Posted on 10/09/2004 5:00:37 AM PDT by foolscap
US vehicles would require a million wind turbines, economists claim. Wind power might be green, but it is unlikely to power the hydrogen revolution.
Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen power would demand so much electricity that the country would need enough wind turbines to cover half of California or 1,000 extra nuclear power stations.
So concludes a British economist, whose calculation is intended to highlight the difficulties of achieving a truly green hydrogen economy.
"This calculation is useful to make people realize what an enormous problem we face," says Andrew Oswald, an economist from the University of Warwick.
The hydrogen economy has been touted as a replacement for fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide when burnt, thus contributing to global warming. Burning hydrogen produces only water.
Most hydrogen is currently made from methane, in a process that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Splitting water molecules with electricity generates hydrogen - but the electricity is likely to have been generated from fossil fuels.
Although this may shift urban pollution to out-of-town electricity plants, it makes little difference to greenhouse-gas output. "Today, hydrogen is not a clean, green fuel," says Oswald's brother Jim, an energy consultant who assisted with the calculation. "You've got to ask: where did the hydrogen come from?"
The only technology that can currently make large amounts of hydrogen without using fossil fuels relies on renewable power sources or nuclear energy, the Oswalds argue. Hydrogen will only mitigate global warming when a clean source of the gas becomes available, they say.
Unpopular options
The duo considered the United Kingdom and the United States. Transport accounts for about one third of each country's energy consumption.
UK transport uses only a tenth as much energy as the United States, but there is less land available: the hydrogen switch would require 100,000 wind turbines, enough to occupy an area greater than Wales.
It unlikely that enough turbines could ever be built, says Jim Oswald. On the other hand, public opposition to nuclear energy deters many politicians. "I suspect we will do nothing, because all the options are so unpopular."
"I don't think we'll ever have a true hydrogen economy. The outlook is extremely bleak," he adds. The brothers outline their calculation in the current issue of Accountancy magazine.
"Hydrogen is not a near-term prospect," agrees Paul Ekins, an energy economist at the Policy Studies Institute, London. "There will have to be a few fundamental breakthroughs in technology first," he says.
Politicians eager to promote their green credentials, yet unaware of the realities, have oversold the hydrogen dream, says Ekins. "I'm amazed by the number of politicians who think you can dig hydrogen out of the ground," he says.
However, he thinks that the Oswalds are too pessimistic about the possibilities of new technology. "An enormous amount of attention is being paid to generating hydrogen cleanly," he says.
If we could trap the carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuels underground, we could convert them to hydrogen, says Ekins. "It's not tried and tested, but it's a possibility." And it could become a reality by the time we have enough hydrogen-powered cars to make it necessary, he says.
So do the Oswalds have a more immediate answer to the hydrogen problem? "We could always use less energy, but that doesn't seem very likely," Jim Oswald says ruefully
A gloom and doom idiot. Huge offshore platforms (like oil drilling rigs) could supply most if not all hydrogen fuel.
That source has the advantage that it can be used to help smooth out the demand for the output of nuclear plants. Those plants have to be run flat out 24/7 to be efficient and so they have to be built to meet the slack demand with hydro and fossil fuel plants coming on line to meet the peak demands.
With a hydrogen economy, nukes could be built to satisfy peak demands and divert output to hydrogen producing plants during slack demand, thereby reducing reliance on the dirtier and less environmentally friendly fossile fuel and hydro plants.
How?
Producing hydrogen from fossil fuels is an utter waste of resources. You are burning up a useable resource to create another less efficient useable resource. It's rediculous.
He has no idea what could be invented, discovered, or developed tomorrow.
"Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen power would demand...enough wind turbines to cover half of California..."
Well, hell's bells, let's get started! Of course, California will never allow anything so practical to besmirch it, which is why it's consistently short of power and screwed on energy contracts. But scatter those turbines across about 30 states and you've got something! Wind power's a success in it's first full year in OK and expanding already. Those who say it can't be done aren't doing a very good job of stopping those who are doing it.
You CAN dig hydrogen out of he ground. It's called coal, oil, uranium.....
Sorry, GWB, I think Hydrogen is a bad idea. How are you going to use it? In a internal combustion engine, you will still get those damn nitrogen oxides forming. If you are going to go fuel cell, why not just use reformers and create the hydrogen out of the liquid fuel (gasoline or CNG). Just take a look at the car explosion at Weehawkin, NJ this past week, and imagine that happening to a hydrogen car.
The all-electric car with the greenest pedigree will almost certainly be a fuel-cell vehicle with an on-board reformer.
Amen!
In fact, so much of what is called nuclear "waste" may come to be a major energy source in the future, as these "decay" products are reclaimed and used for various industrial purposes. What is going on now is superstitious fear, that ALL energy generated from atomic decay of unstable elements is invariably equated to atomic holocaust.
But we need somebody other than Homer Simpson working at the atomic reactors, and somebody besides Montgomery Burns as CEO.
Even if we were to somehow switch to hydrogen as a primary fuel source it would take decades to do it because there is no existing storage medium and no distribution network. These issues could be overcome, but it will cost hundreds of billions to do it.
What ever happens it isn't going to happen over night, that is certain.
I have always though that you could take nuclear waste, embed a heat exchanger in it, vitrify it (turn it into glass/ceramic), encase it in a lead/concrete container, and create a neighborhood-sized power generator that would last for at least a hundred years. Especially if you ever work out the thermoelectric conversion process without a boiler/turbine combination.
Sorry. Offshore platforms with wind turbines.
Part of this is due of course, to the utilities. They have been, unlike the Euros, largely unable standardize on technology. We were way behind the...gasp... the French!
The MSM has never been technically savvy, and coverage of "events" like Three Mile Island was just plain stupid. Bumper Sticker:
No one in the MSM has ever pointed out that Chernobyl, a true human diaster of unprecedented scale, occurred at a Nuclear Weapons facility that produced electricity as a by-product, and not really a hell of a lot of it, considering the size of the place.
To think that one day man will fly in a craft that defies gravity is preposterous.
I've seen a letter from the Department of Energy dated 1979 which states "hydrogen makes an excellent motor fuel," with 3.5 times the explosive power of gasoline," and ambient temperature storage technologies safer than those used at every self-service station in the U.S. were already being toyed with, liquid and metal hydrides, most especially by the Billings Corporation - decades ago.
These pinheads sound like they are the ones worried about their oil stocks.
The generation of electricity to crack water to produce hydrogen is the answer to the battery storage barrier, and the answer to the drawbacks of solar's undependable insolation (cloudy days).
And it is the answer to foreign oil import dependency.
It sounds too good to be true?
The only drawback is the infrastructure standards for distribution. There are hundreds of ways to store hydrogen, and if we allow the DOE to decide which is best it will make the rollout of HDTV look fast.
We need a prize for the first automobile to run from coast to coast without a fill-up.
That same 25 year old DOE letter states that the "Hydrogen Economy" is inevitable. Now, aside from the Jimmy Carter-ish source, know that this neither a new idea nor is it a strange idea. I've been waiting thirty years for a President to acknowledge it's promise all the while with the American populace bought off with cheap OPEC oil.
This is not fantasy, any more than radio or TV must have seemed to your great grand fathers, and grand fathers.
By placing a pyramid over the offshore oil drilling platform, not only would all razor blades on board be honed to a precise sharpness, but tritiated water would fractionate thus producing deuderated offgassing of hydronium-laced gaseous hydrogen.
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