Posted on 08/24/2004 2:25:57 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Should developing a "hydrogen economy" be the number one priority for meeting our long-term energy needs while cutting greenhouse emissions? Or should we be investing in more immediate ways to cut emissions, such as burying the carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuels? Energy experts are bitterly divided on the issue.
John Turner of the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is a leading advocate of hydrogen. He argues in the journal Science (vol 305, p 972) that using renewable energy to generate hydrogen is the only "green" way to produce the energy to run our cars and trucks. Electricity from renewable sources such as wind, wave and solar would be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could then be burnt directly or used to power a fuel cell.
But other experts contacted by New Scientist are highly critical of this approach. They argue that making hydrogen from renewables is far from being economically feasible. Technical problems such as compressing enough hydrogen into a car's fuel tank and bringing down the costs of fuel cells will take decades to solve. We need strategies to reduce greenhouse gases right now, they say. If we concentrate only on hydrogen, the problem of CO2 emissions would just get worse.
The US Department of Energy is backing the second approach. Its budget for 2004 includes $62 million for research into "sequestering" carbon – burying CO2 released from burning fossil fuels so that it cannot affect the climate. And in February 2003, President Bush announced a 10-year, billion-dollar research programme to build "the world's first integrated sequestration and hydrogen production research power plant" using coal as fuel.
Turner is scathing of this stepwise approach. "Every intermediate step takes money and energy," he says. These steps will not be used long enough to pay back the investment, he says, and the funds could be better used to work towards the final goal of renewables-generated hydrogen. Some experts are also worried that an accidental release of CO2 from such a store could be catastrophic.
In turn, Turner's critics argue that he is being unrealistic about the prospects for a hydrogen economy. Joseph Romm, an official responsible for renewable energy during the Clinton administration, says the focus on hydrogen is damaging our chances of solving the climate problem. He calls it a "bait and switch" strategy. "People promise renewable hydrogen, but what you get is dirty hydrogen," he says. In the short term, hydrogen will come from natural gas – a process that produces CO2 . This is currently the cheapest way to make hydrogen.
Romm predicts that it will be 2035 before hydrogen-powered cars start making an impact on climate change. "Thirty years is a long time. We can't sit on our hands," he says.
He also insists that hydrogen generation is not the best use of renewable energy. When losses from distributing and storing hydrogen are taken into account, about 50 per cent of the energy used to make it is lost. Romm and Turner agree that the best short-term use of electricity produced from renewables is not to produce hydrogen but to offset coal. Under current plans, coal burning in the US is set to increase by 50 per cent by 2025. "The first, second and third things you need to do is to replace coal," Romm says.
But Turner wants to keep pushing for hydrogen from renewable energy. However, Romm argues that there will have to be basic scientific discoveries of "Nobel quality" before the hydrogen economy becomes reality. "It would be a tremendous mistake to bet the farm on hydrogen."
Ian Fells, head of the New and Renewable Energy Centre in Northumberland, UK, is also sceptical. He favours an expansion in nuclear power to meet rising energy demands without adding to the greenhouse effect. Otherwise, he argues, it will be like "fighting a battle with one arm behind your back".
Any experts have any comment??
I think developing super conductor tech is going to be more useful for transporting energy from where it is produced to where it is needed.
Hydrogen will be useful, but it is only one part of the solution.
There was a recent article in Scientific American that discussed the problems with Hydrogen. Chief among them is that since hydrogen does not exist anywhere in the world in a usable form, in needs to be "processed" i.e. splitting water atoms. The amount of energy consumed to process hydrogen and get it into our tanks would be greater than all the energy consumed in our gasoline powered cars.
"Bitterly divided experts" is an oxymoron. If a group of technical people are bitterly divided, at least half of them (possibly all of them) don't really know what they're talking about and therefore cannot be considered experts.
I'm beginning to think the fastest way to get away from petroleum is to go to (pure) battery-powered cars. Most driving is commuting, and battery-powered cars can do that. For $4000-6000, you can convert a subcompact to be lead-acid battery-powered; it will have a range of 50-70 miles and it will go on the freeway. You can just plug it in at night to recharge it. No more gas stations -- no need to build a new energy-distribution system. (Lithium-ion batteries would give a much better range, but I think they're still too expensive for an automotive application.)
PING - ENERGY - We need nuclear energy to solve the problems in developing better energy solutions.
Hydrogen is a dead end for economic and technical (hard to store) reasons.
During winter, ice formation would present difficulties in northern climates.
I thought the solution was antimatter as in Dan Browns Angels and Demons!!
As the article points out, the most readily accessible source of hydrogen is natural gas, either directly, or using electricity derived from natgas-driven generators. So hydrogen doesn't really do anything to reduce our dependence on hydrocarbons.
So unless we break the taboo against nuclear energy, hydrogen power won't solve anything; and if we do reintroduce nuclear power, we don't need hydrogen anyway.
So while I think continuing research is a good idea, I don't see it working commercially.
The hilarious joke is that water vapor from burning hydrogen is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
For those trying to do calculations, be sure to include costs associated with production of gasoline. Exploration, drilling, pumping, pipelines, tankers, refineries, trucks, filling stations. Also the various taxes along the way.
Unfortunately, that would require a large increase in electricity production. That means we get the environmentalists to get over their coal/nuclear issues. Also, we can anticipate a certain amount of the electricity will still come from oil.
That why I am powered by beer!
If we as a society really want to cut down on all air emissions, the first thing we should do is implement a massive solar water heater augmentation program. Before you slam me let me finish. Most water in the US is either heated with natural gas or electricity. Adding an additional water tank that allows water to be heated (when sufficient sunlight is available) would mean that the electric and natural gas would supplement and serve a backup water heating role.
From the studies I have seen, that would save a lot of direct natural gas and indirect coal/natural gas, etc. from the electric water heaters. What is interesting about solar thermal is that the technology has been around pretty much unchanged since the 1920's. There are some newer high tech things, but a lot of the basic solar collector design has lots and lots of history and reliability behind it. It also will work in most of the US for at least a good part of the year.
Second, the US should encourage diesel fueled vehicles. Now I know some are going to say WHAT? However, again from the studies I have seen diesel vehicle, when you look at BTU/mile traveled and included the entire fuel/refinery chain, are some of the most fuel efficient vehicles out there.
The problem with the hydrogen economy idea is "portable" fuels. Hydrogen on a BTU per volume basis is just not all that energy intense. You can compress the hydrogen, you can chemically store it so it can be liberated chemically later, but no matter what you do is just isn't that many BTU's per cubic foot and that means that it will not be a decent long range vehicle fuel. Gasoline and diesel fuel have lots and lots of BTU's per cubic foot. That means you can have a "reasonably sized" fuel tank have have a good driving ranges for a car.
Now before the flaming starts, I was a nationally elected officer to one of the founding four engineering societies and was in their government relations committee that provided research and high quality testimony for various congressional committees. The engineering society regularly examined the US energy policy. We paid for mid-level professionally trained engineers to take a work sabatical and placed them as staff in various congressinal committees, federal agency departments and with certain think tanks that provided science & engineering staffing to state agencies. The results of these folks were regularly reviewed by various committees of experts within the engineering society. Those are the kinds of studies I have seen and been involved with.
I was also the project engineer on a 25 MW windfarm project and have looked at a variety of alternate energy technologies for electric utilities and can tell you that there are lots of other things we could do, but they wouldn't make a huge dent in things. Solar Water heating and diesel fueled cars would make a huge difference in U.S. energy consumption.
They're saying that they would produce the hydrogen from water in the first place. It should be a wash. Get it? A wash. ;)
But seriously, if using fuel cell technology in your car is the equivalent of paying $5 a gallon for gas, who wants it?
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