The False Promise of Hydrogen: What The President Is Driving At (The Facts!)

CEI - Competitive Enterprise Institute ^ | January 31, 2003 | Paul J. Georgia

[Varmint Al]

The False Promise of Hydrogen: What The President Is Driving At
Georgia Op-Ed in National Review Online
by Paul J. Georgia
January 31, 2003

In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush proposed that the federal government spend $1.2 billion on hydrogen fuel-cell research. "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," Bush said. "Join me in this important innovation, to make our air significantly cleaner and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of oil."

Bush obviously feels significant pressure to appear that he's doing something about the environment. At some point it might dawn on him that there's nothing he can say or do that will satisfy the radical environmental lobby and their media lapdogs. Bringing up such issues in high-profile speeches, such as the State of the Union, only provides fodder to his political enemies. Predictably the eco-radicals attacked Bush's plan for not requiring automakers to put affordable hydrogen cars on the market by a certain model year. They also claim that the plan is just a way to avoid forcing the automobile companies to lower fuel-economy standards.

It makes even less sense, however, for President Bush to throw a lot of money at a technology that is decades away from commercial viability. The "hydrogen economy" has been promoted for years by environmental activists and alternative-energy gurus like Amory Lovins. But hydrogen is not a source of energy, something which hydrogen advocates either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge. Since hydrogen does not exist in geological reservoirs it must be extracted from fossil-fuel feedstocks or water. The process of extracting hydrogen uses energy, which means that using hydrogen is less efficient that burning fossil fuels. And if you're worried about global warming you certainly don't want to go that route. As a recent energy-technology review in Science magazine pointed out last November, "Per unit of heat generated, more CO2 is produced by making H2 [hydrogen] from fossil fuel than by burning the fossil fuel directly."

The other option is to extract hydrogen from water using renewable-energy sources that deal fossil fuels entirely out of the equation. But that is a pipedream. Renewable energy itself is not cost effective, and by the time you use the energy to extract hydrogen from water, transport that hydrogen to where car owners can get to it and then recombine it with oxygen to re-extract the energy the cost becomes astronomical.

Honda, for example, is leasing five of its FCX fuel-cell vehicles to the city of Los Angeles. It is clearly a PR ploy since the cost to the company for each car is $1.6 million. Honda has also constructed a bank of solar panels in Torrance, California for the purpose of generating "clean" electricity to produce the hydrogen. But it takes a whole week to generate enough power to produce one tank of hydrogen at a cost of $40,000 per tank. Call me crazy, but that's a long way from affordable transportation.

Renewable energy has its own significant drawbacks. Wind power, the only renewable energy even close to being competitive, requires enormous subsidies to stay afloat. Subsidies for wind power, which include an array of both federal and state tax breaks and credits, along with accelerated depreciation (five years as opposed to 20 years for other electric generating facilities), are so extensive that their value sometimes exceeds the wind farm's revenues from selling electricity.

One of the subsidies, a 1.7-cent-per-kilowatt-hour production tax credit that must be renewed periodically by Congress, throws the industry into a recession every time it lapses. In 1999, for example, the tax credit wasn't available and only 50 megawatts of wind generation were installed. Congress renewed the tax credit and new generations soared to 1700 MW. In December 2001, the credit lapsed once again and wasn't renewed until March 2002. That year, only 410 MW of new capacity were installed. An energy source that is so heavily dependent on taxpayer subsidies does not meet President Bush's stated goal of providing this nation with affordable and reliable energy.

Moreover, wind farms are incredibly land intensive. Three newly proposed wind farms in West Virginia would occupy 30 to 40 square miles but would produce slightly less electricity than a new 265 MW gas-fired combined-cycle generating plant, which would occupy a few acres. Sallie Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimates, using very conservative assumptions, that producing enough hydrogen with wind power to replace just one-third of the vehicles on the road today would require 210,000 square miles. In reality, that number would likely be much higher. Finally, the history of federal funding of energy-technology research is downright depressing. It is a landscape littered with dozens of multibillion-dollar failures. It is unlikely that this new endeavor will result in anything more than wasted money.

[Varmint Al]

Paul J. Georgia really nails it! I heard him on KSFO Radio 560 AM on the dial this morning. Very quiet spoken, but grounded in science and facts. It was so refreshing. The CEI web site looks like an excellent site to bookmark for accurate science.

[PhiKapMom]

Thanks for posting this. I think the hydrogen car should be pushed to the way back burner and have "zero" funds allocated for it. Just my two cents!

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Check out the new engine design
www.starrotor.com

130 hp engine in two cubic feet.
this would give a full sized car 90 mpg.
engine would last 1,500,000 miles.
will run on most fuels.

[VRWC_minion]

Busbh ought to come out for every idea the wackos have. That would end them for good.

[CasearianDaoist]

The only way to mke a hydrogen economy" work would be cheap and abundant nuclear fusion. Here hydrogen it a plentiful by-product of the process. BTW, we just rejoined ITER, the large internaltional next generation fussion project. It may turnout that long term funding of fusion and hydrogen engines will turn out to be look quite visionary 20 years or so down the line.

[templar]

Very quiet spoken, but grounded in science and facts. It was so refreshing

Well, arguments also grounded in science and fact:

Bumblebees can't fly
A man cannot stand speeds in excess of 35 miles per hour without dying
The world is flat
The universe revolves around the earth
Travel past the Van Allen belt is impossible since it impossible for rockets to carry the nescessary weight of lead shielding to protect the people on the ship.
The speed of light is fixed and cannot change
etc.

What is scientific and factual today is not what will be scientific and factual in the future. The purpose of research is to develop new science and new facts. Consider what an early electrical engineer in 1903, only a hundred years ago, would say to the idea of the semi conductors and computers that we all take for granted today.

[AdamSelene235]

Transition to a Nuclear/Hydrogen Energy System
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/797219/posts

[Hodar]

Nice response. If the same logic that he proposes were applied to NASA, we would still be waiting to orbit the earth, as the means is still not 'economically viable'. If gasoline were discovered yesterday, the same arguements he made about costs involved in mass producing it could be used.

As a wise man once observed: "Necessity is the mother of invention"

[Wonder Warthog]

"The process of extracting hydrogen uses energy, which means that using hydrogen is less efficient than burning fossil fuels."

Sorry, Al, but this kind of blanket statement is bull****. Sure, extracting hydrogen uses PART of the energy, but what matters is the efficiency of the TOTAL CYCLE including hydrogen extraction.

For instance, if one is talking about a mobile application, burning gasoline in an IC engine is likely to be much LESS efficient than extracting the hydrogen from the same gasoline and using it to power a fuel cell/electric drive, simply due to the far higher conversion efficiency of the fuel cell/electric system.

I'm sorry you think the CEI site has "accurate science", because it doesn't. Like all "policy" sites--it only tells the part of the story that fits its agenda. If you want accurate SCIENCE, try:

here:

[ancient_geezer]

This article completely overlooks the research being done on catalyic & photosynthetic production of hydrogen from organic molecules.

Strong advances are being made in this area. Catalysts currently under study are lowering the temperature (i.e. energy) requirements for extraction of hydrogen every year.

Combining the catalytic production of hydrogen with fuel cell technology is a promising avenue that is being explored and the president's program would be focusing attention to the R&D of these projects.

Not useful today, but it is definitely on its way. There is more than one way to aquire hyrogen than the energy intensive processes used now.

[Petronski]

Wouldn't the use of fission reactors to generate the electricity needed to separate hydrogen from water also be potentially feasible?

[templar]

That's a nice liink. Do you know anyone (hobbyists) making these for home projects? I'd like to talk to them. (I've given up on sterlings and am playing around with tesla turbines now myself.)

[Core_Conservative]

I agree that Buch should not be spending my hard earned money on Fuel Cell Research. I have been to several websites that promote a household generator - which works completely off of self seperated hydrogen. In order to seperate the hydrogen from the water to produce the chemical reaction which produces electricity - you need to have a catalyst. One such catalyst is borax - yup that's right - the old standby laundry soap. Look it up - there are plenty of on-going project which already work - the auto companies already have fuel cells - it's just that I think that they are on the wrong tract - they are still using gas for the catalystic product - YA DON't NEED IT!

[Free the USA]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[Interious]

H2 power clearly is not the Panacea The left (Jeremy Rifkin, for example) thinks it is. It is clearly not a source of energy but a medium through which energy may be transfered.

That said, Honda's huge initial outlay for prototypes is not surprising. It may be foolish to rule out initially difficult concepts because of apparent lack of practical feasibilty in the present.

I'd like to see other assessments from purely scientific bodies--or as free from politics as is possible.

[tallhappy]

Actually his comments are specious and border on intellectually dishonest.

This passage for example:

But hydrogen is not a source of energy, something which hydrogen advocates either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge. Since hydrogen does not exist in geological reservoirs it must be extracted from fossil-fuel feedstocks or water. The process of extracting hydrogen uses energy, which means that using hydrogen is less efficient that burning fossil fuels.

His comments do not address his statement that "hydrogen is not a source of energy".

His comments addres the lack of hydrogen available, not whether or not if it were available would it be a viable energy source.

His comments are written to falsely that imply hydrogen is not efficent as a fuel. That sort of distortion is not appropriate.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

No home builds.
This is a company that is designing this
Braxton cycle engine.

[ancient_geezer]

An example of an application of new catalytic processes

http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/v33_2_00/micropower.htm

In the summer of 1998, CTD's Jonathan Woodward and researchers John Getty and Mark Orr tried a new way to make hydrogen from sugar, which involved the deposition of the metal platinum on a glucose-digesting enzyme. The experiment worked.

"After several different experiments," Woodward says, "we then observed that mixing iron powder with water also produced hydrogen at ambient temperatures, but the production was not sustained. Then we discovered that if we add gluconic acid as well as iron powder to the water, we obtained sustained hydrogen production under certain conditions."

Gluconic acid is an organic acid consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (C₆H₁₁O₇) that is produced from glucose sugar, an abundant and renewable carbon source. Woodward noted that the sustained hydrogen-production reaction works well under three conditions: a temperature of 80°C, neutral pH, and the absence of oxygen.

There are many such approaches being currently explored. To say that Hydrogen cannot become a viable fuel resource and technology is just plain shortsighted and foolish.

[sonofron]

"Wouldn't the use of fission reactors to generate the electricity needed to separate hydrogen from water also be potentially feasible?"

what about radioactive waste? stockpiling by-products of reactors in a mountainside isn't my idea of a better energy policy. Of course WE wouldn't have to worry about it, but our great grandchildren would. R&D for renewables is the best option for now.

[ex-Texan]

He is all wet. BMW will introduce a Hydrogen fuel cell automobile in about 3 years. GM just announced a major fuel fuel cell break through ... I found over a hundred articles on H2 power in 5 minutes.

BMW: http://www.auto.com/industry/iwirg28_20020828.htm

Ford: http://www.automotive-technology.com/projects/p2000/

Many cars: http://www.h2cars.de/