Iceland Moving to Hydrogen Economy

LordSah writes "Related to the recent coverage of hydrogen, it seems that Iceland is making plans to dump oil in favor of hydrogen produced by the country's abundant supply of geothermic energy. Iceland is being used as an experiment to test out hydrogen fuel cell technology en masse. It has backing from DaimlerChrysler, Shell Oil and the European Union. Article here."

Comments

Re:This begs the question

[hublan]

What they doing, in both this case and deCode (which I assume you're alluding to) is allowing big corporations to pour millions of dollars into the economy for something that's readily available and sustainable non-polluting natural resources.

For a nation that's built its whole economy of fish and seeing the fish stocks plummet, this can only be a Good Thing(tm).

At least they're not opening up large wildlife refuges for oil-drilling.

Re:Mentions exporting

[DietFluffy]

Maybe you intended that to be a joke, but it's not quite that simple. The hydrogen would have to be highly compressed to make transport economical. Aside from that, the storing and transporting of hydrogen gas is very similar to the handling of natural gas and propane, so they shouldn't run into any real problems.

Re:Solved the storage problem

[hij]

There's also the leakage problem. It is such a light gas that it is very difficult to avoid losing some. This means that it is beneficial to use it in very well ventilated places. The bad news: this is not what you look for in a house on Iceland!