World’s first hydrogen town

News Posted - 2010-08-26, Last Updated - 2010-08-26

For Yosuke Ito, having a Toyota Prius on the driveway is not green enough. His house, as well as his car, is a hybrid. “I’m living the Hy-life,” he said.

The single-storey home he shares with his wife, Mitsuko, near Fukuoka, 965 km. west of Tokyo, has mains electricity but chiefly runs on electricity and heat generated from hydrogen, which is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than conventional sources of power.

“We save thousands of yen a year and we don’t pollute so much,” he said. Ito, 68, an unlikely green revolutionary who used to travel around Japan in a petrol-fuelled car selling soy sauce, is one of hundreds of home owners who have signed up to join the Fukuoka hydrogen town project.

Private companies, such as Nippon Oil and Nippon Steel, backed by the central government, believe that hydrogen is the fuel of the future and are creating the world’s first hydrogen-powered town and building the first ‘hydrogen corridor’ that they say will eventually run from Fukuoka to Osaka and Tokyo. The idea is simple. Supply homes with hydrogen to generate electricity to power lights and heat water. At the same time, create a network of hydrogen filling stations so that drivers can top up their hydrogen-fuelled cars, such as Honda’s stylish FCX Clarity.

So far, so futuristic. But there are problems. A hybrid house is expensive. The fuel-cell stacks cost some £10,000 — although government subsidies reduce that figure by about half. Nippon Oil acknowledges that even this is a high price to pay. Manufacturing improvements will bring the price down to about £2,500 by 2015, it said.

Scientists in London are inching closer to produce a new fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight which they claim will help meet world’s energy needs and minimise carbon emissions. A team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is developing the technique which will produce ’synthetic liquid fuels’ in solar-powered reactors.

Experiments have also shown that the reactors can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) and turn it into carbon monoxide. The same reactors can also be used to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two can then be reacted together with a catalyst to form hydrocarbon fuels. Researchers say fuels made in this way are sufficiently similar to those currently used in cars. Source: magicbricks 5/7/10