I am doing a project and I need to know how hydrogen is transported to our homes, how our homes use this source of Energy, cost for production and the cost to the consumer, statistical info, and tax incentives on hydrogen as a Renewable resource.
Hydrogen has been proposed as an alternative means of providing energy to both fixed applications and for transportation. At the present time, however, this is purely a proposal – there are still a great many hurdles to overcome before the use of hydrogen is practical.
The major issues include:
1. Producing the hydrogen. Production of hydrogen currently consumes more energy than is made available as hydrogen.
2. Delivery. There is currently no hydrogen delivery system. The options include constructing a pipeline-based delivery system – essentially duplicating the delivery system that already exists for natural gas, substituting hydrogen for natural gas in the existing natural gas distribution system, or a more exotic system that might involve some form of liquified hydrogen (which entails even greater inefficiences since liquifaction consumes a great deal of energy).
3. Storage. This is especially a problem for the use of hydrogen as a transportation fuel. Hydrogen is a normally a gas; we currently have a fuel system that handles liquids reasonably well (even providing the self-service option every except New Jersey), but that won’t translate to handling gasses such as hydrogen.
4. Consumption. there are a number of issues here. The energy density of hydrogen is less than that of natural gas, meaning that larger volumes of hydrogen would be required to do the same work that is currently done with natural gas. We can certainly burn hydrogen, and fuel cells are an option for producing electricity, but more work needs to be done to make fuel cells commercially viable.