Posted on 09/23/2005 2:19:38 PM PDT by newgeezer
Funny thing about hydrogen cars: If we were all driving them now, the President's FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be "the moral equivalent of war," to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.
To see why this is so, let's look at the numbers. And for once, we're talking about a miracle fuel without speculation. We can see exactly how the "gasoline economy" would work by looking back to a year that's already happened. In 2000, gasoline consumption averaged 8.47 million barrels per day. Gas contains 5.15 million British thermal units of energy per barrel. For big numbers like this, it's customary to think in "quads," or quadrillion BTUs. So the gasoline energy used by motor vehicles in the year 2000 worked out to 16 quads.
Now let's do the same driving in hydrogen cars. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element on earth, but there's no underground pool of it we can drill into. All of nature's hydrogen atoms come married to other atoms in earnestly stable relationships. It takes an industrial process to break apart those marriages to obtain pure hydrogen in a form that can be used by fuel cells.
Think of fuel cells as black boxes into which we put hydrogen on one side and oxygen from the atmosphere on the other. Out the bottom come water and a small electrical current. There is no such thing as free power, of course. If you get power out when you let hydrogen and oxygen get married in a fuel cell, then you must put power into the process of divorcing them.
The industrial divorcing of water molecules is known as electrolysis. This is fuel by immaculate conception, according to most greenies. To make the chemistry work, you must put in 39.4 kilowatt-hours of energy for each kilogram of hydrogen you expect to liberate. Unfortunately, the electrolysis process is only 70 percent efficient. So the total energy input must be 56.3 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen.
This energy to be added must come from somewhere. The U.S. has an excellent supply of coal. Coal-fired powerplants are about 40 percent efficient, so 140.8 kilowatt-hours of coal energy are required to net the 56.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce our one kilogram of hydrogen.
My source for these calculations is Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University, in a Cato Institute report.
In a perfect world, the fuel cell in our car would produce 33.4 kilowatt-hours of useful energy from each kilogram of hydrogen, and 6.0 kilowatt-hours would go to water vapor, giving you back your net investment of 39.4 kilowatt-hours at the electrolysis plant. But the world is not perfect, and the best fuel cells are only about 70 percent efficient. So the energy yield is 23.3 kilowatt-hours.
One more loss must be reckoned with. Hydrogen is a gas. It's lighter than air. Remember, it was the stuffing for the airship Hindenburg. Hydrogen gas (at atmospheric pressure and room temperature) containing the same energy as a gallon of gasoline takes up 3107 gallons of space. To make a useful auto fuel, Anthrop says it must be compressed to at least 4000 psi (Honda uses 5000 psi in the FCX; GM is trying for 10,000). The energy required to do that further trims the yield to 17.4 kilowatt-hours. Pressures higher than 4000 would increase miles available from each fill but cost more energy for compression. Liquefying hydrogen, which BMW advocates, costs upward of 40 percent of hydrogen's energy content.
So far, the numbers say this: Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.
Anthrop goes on to estimate the fuel-cell power needed for the 2.526 billion miles driven in the U.S. in 2000. According to Southern California Edison, the electricity needed per mile for passenger cars is at least 0.46 kilowatt-hour. For the whole U.S. vehicle fleet, that works out to 1.16 trillion kilowatt-hours. You'll need 32 quads of coal, which is twice the energy actually consumed in 2000 with gasoline.
As for global-warming implications, the use of hydrogen from coal instead of gasoline would produce a 2.7-fold increase in carbon emissions.
Of course, all of today's electricity doesn't come from coal. But even with the current mix of sources, including natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind, that much hydrogen would raise our carbon output to about twice the 2000 level.
The enviros like to talk about renewable energy. Anthrop has done those calculations as well. Hydro power is our largest source of green electricity, but it would take 15 times the current amount for an all-hydrogen vehicle fleet. Given the pressure to remove existing dams, it's unlikely we'll have any additional hydroelectricity.
Photovoltaic cells? Anthrop says it takes about eight years of cell output to make back the electrical power originally consumed in manufacturing the cell.
Wind power? It defies calculation, in part because wind blows only intermittently.
Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called "steam reforming," is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he says, "than if the natural gas were simply burned" in the generating plant.
Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002's usage. And don't forget the carbon emissions.
That leaves the unspeakable—nukes.
Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW's hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California's greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW's official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.
No answer, of course, is the anwer.
There are a lot of technical problems with using hydrogen as a fuel that will need to be overcome before it has a chance of being what the environitwits claim it can be. Some of them may not be solvable. But that hasn't stopped people from pushing hydrogen as the universal energy solution that it clearly isn't.
Now don't get me wrong; hydrogen does have a place in a post petroleum economy, but not by itself. The real post petroleum world will see a much wider variety of energy sources in use. Right now we depend almost entirely on the big three fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. If we do things right, we will see many different renewable fuels, each being used where it is most useful. That means hydrogen, but it also includes biodiesel, ethanol, wind, photovoltaic, nuclear, and other energy sources.
To claim hydrogen and nuclear power will be the sole energy solutions is naive. Promoting them as such, to the exclusion of all others, is foolish to the point of being economically suicidal.
I want a diesel Harley.
But the report specifically does not give any real data about the economic feasability of using catalyzed organosilanes as a hydrogen source. What is the source of the organosilane liquid? How cheap is it to produce?
The by-product of extracting the hydrogen is silanol, which is currently more valuable than the source organosilanes. However, if this process is implemented on the mass scale required to produce enough hydrogen to be a replacement for our current energy sources, I strongly suspect so much silanol byproduct would be produced that it will become just another waste product and will need to be disposed of in some way.
But it is an intruiging thought. Don't maglev trains have truly pure EM drive trains at speed?
We have smart people workin' on it. :D I'm not worried.
Once upon a time, this was true, but research has decreased the required amount of platinum sufficiently that it is no longer a serious problem. As to a "domestic source"---we'll just recycle all the platinum currently used in exhaust system catalytic converters.
I note that the need to use platinum for THAT application hasn't slowed down people buying cars.
This is only true if you consider "boule-grown, diamond sawed" type solar cells. Look up "Konarka" solar cells for CURRENT cutting-edge technology.
That leaves the unspeakable—nukes.
Nukes aren't just speakable, they're buildable. That new Arreva commercial makes them seem almost trendy.
If you build it (network of new nukes), they (hydro cars) will come.
Yep. Me too.
Somebody has to say it!
ping to 70. Have you heard of this? What's your opinion?
I burned up a set of tires and brakes in Louisiana.
Let's start speaking about it then.
Nuclear power plant technology can be engineered to a standard of safety exceeding that of coal-fired power plants. And we will son have a place to store the waste, at Yucca Flat.
Nuclear power can produce hydrogen efficiently and cheaply. Let's get on with it!
Hidden? Seemed apparent to me ; )
Exactly! Why the rush to abandon a well established fuel sourch that is still plentiful? The planet still contains a tremendous ammount of oil and the known reserves are growing every year.
Any dramatic changes in the fuel infrasture, intoductions of localized fuels or fuels that can not be readily manufactured will slow economies drastically. It's almost like there is a concerted movement to stop ecomnomic progess. The environmentalist movement in a nutshell.
Didn't see the price in $ per watt on their corporate homepage. Seems like yet another corporation just waiting to be bought out.
Your statement implies there is absolutely no reason to recycle. (If recycling cannot be justified -- even environmentally -- why bother?) Show me the numbers, deliniating inputs and outputs, to support such a claim.
Supposedly, the main objective of recycling is to reclaim assets from our waste products instead of simply burying them. In certain cases, such as aluminum, recycling costs much less than producing it from raw materials. If the the total energy and environmental costs associated with collecting, transporting and processing waste aluminum exceed those of mining bauxite, etc., I'd be surprised, to put it mildly.
Recycling only makes sense when there's a market for it, sans government subsidies. Aluminum is one of the few places where recycling makes sense. The market supports the recycling of aluminum regardless of government intervention and subsidies. In most cases, recycling is a misuse of resources and a hidden tax so liberals and environmentalists can "feel good."
Show me the numbers, deliniating inputs and outputs, to support such a claim.
Okay. This is easy to back up. Here's a couple of minutes worth of searching.
From The Myth and Cost of Recycling...
It will cost the City of St. Marys $18.00 per ton to dispose of refuse in 2004 but would cost $50.00 per ton to get a recycler to accept it - the transportation costs are about equal. (That you have to pay a person to take "recyclable" material, rather than being paid for it, tells you immediately the value of the effort.)
From Recycling Myths...
Quite often, more energy and resources are spent than saved in the process of recycling. Municipal governments, because of the inherent shortcomings of public sector accounting and budget information, routinely underestimate the full costs of their recycling programs.
and...
Environmentalists who put their faith in government, with hardly a scrap of evidence that suggests they should, seem oblivious to these realities. To them, mountains of refuse waiting to be recycled into things people don't want at a cost they would never freely pay is not a reason to abolish mandatory recycling schemes. Instead, it gives them a reason to pass new laws that would force-feed the economy with recycled products.
From the classic Eight Great Myths of Recycling, which is full of footnotes for the skeptic...
The method of comparison I use is based on cost studies by Franklin Associates (1997), a consulting firm that studies solid waste issues on behalf of the EPA and other clients. Three programs are the focus here: disposal into landfills (but including a voluntary drop-off/buy-back recycling program), a baseline curbside recycling program, and an extensive curbside recycling program. These three approaches represent the vast majority of municipal solid waste programs across the country. In each case, Franklin assumes a city size of 250,000 and supposes that all equipment and facilities are new at the outset. The firm also assumes that the community has a broad-based municipal solid waste (MSW) service capacity, provides both residential and commercial service, and offers onceper-week curbside pickup of MSW.3 Table 2 shows the costs per ton of handling rubbish through these three alternative methods.
It is apparent from this table that, on average, curbside recycling is substantially more costly—that is, it uses far more resources—than a program in which disposal is combined with a voluntary drop-off/buy-back option. The reason: Curbside recycling of household rubbish uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Overall, curbside recycling costs run between 35 percent and 55 percent higher than the disposal option.
As one expert in the field puts it, adding curbside recycling is “like moving from once-a-week garbage collection to twice a week” (Bailey 1995, A8).
In the table shown in the report, disposal costs $104 per ton in 2002 dollars, compared to $182 for baseline recycling and $151 for extended recycling.
Most recycling has a negative economic and environmental benefit. It occurs because it makes people "feel good."
Given that France is the last western nation to test nukes...not really surprising.
They are also the nation known to attempt to sink Greenpeace ships.
Could be--but still VERY interesting technology. Reasonably good efficiency, and the fabrication technology certainly "should" be less expensive than crystalline or amorphous silicon, and the non-silicon "thin-film" cells.
As I understand it, they are in the "production engineering" phase at this point.
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