Researchers from University of Maryland and the California Institute of Technology have found a new compound that can apparently pack hydrogen very densely (more densely then a solid clump of hydrogen) and make for a great material to store hydrogen in an eventual hydrogen vehicle (press release here). One of the big engineering problems of a hydrogen car is the actual gas-tank (and how to store reasonable amounts of hydrogen), and the claim with this new research is that tanking up a hydrogen vehicle could be as easy as tanking up on a normal vehicle.

It’s of course not without drawbacks. The material seems to have these properties at liquid nitrogen temperatures, 77°K (-196°C), so it’s not really something that could be thrown into a car in it’s present form. But it’s definitely a step up, and hopefully it is a stepping stone to better things.

Hydrogen cars are not just hypothetical either. My home country of Iceland actually has buses running on Hydrogen and the emission from them is basically just water vapor. It kinda smells like walking past a laundromat when they drive by. But there are many more obstacles on the way to a cost-viable hydrogen vehicle, you can read about some of the problems in wikipedia’s article. One of them is that it costs energy to make hydrogen. Energy that is usually made from fossil fuels, so it is not a completely carbon emission free source (unless of course the energy to create the hydrogen comes from non-fossil fuel sources like wind generators or dams).