Before a hydrogen-fueled future can become a reality, however, many complex challenges must be overcome. Carmakers must learn to manufacture new types of vehicles, and consumers must find them attractive enough to buy. Energy companies must adopt cleaner techniques for producing hydrogen and build a new fuel infrastructure that will eventually replace the existing systems for refining and distributing gasoline. Hydrogen will not fix all our problems tomorrow; in fact, it could be decades before it starts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil use on a global scale. It is important to recognize that a hydrogen transition will be a marathon, not a sprint.
Hydrogen, of course, is not really a source of energy so much as it is a medium for transferring energy: since we don't have pools of hydrogen around to tap freely, we need to produce energy just to create the hydrogen that would then go into fuel cells or other systems. Ogden reviews how that would work with various energy technologies as well as the massive infrastructural changes that a shift to hydrogen would require. She reports that such a transition could cost hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. over several decades--a huge sum, but she also points out that simply maintaining and expanding our gasoline infrastructure and searching for new oil sources could cost $1.3 trillion over the next 30 years.
