogen, and then convert it back [into electricity]. You don't have the distribution problem, you don't have the weight problem. [Editor's note: Storage tanks can be heavy.] In certain applications, you don't need as many miracles for it to happen. If you need four miracles, that's unlikely: saints only need three miracles [laughs].
The last time Obama and Chu tried to cut R&D funding for hydrogen, Congress wouldn't let them.