This morning I was looking at the Economist and saw an advertisement from Shell Oil. Usually, I don't pay much attention to those kinds of ads, since every oil company, chemical company, etc. seems to have something out now to say how "green" they have become. However, it caught my interest because it mentioned a hydrogen fuel pump installed by Shell at a gas station in Washington, D.C. Apparently, this has been there for two years; I didn't know these pumps existed yet in this country. Hydrogen sounds so great as an alternative fuel source, because the by-product is water vapor. According to the Shell website (Shell.com), hydrogen cell vehicles are much more efficient than cars with internal combustion engines. Shell estimates that by 2050, there could be 700 million vehicles using hydrogen fuel. If this is so promising, I wondered, why is there still only one pump in this country providing this fuel? How difficult and expensive is it to build cars that use hydrogen fuel? Can cars on the road now be modified to use hydrogen? How about existing hybrid cars--Can they use hydrogen somehow? How safe is it in terms of the explosion risk if a car gets into an accident? The Shell website left a lot of unanswered questions.

I saw a program recently about Iceland, which is working towards being completely self-reliant in terms of fuel, because of its hydrogen use. Iceland has hot springs and obviously, lots of water around it (not to mention a much smaller population than this country), so hydrogen seems like a really smart choice for that nation. If companies like Shell really lead the way on hydrogen use in this country and have something of a monopoly for a while, I don't really take issue with that if it means less dependence on foreign oil. I would really be curious to see how this concept materializes in the next few years.