Hydrogen vehicle safety concerns (Obama hydrogen economy)

President Obama, when he became president ten years ago, said we're going to have a hydrogen economy and people will be driving vehicles that burn hydrogen with oxygen and produce water vapor. Great idea, Barack, but how are you going to do it? Little technology problem there. How do you store the hydrogen? They have given away hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out a way. Hydrogen at 700 bar pressure, 3500 psi, and they look at things even bigger than that. So you want to be in a car that has a pressure vessel full of hydrogen at 5000 psi, and you get in a wreck — all of a sudden you've got a big fireball, plus a big boom. You might survive the crash, but you want to survive the explosion or the fire.

Obama's hydrogen economy announcement (~2008). Tom's safety objection: hydrogen flame is invisible; people walk through hydrogen flames at chemical plants. Steam sparging used to dilute leaks rather than shut plants down.

So we want to have a hydrogen economy. You want to fuel your car with hydrogen. People are trying to figure out how to store the hydrogen in your car. The federal government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars figuring out some way to store compressed hydrogen economically. When I heard President Obama announce this eight years ago, I said, oh yeah, we're going to have a hydrogen economy. You know what a hydrogen flame looks like? You can't see it. Most flames you can see because of the carbon soot, which glows yellow in the heat of the flame. A natural gas flame, if you burn it near stoichiometry, is blue — there's some carbon there, but mostly you're burning to carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. A poorly combusted flame is yellow.