You know how when you get the 3am zoomies, you consume a tiny bowl of crunchy dreamies and instantly convert it into maximum speed, tearing across the hardwood floor and bouncing off the chairs?
Well, Humans are trying to do the exact same thing for their cars, factories, and cities, but instead of dreamies, they want to use the most common, feather-light element in the universe: Hydrogen.
You see, hydrogen is everywhere. It is in the water bowl you refuse to drink from because you prefer the leaking bathroom tap.
It is in the air. It is in the sun. It is the original building block of the entire cosmos. Amazing.
The catch? It never hangs out alone. Hydrogen is deeply co-dependent, it is almost always tightly bonded to oxygen, forming water.
To use it for power, humans have to forcibly pull the hydrogen away from the oxygen, like trying to pry a stubborn cat off the top of the warm bed.
To get pure hydrogen, humans take a big tank of water and blast it with high-voltage electricity. This zaps the water apart, trapping the pure hydrogen gas in heavy metal tanks.
When humans are ready to use that stored energy, they feed the hydrogen back into a special machine called a fuel cell, let it reunite with oxygen, and pop – it releases a massive burst of clean electricity.
The only leftover waste product? A tiny trickle of pure, warm water. No smoke, no stinky fumes, no black soot on your whiskers.
So, you are no doubt asking, If hydrogen is so clean and powerful, why aren’t humans using it for everything already?
Because it is an absolute nightmare to catch and hold. Hydrogen atoms are so microscopically small that they can literally wiggle their way through the tiny microscopic spaces in solid metal tanks.
Storing hydrogen is like trying to keep a slippery, hyperactive kitten inside a cardboard box that has no lid and giant holes in the side. Furthermore, it takes an enormous amount of energy just to split it from water in the first place.
To be fair to the humans: When they actually get it right, it is a brilliant trick. They can power a giant, roaring metal bus using nothing more than bottled gas, and the only thing coming out of the exhaust pipe is a soft puff of harmless water vapor.
The Reality: To a cat, it sounds like an awful lot of complicated, high-voltage fuss just to end up right back where you started: with a bowl of wet water that you are going to ignore anyway.