While Pompeo is asking for help from Brazil in the trade war with China.We'll take a look on Hydrogen.
First obtained in the 18th century, it found wide application in industry. And now, with growing concern about the ongoing global warming, the leading world's media are increasingly stimulating its use in transport.
And the first experiences of using it in transport were in NASA and later in the USSR in passenger cars and airplanes.
The author read an article in the Soviet journal "Science and Life" about the project Tu-155 a hydrogen-powered aircraft was built in the USSR.(converted then popular Tu-154) for a flight on hydrogen. And everything would be fine, but with economic efficiency it did not work out very well. The fuel tank was located at the end of the passenger compartment and occupied a third of its volume. Although the plane flew on hydrogen just like a regular one on kerosene. The project ended with the collapse of the USSR and they simply forgot about it, and then no one thought about carbon dioxide emissions that time.
Now we live in the 2020 century, when the record reduction of the ice cover in the Arctic worries no less than the coronavirus that continues to rage around the world. And the world media is actively promoting not only coverage of this problem, but also ways to solve it. Since the main enemy is declared to be carbon dioxide, which is mainly imitated by transport, then all solutions to get rid of transport from CO2, are moving intensively.
They remembered hydrogen as a possible fuel for transport 20 years ago, but it was not until 2014 that Toyota released the only hydrogen car and sells it in limited regions and subsidizes hydrogen refueling for car owners. The author himself saw the car a couple of times in Tokyo and a gas station, which he passed many times, but it was closed all the time. In California, where Mirai is also sold, a YouTube blogger complained that Hydrogen stations often break.
However, hydrogen cars have a strong competitor in the form of electric vehicles. Which are simpler, cheaper and are sold several hundreds of times better than cars powered by hydrogen.
There is also a startup in England that is developing an aircraft that uses hydrogen for flight. Based in England and it's team, by an incredible coincidence of circumstances, from the same country where the aforementioned Tu-155 flying on hydrogen was tested.
Hydrogen is actually very good(light and ubiquitous) except for the cost. Its cheap production is possible only from methane. That is used now to get 75% of all hydrogen produced in the world despite that ~ 830 million tons of CO2 go into the atmosphere.
However, it is an open question whether economic efficiency or the fight against carbon dioxide will win in the future.
P.S. While writing of this article emitted just as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as if it had never been written.
