Unless you’re incredibly optimistic or know something that I don’t, you’ll probably agree that gasoline prices aren’t going to be going down anytime soon if ever. I’ve long felt that rapid inflation in the cost of oil would be the single greatest catalyst for alternative energy vehicles and it seems that my theory will be tested in practice over the coming years. With few exceptions 2011 has seen the price to fill up your car reach record levels and a myriad of different reasons leave industry experts predicting that the worst is yet to come. While electric vehicles still face a number of obstacles which I’ve written about before such as range, ease of recharge, cost and variety there’s another viable alternate that might be arriving a little sooner than had previously been forecast.

Hydrogen has long been considered a potential market changer for vehicle fuel, although the technology required has always seemed to be too far over the horizon to be considered sensibly although that may well change. In the UK a team of scientists are hoping that a hydrogen-based fuel could be on the market much sooner than forecast. The pump price might be as low as a $1.10 per gallon / $0.29 per litre which is less than a third of what is being paid in North America for gasoline and about a fifth of current prices in Europe. Even if these projections are off by 25 percent such an option would completely change the playing field for the automotive industry, road transport costs and consumers/businesses.

Beyond the economic impacts and environmental ones, hydrogen is close to being the ideal fuel, cheaper to transport, provides more energy versus its weight and best of all when it burns the only byproduct is water.

The first road tests for this alternate fuel are scheduled to commence in 2012 and if everything proceeds as hoped it could be on sale just four or five years from now. The technology of engine power from hydrogen fuel is less of an obstacle than the storage of the fuel. To date storing hydrogen has required expensive high-pressure cylinders or supercooled liquids to keep the gas safe. A company called Cellar Energy have found a way that could solve this giant issue, they have developed microbeads that can be added to hydrogen to trap the compound and create synthetic fuel with the consistency of liquid. Hopefully you know far more about science than I do and it makes sense to you as I’ll just have to take their word.

What does this do for existing automobiles? This was the part that astounded me, it’s hoped that the current testing will demonstrate that an existing vehicle could use the new blend without any engine modification. That is simply remarkable, an engine designed for gasoline used to instead run upon hydrogen fuel with the only discharge from your exhaust pipe being water vapour. I’m hopeful that this will come to fruition.