Posted on 02/07/2003 7:31:16 AM PST by Isara
President Bush, a former Texas oilman, is not exactly the environmentalists' favorite eco-warrior. Even so, he has put himself at the forefront of one of their crusades.
On Thursday, Bush called on Congress to approve $1.2 billion in research funding for hydrogen-fueled cars.
"I'm going to work with the Congress to move this nation forward on hydrogen fuel cell technologies," he said, repeating a proposal in last week's State of the Union address. "It is in our national interest that we do so."
Bush is proposing other hydrogen-related projects too. All told, he wants to spend $1.7 billion on research over five years.
Hydrogen promises a clean, renewable energy source that would end the need for foreign oil. But it has the same drawbacks as wind and solar: It has never proved itself efficient or practical.
Private industry has already made the first hydrogen cars, but the cost remains huge.
Absent a major breakthrough or government mandate, Americans will not be driving them for a long time.
"The problem with hydrogen is there are no hydrogen wells," said Sallie Baliunas, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We can dig up petroleum, but hydrogen has to be created from, say, seawater. And that requires a lot of energy."
How Hydrogen Works
Hydrogen is an abundant natural element. It can be extracted through chemical processes from several sources, including water.
Hydrogen gas would then be stored in compressed form in a battery-like device called a fuel cell. When mixed with oxygen - an air filter would do it - the cell creates an electric charge. The only exhaust is water vapor.
For all of the benefits of hydrogen, there are major drawbacks. The main one is that it requires energy to extract it in the first place.
The most common method (called "steam reformation") mixes natural gas and water with a catalyst to produce hydrogen. Greenhouse gasses are a byproduct.
The process also requires heat, which must come from another energy source.
Solar or wind could be used, but vast tracts of land for windmills or solar panels would be needed.
The Cost Problem
Using the cheapest process, it costs $3,000 to make enough hydrogen to generate one kilowatt. That's four times what it costs a gas-powered generator to make the same amount of power.
"I can only say the expense is enormous," Shinichi Yamaguchi, a Toyota scientist, told the National Journal about his company's hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Baliunas is skeptical hydrogen can ever be made practical in a market-based economy.
"It takes energy, and you lose energy in the process, so it is never going to be worthwhile," she said. "That is just the laws of physics."
Others are more optimistic, but no one expects hydrogen cars for at least another decade or two.
A related problem is the logistics of hydrogen fuel cells.
There's no efficient way yet to make them widely available. Exactly how it would be done is a mystery even to the experts.
Oil companies are already looking into refitting their filling stations to provide hydrogen, but the infrastructure would have to be completely rebuilt. Only four stations exist now.
Despite these problems, hydrogen has replaced wind and solar as the preferred alternative to oil.
An alliance of environmentalists, corporations and state governors has emerged calling for federal subsidies to boost research.
Bush's remarks were seen as a bone for that group.
Many companies already have advanced hydrogen-fuel programs. General Motors () alone has 300 people devoted to it. Most would love a federal boost.
There's even a Hydrogen Infrastructure Investment Roundtable.
"We're interested in supplying energy to consumers, whether it be gasoline, heating oil, jet fuel or hydrogen," said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, a roundtable participant.
The greens are also pushing hydrogen. They'd like to see internal combustion engines replaced with pollution-free hydrogen vehicles.
California Gov. Gray Davis upped the ante last year. He pushed through a law mandating that only low-emissions cars could be sold in the state by 2009.
California is the nation's largest car market. Other states are weighing similar rules.
Hydrogen is being pushed abroad as well. The European Union recently announced a $2 billion fuel cell research program.
A Job For Big Gov't?
Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Hydrogen Economy" and an adviser to the EU project, says the U.S. needs a similar approach.
"Assistance for industry, tax credits, research and development, investment opportunities: that's what is really called for," he said. "To make this real, there needs to be the same kind of public-private partnership that Europe has."
The $1.2 billion Bush has proposed isn't nearly enough, Rifkin says.
But he expects more funding. Once started, the pressure to expand U.S. research will ratchet up.
"Bush has opened the door a slight bit. What you're going to see right now is the industry pushing that door wide open," he said. "There is going to be tremendous pressure on Bush now to go much further than he is suggesting."
That's likely, says Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis.
But the rush to develop hydrogen could crowd out other research.
"Everyone will now focus on hydrogen fuel cells because that is where the research money is going to go," he said. "Other technologies that might be even cleaner or more readily useful will see their research funding dry up."
Burnett says it would be better to let the companies do the research independently.
"Eventually the markets will demand this technology, if it is the best technology," he said. "I don't think it is necessary for the government to subsidize it."
That's not proof. That's a theory. A tenuous theory given the (in)efficiency of solar cells.
Proof is a link to someone who has done it.
You're an idiot if you pass up this opportunity to be the Bill Gates of hydrogen. When will you be building the first working prototype?
I will/do conserve now, as I'm sure you do as well but it's the majority of Americans that won't.
Ahhh...so until someone built a PC, it could never be done.
The idiot who wrote this hasn't a clue as to the difference between power and energy.
You can develop one kilowatt for a penny with either fuel. It just won't be for very long.
A kilowatt is a unit of power; a kilowatt-hour is a unit of energy. He means (if he means anything at all) to claim it cost $3K per kilowatt-hour, etc.
--Boris
I remember when it wasn't possible to get more than 200 meg on a PC hard drive.
The same thing the car manufacturers were waiting for in 1900. Technology to catch up.
Don't tell me how it can't be done. Tell me how it CAN be done.
No--that's not what happens--what goes on is that the powdered coal is injected into a closed vessel along with an "oxidant" of pure oxygen, plus some live steam. This turns all the carbon in the coal into carbon monoxide, and basically "extracts" the oxygen atom from the water, leaving hydrogen. The final result is a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen, which can be easily separated from one another by diverse methods. Depending on the efficiency of the separation process, it is likely that there will be some tiny amount of hydrogen in the carbon monoxide stream, and some tiny amount of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen stream (in both cases probably in the parts-per-million range). Certainly not enough to cause any problems with "exposure to people, but PERHAPS enough to poison catalysts on "some" types of fuel cells. If that is the case, some additional cleanup process will be used to get rid of the last vestiges of CO.
Pretty much an alumino-silicate glass. Such slags have been extensively tested by the EPA and others for "leaching out" of toxic metals, and found to be pretty innocuous. It would probably make good aggregate for building roads. There WILL be a lot of it, but at worst, it can just be put back into the hole it came out of with minimal consequences.
Other than the energy in the coal itself, no. Oh, the plant has to have electricity and live steam, but this can be powered by energy-converions/recovery steps in the process itself.
"Its just combusting the coal and capturing the products of that?
In the final analysis, yes. The process does require pretty tight control of the reaction conditions to work correctly.
"If so, could one retrofit existing coal burners and use them to produce these products? Or is a slower process?"
No--it takes a plant specifically designed for gasification to carry out the process effectively (i.e. with high conversion efficiency)--however the processes are NOT slow in and of themselves---they just have to be "tightly tuned" to work properly
I like that idea, but what about this? All vehicles, employees that manufacture the vehicles, and the fuel itself are exempt from local, state and federal taxes for 10 years.
I don't know enough to know if this is feasable, but even if production cost twice as much, if the money stayed in the US, it would be far better for the economy than cheaper fuel when all the money is flowing out of our borders.
But you can't get out more or even equal to what you put in in terms of energy content. There have to be some losses along the way, especially if a steam cycle is involved. I'm wondering what the energy balance looks like for the whole plant. That is, for a BTU out contained in a hydrocarbon product, how much went in to produce it?
I don't mean this to imply its not a good idea, as it makes use of a domestically-available material and perhaps it puts it into a more eco-friendly form. We just need to know how much raw material usage we're talking about if we're thinking of going this way to, say, displace a significant fraction of foreign-sourced petroleum products in the transport fuel sector (which is the number one thing we should do if we want to get off of the foreign oil addiction that people worry about).
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