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A new Take on the Fillin' Station
Thu Nov 11, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
A New Twist on the Fillin’ Station, next on The Weather Notebook.
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. When we make the switch to hydrogen-powered cars, we will need places to fuel them up. Chad Bouchard reports from Iceland.
Along a highway just outside of Reykjavik, there’s a building that looks remarkably like a regular gas station. Physicist Thorstein Sigfusson takes us there.
“You can see the Shell sign there, you have a car wash just in front, and of course the normal outlets for gasoline and diesel, and in front you can see the hydrogen station. So we'll park outside it and take a look inside.”
Inside a small fenced area there are several blue tanks, and a machine humming inside a white hut. That machine electrically pulls oxygen out of city water, leaving hydrogen behind. Hydrogen is bulky and flammable, so designers decided it’s better to make the stuff on the spot. Sigfusson says hydrogen energy is more efficient, uses less of the world’s natural resources, and reduces pollution. He says the electricity needed to generate hydrogen can come from different sources, including fossil fuels.
“I think in order to convert to hydrogen you need to have many colors of hydrogen. You need to have renewables as much as possible but you can't convert quickly unless you use the nonrenewables.”
The station is part of a larger vision to move Iceland toward a hydrogen-based economy. With one pump and three busses on the road, Sigfusson and his colleagues are just getting started in the effort to replace fossil fuels. He says there are a few more obstacles left in the hydrogen revolution. Hydrogen cars, busses, and fueling stations are still expensive. But, he points out, so were the world’s first automobiles.
Chad Bouchard comes to us from WFIU in Indiana. The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory, and funded by Subaru of America.
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