The thought of powering our cars, trucks, trains, and even planes with the most abundant element in the universe, whose byproduct is just water, sounds like the solution to greatly reducing global carbon emissions. Hydrogen seems perfect on the surface. It stores three times as much energy per unit of mass as gasoline. When it is combined with air, the energy released can power a vehicle, and it combines with oxygen to produce water.

Hydrogen is produced from water. About 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced each year, primarily used for ammonia fertilizer. And 96% of hydrogen production is made by a process known as steam-methane reformation. This process uses energy created by natural gas, coal, and oil to produce hydrogen. The industry produces 830 million metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly to produce this “clean” hydrogen fuel.

If we have to burn massive amounts of carbon-based fuel to put hydrogen in our cars, we aren’t helping the environment. We are only displacing where the carbon emissions take place, not whether or not they happen in the first place.

It is no different than fueling our electric vehicles with electricity produced from coal, natural gas, or oil. It is nonsensical to think that we are helping the environment.

Currently, 4% of hydrogen production is produced using electrolysis which uses electricity to split the hydrogen out of the water. However, the costs are four times higher than steam-methane reformation. To put things in perspective, it takes about 50–55 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce a single kilogram of hydrogen fuel. That’s the equivalent of about two days of electricity consumption for an average home in America. Two days of an entire household’s energy consumption just to produce one kilogram that provides enough fuel to travel 70 miles. Also, its volume is a problem It takes up a lot of space, so we can only carry about 5–6 kilograms of hydrogen in our tank. The other tricky nuance is that hydrogen molecules are so tiny, that they easily leak out of most containers.

Without billions of dollars in subsidies, hydrogen just doesn’t make economic sense; and because of where the energy comes from in the production of hydrogen – mainly fossil fuels – it doesn’t even make environmental sense.

For hydrogen fuel cells to be both environmentally sustainable and economical, the world must address how it produces baseload power. This is the kind of power required to manufacture the 70 million tons of hydrogen produced every year.

The most desirable technology to achieve this is nuclear fusion technology but it is still a long way off. Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and other stars and is widely seen as the holy grail of clean energy. Experts have worked for decades to master the highly complex process on Earth, and if they do, fusion could generate enormous amounts of energy with tiny inputs of fuel and emit zero planet-warming carbon in the process. In the meantime, nuclear fission providing carbon-free emissions with limited radioactive waste is a sustainable energy production strategy and one we should all be using. Both Small Modular Nuclear Reactors and Large-Scale Reactors are the way forward and progressive countries are already pursuing that strategy.