In the last few posts, I discussed plug-in hybrid electric vehicles; how the electric motor is the future of transportation; and how emerging markets are going to be the key to changing from ICE to electric.

Now, let’s talk about hydrogen. When I first sat down with futurist Garry Golden in a coffee shop in Austin about 18 months ago, I was vaguely aware of something everyone was calling “the hydrogen economy,” but I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Early in the hype cycle, I knew little bits like how BMW was creating a prototype hydrogen powered vehicle. They were replacing gasoline with hydrogen in an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). What I didn’t know was that there was an alternative view. “The type of car that’s going to drive growth in the next 50 years is not the SUV. It’s the small cheap car that can be sold to the middle class in India, China, Brazil, etc,” says Golden. For a variety of reasons, Golden is betting that car won’t be powered by oil.

BMW was placing their hydrogen bet on the idea that hydrogen burns cleaner than gasoline. Oil and gas are hydrocarbons, which are compounds made up of strings of hydrogen and carbon and sometimes oxygen. If you think about burning as a process of combining elements with oxygen, ICEs burn the carbon as well as the hydrogen when we run our vehicles. The carbon combines with oxygen to create carbon dioxide. In other words, burning hydrocarbons creates heat and carbon dioxide; but burning hydrogen creates heat and dihydrogen oxide, or water.

Golden laid out different hydrogen future than BMW’s bet. In short, hydrogen will power fuel cells which will power electric motors in vehicles. Here’s why:

1) ICE Is at the Beginning of the End of It’s Life Cycle

The internal combustion engine as we know it has been around for about 100 years. It replaced the steam engine, which powered the industrial revolution. The primary fuel is gasoline, but Rudolf Diesel built his engine to run on a wide variety of fuels as well, all hydrocarbons. Why? Because hydrocarbons store a lot of energy and at the time (late 1800′s), he couldn’t be sure which hydrocarbons someone could find to fuel their engines. We see this legacy in today’s biodiesel fuels and mods to diesel engines to run directly from left over cooking oil.

But because of the issues surrounding pumping oil out of the ground; the generally held belief that we’re close to being pumped out of all the easy to get to oil (peak oil); and because transportation accounts for 30% to 50% of greenhouse gases (depending on who you read), it doesn’t take much imagination to see that the next 10 years are going to bring a variety of solutions to transportation that eliminate ICE.

Just because millions of people have driven millions of cars powered by ICE in the last century and still do so today, does not mean that will be the case in the future. The big hairy audacious goal (BHAG): develop an affordable transportation solution that emits no greenhouse gases and uses a renewable resource.

What this means is change and new ways of thinking about transportation as consumers. Many scientists and engineers are already working on the problem.

2) The Future Is Electric

Electric motors replace the internal combustion engine. According to Golden and to folks like the Rocky Mountain Institute, the electric motor is potentially more versatile than ICE because there can be a wide variety of sources used to create moving electrons. Moving electrons create a magnetic field that repels magnets attached to an arm that rotates. Like ICE, that rotational energy gets fed to wheels via some kind of transmission system.

Compared to ICE, electric motors are cheaper, smaller, and easier to repair. What they need are electronics to run them in the form of motor controllers. So, the “secret” sauce to a successful electric vehicle may not be the physical parts as it is the software that runs it all. This software may be the reason that the Toyota Prius is a more fuel efficient hybrid vehicle than the Honda Accord.

More reasons to come…