Why Bush's H-Car is Just Hot Air

The New Republic ^ | February 18, 2003 | Greg Easterbrook

[MurryMom]

"A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free." President Bush said these words during his State of the Union address, introducing the FreedomFUEL proposal--which is really how the White House spells it. The president wants to spend $1.2 billion over the next five years to research the production of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline in automobiles.

Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell" motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants, including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.

The attraction of hydrogen is great, since hydrogen-based transportation would both be environmentally benign and reduce the need for the United States to import petroleum. But Bush's proposal joins a new convention of rhapsodizing about hydrogen-powered transportation--Jeremy Rifkin numbers among current hydrogen zealots--while skipping over the small matter of where we get the hydrogen. Worse, the White House plan offers a long-term distraction from a short-term need: While the administration dreams big about our hydrogen-powered future, it does little to improve fuel-economy standards today.

There are many impediments to a future in which fuel-cell automobiles dominate America's roadways. What form--gaseous, liquid, or mixed with metallic dust to prevent explosion should there be an accident--would the hydrogen we pump into our cars take? How would the hydrogen be moved in commercial quantities to those filling stations? Could average motorists pump hydrogen themselves, considering it is now handled only by specialists? But these are engineering questions and presumably can be answered.

Unfortunately, a cost-effective answer to the question of how to obtain hydrogen may prove more elusive than answers to questions about how to handle it. At first glance, this issue would seem simple. After all, our world contains gargantuan amounts of hydrogen--two-thirds of the oceans, for instance, are made up of this element. But the pure form of hydrogen needed to power fuel-cell cars does not occur naturally on Earth, where hydrogen is chemically bound to other elements, such as oxygen in the case of the oceans. And, while the stars contain an almost inexpressible amount of hydrogen in its pure form, stellar material will not be on sale at your local filling station anytime soon, or ever.

Because pure hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, any pure hydrogen for use as fuel must be manufactured. Today, pure hydrogen is most often made using natural gas as a feedstock, but that means fossil fuels are still being consumed: Basically, the process turns a fossil fuel, methane, into something that seems not to be a fossil fuel, hydrogen. Pure hydrogen can also be manufactured using petroleum or coal, which of course are the very fossil fuels whose grip we wish to loosen. And, while pure hydrogen has been manufactured from agricultural products--plants contain hydrogen bound as carbohydrates--at the research level, it remains to be seen whether this could work commercially. Enviros rhapsodize about making hydrogen from seawater. But there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic reactor--must provide the electricity. Indeed, the big misconception about hydrogen is that it is a "source" of energy. Pure hydrogen is not an energy source, except to stars. As it will be used in cars or to power homes and offices, hydrogen--like a battery--is an energy medium, a way to store power that has been obtained in some other way. Hydrogen makes an attractive energy medium because its "fuel-cycle" calculations--the sum of all steps of manufacture and use--show reductions in greenhouse gases compared with any automotive fuel burned today. But hydrogen is going to be an expensive energy medium and, in the early decades at least, will be a medium either for natural gas, a fossil fuel, or for atomic power.

Today, the most practical means to make pure hydrogen is a process called "steam reforming" of natural gas. A natural-gas molecule has one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; "reforming" strips off the carbon atoms, leaving pure hydrogen. But not only is a fossil fuel--natural gas--the raw material of this process, energy must be expended for the "reforming" itself, meaning a net loss of BTUs. Using Department of Energy estimates, the White House says pure hydrogen from natural gas is currently "four times as expensive to produce as gasoline."

Applied engineering and commercial-scale production would surely bring down the price. The most optimistic credible projection I have seen comes from Jesse Ausubel, a specialist in "industrial ecology" at the Rockefeller University, who thinks commercial-scale hydrogen made from natural gas could be produced for about 40 percent more than the price of gasoline. That's within striking distance of a good deal. But there is a catch to this catch: Optimistic estimates for hydrogen from natural gas are based on the current low selling price of natural gas. Significant new demand for natural gas might raise its price. And, while natural-gas supplies are steady at the moment, who knows what the effect on supply would be if hydrogen manufacturing caused natural-gas consumption to skyrocket?

So maybe the hydrogen should be made from coal or petroleum. Fuel-cycle calculations show that using coal or petroleum to manufacture hydrogen would lead to some reduction in greenhouse gases but not to a big cut; moreover, we'd still be digging coal and importing petroleum. Maybe hydrogen should be made from agricultural products-- "biomass," in energy lingo. But biomass feedstocks might be grown using fertilizer, which is made mainly from fossil fuels, and again the fuel-cycle calculations show only a moderate gain in pollution reduction for the large capital costs entailed in establishing an agriculture-hydrogen economy. (All hydrogen schemes, it should be noted, involve large capital costs.) Owing to these concerns, John McCarthy, a Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar electricity." Otherwise, it's just repackaging fossil fuels.

But solar power on the scale required is far from practical. It is possible to imagine a green-dream-come-true energy cycle that uses solar collectors to generate electricity to crack hydrogen out of water: zero greenhouse gases and endlessly renewable. For the moment, solar collectors are much too expensive. The Worldwatch Institute, a much-admired, left-leaning environmental organization, recently rated sources of electricity by combining their capital cost and true social cost--that is, taking into account "externalities" such as pollution and entanglements with the Gulf states. Solar power finished last, much more expensive than coal-generated power, even when coal's external costs are factored in. An indicator: Solar-derived electricity currently wholesales for around ten times as much per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired watts.

Even if the price of solar power fell by orders of magnitude, there would be the not-so-little problem of where to put the solar collectors. To replace the petroleum we use to power our cars with hydrogen split from water might entail doubling America's electricity-generating capacity. Doing that with solar collectors could require covering a land area roughly the size of Connecticut with photovoltaic cells. In theory, the collectors could be put in space, where sunlight has eight times as many watts per square meter as on the ground and where no one's land need be taken. Figures in a recent study in Science magazine suggested that doubling the electricity-production capacity of the United States would require placing approximately 40 photovoltaic collector dishes, each the size of Manhattan, into orbit. Even if capital cost were no object and society possessed the technical means to build objects in space the size of Manhattan, such a project would take a century.

hich brings us to atomic power, the energy source everyone loves to hate. In theory, lots of new atomic stations could be built to make electricity to manufacture hydrogen, and the stations could use new, "inherently safe" reactors designed so that they cannot melt down. (In inherently safe reactors, the atomic chain reaction is initiated in such a way that, if safety systems fail, the chain breaks; researchers have deliberately turned off all cooling and safety systems of inherently safe prototypes and nothing happens.) But political opposition to atomic reactors is intense, and capital costs here would be high as well. Some estimates also suggest that, if a significant number of new reactors were put into service, uranium--currently plentiful--would become scarce after a few decades. This could be avoided by building "breeder" reactors that make more fuel than they consume. But breeders work by breeding plutonium, and most nations, including the United States, have suspended construction of breeder reactors because such machines would increase the risk of plutonium being diverted for nuclear weapons production.

Many researchers continue to believe that "fusion" reactors, which mimic the internal process of the sun, someday will be perfected. Over the long term, fusion reactors might solve all global-energy questions, oddly, by using hydrogen to make hydrogen! In a fusion reactor, tiny amounts of hydrogen isotope are fused into helium, generating heat. (The sun fuses hydrogen into helium for its luminescence, and nuclear bombs get much of their force from fusing a small amount of hydrogen isotope.) Heat from a fusion reactor would drive turbines to make electricity; the electricity would crack hydrogen out of water in large quantities; the hydrogen would power cars or be turned back into electricity in individual fuel cells in people's homes. Though a hydrogen-to-hydrogen energy cycle might sound like a perpetual-motion machine, it could end up being the technology that someday makes global-energy needs a solved issue.

But this is all blue sky because fusion reactors barely function in the laboratory--there is nothing remotely close to a commercial prototype. And, even if a grad student ran from a laboratory tomorrow yelling, "Eureka!" and clutching the secret of an unlimited-energy-fusion future, it would be another century-long project to convert the world to an energy economy based on machines that simulate the centers of stars.

Realistically, these concerns dictate that, for the next few decades, hydrogen would be manufactured either from natural gas or by using power from a new generation of atomic reactors. The most cost-effective combination, some researchers think, might be natural gas heated directly by atomic reactors, whose high operating temperatures turn out to be ideal for the reforming of hydrogen from natural gas. But that means our miracle zero-emission hydrogen will be produced from fossil fuels via an intermediate stop at a nuclear reactor--not exactly what the Sierra Club had in mind.

All these drawbacks do not rule out hydrogen as a fuel, they merely represent problems to be overcome. Hydrogen is sure to enter common use someday, perhaps during the lifetimes of children now being born. After all, a century ago, smart engineers and economists would have sworn it physically impossible--to say nothing of impossibly expensive--for the world to consume 75 million barrels of oil per day, as we do today, at affordable prices. But there is almost no chance hydrogen will make a dent in energy-use patterns during a two-term Bush administration. Even the White House concedes that the earliest a significant number of service stations could offer pure hydrogen would be 2020.

Which brings us to the downside of Bush's hydrogen proposal. The announcement makes the president sound interested in dramatic future action regarding petroleum imports and greenhouse gases, while distracting attention from the reform that is practical and affordable using technology that exists right now: higher miles-per-gallon (MPG) standards for cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs.

Bush is certainly not the first president to employ futurism to deflect attention from torpor on energy efficiency. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, federal MPG standards did not rise, while nothing was done about the fuel-efficiency exemptions enjoyed by SUVs and the misnamed "light" pickup trucks. President Clinton did, however, unveil to much fanfare a "supercar" project that promised incredible, astonishing, super-ultra-futuristic advances in mileage performance at an unspecified later date. The supercar effort, which ended up spending $1.6 billion to accomplish nothing (see "Political Mileage," by Gregg Easterbrook, October 9, 2000), was always a smoke screen. When Clinton was asked why he was taking no action on SUV mileage, he'd launch into an animated discourse about the supercar. Gore did the same, talking--like the "Futurama" caricature of himself--about 80 MPG family sedans made from recycled yogurt cartons. By resorting to discussion of speculative fantastic leaps to distract attention from bad energy policy in the present, Bush has simply taken his cue from two previous masters of petroleum-waste inaction.

And there is no escaping that energy policy remains bad in the present. True, the White House has proposed a 7 percent increase in fuel-efficiency standards for SUVs, but a loophole in the president's proposal will allow manufacturers to declare many SUVs exempt from this fairly modest new requirement. The National Research Council told the White House in summer 2001 that a 25 to 35 percent increase in SUV fuel-efficiency could be accomplished quickly using existing technology. The sorts of improvements the National Research Council envisioned would still permit the production of large vehicles and large pickups, knocking out only Godzilla-sized SUVs, such as the Ford Excursion, or those SUVs, such as the Cadillac Escalade, that get pitiful gas mileage owing to very high-horsepower engines. Yet Bush and his energy advisers apparently lack the will to face down even the relatively small Excursion and Escalade lobby. Thus, talk of the hydrogen future.

"Join me in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy," Bush said in announcing the FreedomFUEL plan. Becoming "much less dependent on foreign sources of energy" should be a vital goal of U.S. policy. So why doesn't Bush take genuine action toward this end today via meaningful increases in fuel-efficiency standards, and leave futurism to the futurists?

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at TNR.

[MurryMom]

Bush finally tries to appease the environmentalists and it turns out he's merely attempting to deceive the voters yet again.

Go figure!

[ECM]

I think we're all aware that there really is no appeasing environmentalists. Even when he attempts to cater to them, he gets spit on.

And yeah, hydrogen-based fuel cells are a pipe dream, but so is just about every other form of "renewable" energy.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Boiled down, the reason that hydrogen from water won't work is that it takes more enegy to break the bond between hydrogen and water than a fuel cell can produce. This energy must come from somewhere and it is usually electricity. The load put on the power grid to generate enough hydrogen to fuel +200 million cars wouold bring it to its knees.

[Monster Zero]

Speaking of hot air...

[TontoKowalski]

Looks like nuclear energy is about the only way to go.

[Chemist_Geek]

And yeah, hydrogen-based fuel cells are a pipe dream,

And there would only be a market for a few dozen computers in the United States, and there was no point in drilling for oil, and what were those Wright brothers thinking anyway...

[NittanyLion]

You're right - this hydrogen talk is nonsense. It's clear nuclear power is the best long-term solution.

[ECM]

I'm sorry you don't like the current version of reality/physics making the rounds.

Come talk to me when it doesn't take MORE energy to make hyrogen cells 'pound for pound' equal to fossil fuels.

(see you in half a century or more)

[Lee Heggy]

"64 K of memory should be enough for anyone."

Bill Gates

[altayann]

True, but the same applies to petroleum deposits as well.

The reason petroleum is cheaper than any current alternative is that extra energy has been applied to it over millions of years through the pressure exerted on it by the earth's crust.

Petroleum, in other words, comes with a hidden 'subsidy'. Unless there's a way of creating hydrogen more cheaply, you're never going to get around this problem.

[NittanyLion]

And there would only be a market for a few dozen computers in the United States, and there was no point in drilling for oil, and what were those Wright brothers thinking anyway...

This isn't a question of marketing, it's one of science. More energy must be put into producing hydrogen than the hydrogen itself can provide. That is a constant and always will be.

[eastsider]

But there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic reactor--must provide the electricity.... John McCarthy, a Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar electricity."

I'm no authority on energy production, but couldn't the electricity be generated from wind power?

[biblewonk]

Wind power rocks but making hydrogen is pointless. At 5 cents per kwhr for the electricity, how much would a tank of hydrogen cost? I'll be excited, though, when wind power reaches 1 percent of the US electricity supply.

[Paul_B]

> Republicans relentlessly mocked Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.

Not quite. Gore's plan doubtless would have entailed aggressive government regulations to fit an unproven agenda. Bush, OTOH, is spending research bucks to first develop the technology. Big dif.

I agree with the article's point, though, that Bush's rhetoric, like Clinton's and Gore's previous on the subject, is far too utopian. There are massive problems to switching to hydrogen or electric powered cars in a way that transcends zero-sum use of existing fuels to make hydrogen or electricity (though even that could bring some small logistical advantage, as in lowering pollution in dense population areas).

I suppose the reason for the smooth rhetoric, and the massive cumulative loosing of governmental coffers in general that we have seen, is to silence domestic political opposition one issue at a time. This stuff tends to play well among the masses. Such is the political reality, I guess.

[radioman]

The load put on the power grid to generate enough hydrogen to fuel +200 million cars wouold bring it to its knees.

You remind me of my grandfather. His dad told him not to give up blacksmithing to work on automobiles. "They're just a passing fad."

Hydrogen fueled vehicles are already in use. Production of hydrogen is simple and efficient. The 1.2 billion is to set up a distribution system.
Fuel cells and hydrogen on demand may be science fiction, but filling your tank at a hydrogen service station is possible now.

[thepitts]

Bush finally tries to appease the environmentalists and it turns out he's merely attempting to deceive the voters yet again.

I agree with your statement, but not you agenda.

[BlackJack]

Wind power can make electricity cheaper than coal.
Bacteria can produce Hydrogen VERY cheaply.

Whatever happened to America's famous "can do" attitude?
Look at all these FR whiners,"we can't do it" "we can't make
Hydrogen" whaaaaaa

Yeah Nukes-the way to go-the most dangerous expensive way to
make a Kw ever devised by Big BROTHER and the holding co.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

new type of engine it will use most fuels and can
be scaled to any size.

http://www.starrotor.com

1805 Southwood Dr.
College Station, TX 77840
contact@StarRotor.com
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[NittanyLion]

Yeah Nukes-the way to go-the most dangerous expensive way to make a Kw ever devised by Big BROTHER and the holding co.

Dangerous? When one considers the emissions (or lack thereof) nuclear power is actually quite safe. As far as expenses, remove government regulation and nuclear power would be much more price competitive.