Twenty Hydrogen Myths
by AMORY B. LOVINS, CEO, ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
20 June 2003, corrected and updated 17 February 2005

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Myth #1. A whole hydrogen industry would need to be developed from scratch.
Myth #2. Hydrogen is too dangerous, explosive, or “volatile” for common use as a fuel.
Myth #3. Making hydrogen uses more energy than it yields, so it’s prohibitively inefficient.
Myth #4. Delivering hydrogen to users would consume most of the energy it contains.
Myth #5. Hydrogen can’t be distributed in existing pipelines, requiring costly new ones.
Myth #6. We don’t have practical ways to run cars on gaseous hydrogen, so cars must continue to use liquid fuels.
Myth #7. We lack a safe and affordable way to store hydrogen in cars.
Myth #8. Compressing hydrogen for automotive storage tanks takes too much energy.
Myth #9. Hydrogen is too expensive to compete with gasoline.
Myth #10. We’d need to lace the country with ubiquitous hydrogen production, distribution,and delivery infrastructure before we could sell the first hydrogen car, but that’s impractical and far too costly — probably hundreds of billions of dollars.
Myth #11. Manufacturing enough hydrogen to run a car fleet is a gargantuan and hugely expensive task.
Myth #12. Since renewables are currently too costly, hydrogen would have to be made from fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
Myth #13. Incumbent industries (e.g., oil and car companies) actually oppose hydrogen as a competitive threat, so their hydrogen development efforts are mere window-dressing.
Myth #14. A large-scale hydrogen economy would harm the Earth’s climate, water balance, or atmospheric chemistry.
Myth #15. There are more attractive ways to provide sustainable mobility than adopting hy-drogen.
Myth #16. Because the U.S. car fleet takes roughly 14 years to turn over, little can be done to change car technology in the short term.
Myth #17. A viable hydrogen transition would take 30–50 years or more to complete, andhardly anything worthwhile could be done sooner than 20 years.
Myth #18. The hydrogen transition requires a big (say, $100–300 billion) Federal crash program, on the lines of the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project.
Myth #19. A crash program to switch to hydrogen is the only realistic way to get off oil.
Myth #20. The Bush Administration’s hydrogen program is just a smokescreen to stall adoption of the hybrid-electric and other efficient car designs available now, and wrapsfossil and nuclear energy in a green disguise.