A Dream of Hydrogen

Published: August 8, 2009

Six years ago, President Bush proposed a grand plan to spend $1.2 billion on a “Freedom Car” that would run on (what else?) a “Freedom Fuel” — hydrogen. Thus liberated from the yoke of foreign oil, Americans by the millions would someday be zipping around in contraptions powered by an inexhaustible gas.

Hydrogen may yet serve the world as a transportation fuel. But Mr. Bush’s plan seemed mainly designed to gull the public into thinking he was doing something while absolving the car companies from making real improvements to increase the efficiency of their fleets.

Several hydrocars have been manufactured since then — nifty little things with a price tag of several hundred thousand dollars that can be fueled at one of the 63 hydrogen stations throughout the country. They emit fewer greenhouse gases than hybrids, but the difference is not great since energy is needed to produce hydrogen. And so far they have not displaced any foreign oil.

President Obama’s energy secretary, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Steven Chu, recently called for eliminating the $100 million in his budget devoted to research on hydrogen technology.

He told Congress that hydrogen cars are unlikely to be deployed on a mass market scale within the next 20 years. And there are other technologies, like plug-in vehicles or even cars run on clean diesel, that will do more to reduce fossil fuel consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions in that time.

We agree with much of Mr. Chu’s assessment. But it seems wrong to cut out all research. The $100 million (as opposed to Mr. Bush’s $1.2 billion) is not a large amount to invest to keep this promise alive — especially since no one is using the program as an excuse for avoiding here-and-now regulations and innovation.

Fortunately, the House and the Senate have voted to restore the hydrogen money. Unfortunately, they also slashed funds requested by Mr. Chu for eight new research labs to develop new energy technologies, from solar electricity to carbon sequestration. We hope these can be restored when the two bills go to conference.

The amounts devoted to all of these investments are relatively small. If they pay off, the returns will be big. A nation that must drastically reduce its consumption of fossil fuels must be willing to gamble.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 9, 2009, on page WK7 of the New York edition.