A recent poll suggests New Hampshire residents are worried about the possibility of global climate change.
In a survey funded by an environmental organization, 86% of presidential primary voters said society should take action to reduce the causes of global warming.
That means finding clean sources of energy.
Thousands of miles away in Iceland, researchers hope to blaze the way.
The little island nation plans to become the world's first hydrogen-powered country.
NHPR's Trish Anderton recently visited Iceland and filed this report.
It's a typical winter day in Reykjavik.
That means cold, windy, and wet.
If you could turn sleet into energy, you could probably fuel this city for half the year.
Short of that, Thorstein Sigfusson has some other ideas about renewable power.
122 today I would like to take you to the refueling station on the outskirts of reykjavik where we produce hydrogen from just water and electricity.
Sigfusson is a physics professor. He's also a consultant for Icelandic New Energy, a nonprofit company pushing to convert Iceland to hydrogen.
We jump into his black SUV for the drive through Reykjavik.
Iceland's capital is bustling and affluent.
That means plenty of cars.
Since Iceland doesn't have fossil fuels of its own, it has to import all the gas and oil for those vehicles.
003 150 the car fleet in reykjavik, and we're now in the middle of an Icelandic style traffic jam, uses up about a third of the fossil fuel imports. //So one of the aims of INE is to replace imported fuel with hydrogen produced with domestic sources.
On the edge of town, the hydrogen refueling station represents one of the first steps toward that goal.
SIG: you can see the shell sign there, you have a car wash just in front, and of course the normal outlets for gasoline and diesel, and in front you can see the hydrogen station. So we'll park outside it and take a look inside.
The hydrogen pump is off to one side.
It looks a little different from a typical pump.
Since the hydrogen is delivered as a pressurized gas, the nozzle has a locking handle that clamps down tight on a vehicle's input valve.
SIG: This nozzle is attached to the car, you turn the handle about 90 degrees and it's ready.
Behind the pump is a fenced off jumble of pressurized metal tanks and tubes.
It's a hydrolizer, which breaks up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrolizer uses electricity from the grid.
But Iceland produces all its electricity from renewable sources - hydropower from its rivers and geothermal power from underground hot springs.
So this hydrogen is totally renewable too.
Right now there aren't any cars that use the hydrogen station.
But there are three buses.
Boarding bus AMB
A short drive from the fueling station, one of the hydrogen buses has finished its run for the day.
These buses have hydrogen fuel cells instead of engines.
Fuel cells are like batteries - they produce energy through a chemical reaction.
Since they don't burn fuel, they don't produce air pollution.
They're also quieter than ordinary bus engines.
Engineer Thomas Vilna says one elderly rider likes the buses because she can nap on them more easily.
He turns the key to demonstrate.
28 25 that's the diffuser fan. That's the starter motor. And as soon as we have enough air we can put hydrogen to the fuel cell. That's the normal sound of a fuel cell engine. // 28 148 that's the maximum sound we can create. That's it.
Scientists like Thorstein Sigfusson hope hydrogen will someday be a kind of lingua franca - a way to get all the different energy sources in the world to speak one language.
Iceland already relies heavily on two kinds of renewable energy - hydropower from its rivers, and geothermal power from underground hot springs.
In Africa, you might use solar energy to make hydrogen.
And in Denmark, wind power.
All of those different energy sources could power the same car.
And that car would be emissions-free.
Driving back to the university, Sigfusson imagines many countries might start out using fossil fuels to make hydrogen.
As cleaner technologies became available, those countries could switch over.
SIG: I think in order to convert to hydrogen you need to have many colors of hydrogen. You need to have renewables as much as possible but you can't convert quickly unless you use the nonrenewables.
The man at the center of Iceland's putative energy revolution is often called simply "Professor Hydrogen."
Bragi Arnason believes hydrogen is the key to derailing dirty fuels like coal and oil.
He says as developing countries demand more energy, the environmental stakes will continue to climb.
15 00 china has a huge amount of coal. They can use that. But what will happen if china and other countries approach the same energy needs as Europe and u.s. and they supply it with coal? It would be disastrous.
Arnason pushed Iceland for years to consider hydrogen.
He didn't get far until 1997, when multinational companies like Daimler Benz and Royal Dutch Shell got interested.
Arnason recalls what one politician told him.
ARN: he said I'm going to believe what you are doing makes sense. Because these big companies are not coming to Iceland to drink coffee and chat. They mean something serious. And from that time we had a very positive response from our govt.
Even though it's won the interest of multinational companies and the commitment of Iceland's government, huge question marks remain about hydrogen's viability.
Storage is a key problem.
Hydrogen gas isn't very energy-dense.
In order to get enough into a tank to run a car for any length of time, it has to be stored at extremely high pressure.
Joseph Romm is the author of the recent book, The Hype About Hydrogen.
ROMM: I don't think soccer mom or soccer dad wants 5000 pounds per square inch of explosive hydrogen half a foot away from their kid and I don't think when they go to the fueling station they want a fuel pump in their hands pressured to 7000 pounds per square inch. Atmospheric pressure is 14 pounds per square inch so we're talking about something that I think is just not going to be well received by the public.
It's also unclear how hydrogen would be distributed.
Trucking or piping it across the country may not be economical.
Some people believe hydrogen production will be decentralized - scattered among numerous small facilities like the Reykjavik filling station.
Either way it'll take lots of new infrastructure.
Romm is hopeful hydrogen's technical challenges can be overcome.
But he worries people will be so busy waiting for hydrogen, they'll put off things they should be doing now to cut air pollution.
ROMM: 5:10 we critically need to get fuel efficient cars on the roads now. It would be tragic if we waited ten years for hydrogen and it didn't work out and we were stuck with rising greenhouse gas emissions
Both Romm and Bragi Arnason believe Iceland can be the laboratory that determines whether hydrogen is viable.
Arnason hopes to see hydrogen cars on the country's roads before the end of the decade.
But he predicts it'll take three generations to complete Iceland's conversion to hydrogen - if the technology works.
For NHPR news I'm Trish Anderton.
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