Posted on 05/07/2003 11:54:50 AM PDT by Jack of all Trades
Not long ago I wrote a commentary, "The Great Hydrogen Myth," in which I opined that throwing another billion dollars at more research for the purpose of replacing oil, coal, or natural gas was a huge waste. Recently, that commentary was posted on an Internet site for those who work in industries that provide and use various forms of energy. It's a favorite among the many engineers and scientists whose lives are devoted to energy issues.
Here are some of the responses my commentary received. The names of the innocent have been protected because their jobs depend upon it.
"I have often thought that this 'hydrogen economy' seems intuitively flawed; using energy to make hydrogen to then be used as an energy source. Intuitively, it feels like the Escher painting with the water flowing uphill."
Therein lies central issue that undermines the hype about hydrogen as an endless, virtually free, source of energy. First of all, it is not energy. It is what the engineers and scientists call "a carrier." You have to break the hydrogen molecule free from others to use it and that requires energy. Thus, you have to use a lot of energy in order to use hydrogen to make energy. In real life there is no free lunch.
A chemical engineer with 35 years in the chemical and oil industry who knows a lot about catalytic reforming units that make and use hydrogen in the reformation processes, had this to say: "Not only does H2 (hydrogen) require a lot of energy to produce, collect, and store, it presents rather nasty safety problems."
Need it be said he thinks that Ethanol (made from corn!) is another bad idea the environmentalists have foisted on us? Why? "Ethanol costs far more to produce than the fuel value it provides and the Environmental Protection Agency in its wisdom forced industry to oxygenate fuels only to discover that covalent bonds of all oxygenates are very soluble and stable in ground waters when released." In other words, this environmental "solution" has led to the poisoning of ground water supplies throughout the nation. It also forces up the cost of gasoline.
He wasn't through. "While I'm at it - Greens have our environmental experts at EPA on another even wilder goose chase to capture mercury from coal fired utility plants across the USA. If you add up all the Hg (mercury) released from coal combustion and compare it to global sources, the current analytical and statistical techniques and technologies probably will not be able to detect any reduction in the global Hq pool in the environment."
Thank you, thank you, thank you! The Greens live to conjure up endless scare campaigns, always shouting that everyone, especially children, are being "poisoned" by things that pose no real threat. Or they find ways to force government mandates that either end up poisoning us, i.e., ethanol, are represent no real threat, i.e., mercury. The end result is higher costs for energy use of any kind.
Part of the hydrogen hype is its use in fuel cells. A retired General Electric engineer wrote to say, "I previously analyzed and designed fuel cells and it is apparent to me that they will always be too expensive for all but very special uses. They are twenty times the cost of a piston engine and are very likely to remain at least ten times more in spite of all the research done."
Like all realists, engineers and scientists believe we are, in fact, running a risk in our dependence on petroleum. Even with a trillion and maybe even two trillion barrels of oil available, at the present rate of use, the experts estimate we will go through it in about forty years. Others, however, believe there are vast amounts of undiscovered oil reserves.
Part of the problem of energy costs, energy dependency, and the cost of oil can be found in the fact that the US has experienced a drop in its refining capability over the past twenty years. We went from being able to refine 18.5 million barrels to 16.5 million barrels. There has been an even sharper drop in the number of refineries, from 315 to 155! Thus, the US is highly vulnerable if even a small number of refineries stopped producing, even temporarily. A major factor for the dramatic increase in oil prices is this lack of refining capacity.
This may explain why the oil industry and auto manufacturers are willing to spend billions to find a way to make hydrogen the transportation energy of the future. Hybrid vehicles that utilize a fuel cell could get more than 75 miles per gallon of gasoline and that's a good thing. Environmentalists support this and, if the technology can be developed to a point of being affordable, why not? It remains, however, a very big "if".
The real answer, of course, is to build more refineries and, in part, to tap the reserves of oil known to exist in the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve. Environmentalists have fought both these options.
Here's the bottom line. Without energy, this nation shuts down, and so do all the others. The good news is that technologies are being developed whereby, for transportation and other uses, new engines will revolutionize the use of current energy sources. They will be far more efficient and they will be affordable.
Beware of the hype about hydrogen. Many engineers and scientists know it's baloney, and you should too.
The reason we are dependent on oil for about 40% of our energy needs is because it is such a cheap and reliable source of energy, more convenient and cheaper than the alternatives. We will NOT stop using oil when we run out, we will stop using it, WHEN A BETTER ANSWER IS FOUND AND APPLIED.
When oil ceases to be cheaper, we will use alternatives, either with existing or new technology. We can be completely free of oil dependence, using TODAY's technology, ONLY BY CREATING CHEAPER ALTERNATIVES:
1. Convert 80% of our non-nuclear electric generation from coal and natural gas to nuclear power. Use the inherently safe pebble-bed nuclear technology or other new generation nuclear technology (lead-bismuth reactors etc), which also is more efficient and will produce less waste long-term. Add in renewables (wind, hydro) so we have fossil-free electricity generation capability. Bonus with nukes: no greenhouse gas emissions, and long-term lower cost than fossil fuels. It frees up natural gas to be used in a new way: transportation.
2. Switch to hybrid ICE/electrics to triple fuel efficiency, and enable those cars to run on natural gas and also electricity instead of oil. The gas saved in step #1 can be applied to the transport sector, so we won't be increasing use of natural gas.
3. Drill in Alaska, drill off the California coast, drill in deepwater Mexico. Buy local and become energy independent and use our own oil resources BEFORE TECHNOLOGY PASSES THEM BY!
4. Increase cost of oil and keep more of money spent on oil in America: Via oil import fees, oil taxation.
5. Use and encourage use of alternative transportation methods beyond the car. for example, Personal Rapid Transit systems built on electric powered maglev technology could displace cars in urban transit settings.
6. With the above reductions in demand and increases in supply, we can furthermore break the OPEC cartel, working with other energy consumer nations. Net result: more of the money paid for oil goes to our tax base, not theirs. We use less of it and pay less out to other nations for the amount we use. End result - our oil trade deficit declines significantly.
Result: While saving about $100 billion on our energy bill in the US, we can be free of dependence on foreign oil. We import 60% of our oil used, if we increase production 20% and cut our use in half, we will be free of foreign oil.
Let me restate: We will stop using oil when a better solution is found and applied. Oil will never run out. It will simply get more expensive/annoying/societally unacceptable than the alternatives and will get displaced by them. This will happen even though plenty of oil will lie under the ground, in oil shales, etc. IMHO, it will happen in the next 25 years. As stated by another technologist, the Stone Age didnt end for lack of stones.
Given your credentials, your points are WELL taken. I vote this the most sensible posted response!
Eminently doable, as the Honda Insight (70 mpg) proves!
Oh, sure we did. Fighting wars in places like that is called "doing things in your interest". Countries that do things that aren't in their own interest don't last long.
" The best infrastructure on the ehicle is an ELECTRIC DRIVETRAIN, there is practically NO ADVANTAGE to fuel cells over ICES and MANY DISADVANTAGES, namely cost and robustness (what happens when your feull cell stack freezes)?"
One word: "batteries". Solve that, and you might be right. But, uh, when a lot of the guys from my old group spent a year at Ford in 1991-92, trying to do the systems work on a straight electric, that little bugaboo kept biting them. After which, people started chatting about fuel cells...
"In other words, if oil didnt exist and we were looking for a great energy carrier, mankind would invent gasoline as the perfect one for vehicles"
Would man then locate all the raw materials for gas underneath the most politically unstable part of the planet, or just bury it somewhere near Salina, KS for centrality of access?
"Aeorspace Engineers are quite capable of designing large passenger jets that fly over MACH 1. That alone doesnt make the Concorde pay its own way."
The Concorde runs them old, old, old Olympus engines, and fuel specifics have come a looooong way since then (think supersonic fanjets). And Concorde was making money up until the crash. Boeing tried the Transonic route with the Sonic Cruiser but decided that dispatch frequency and seat rpm was more important than just 2/10ths more Mach. But I think the real problem with SST's is simply environmental laws, specifically international ones. But mitigating sonic boom is a big research area now (narrowing the footprint, lowering the intensity), and perhaps in the near future we'll see some good results there. Of course, you won't hear the booms anymore, more like a nice muffled "whump", but it won't last long...and the nice little spotted owl will go right back to sleep. I would expect to see Supersonic corporate jets making their way into the fractional fleet not too far off in the future. Speaking of Supersonic Fan Jets, here's a really nice one that I did a little work on a long, long time ago, and far, far away: The TFE-1042!
It's not engineering it's economics that drives the viable solution
And good engineering makes for good economics.
Nighty nite.
Yes...but consider the consequences of releasing hydrogen-releasing bacteria into the environment. There is already work going on in this area, and it is far more meaningful than getting an extra three percent out of fuel cell efficiency.
Lastly I see pollution as one of those problems which is easier to work on when you concentrate its source.
Nope, the environment is quite capable of coping with diffuse pollution. In is when it is concentrated that bad things start to happen. The problem with hydrogen powered cars isn't pollution or how or where the energy is generated, it is economic.
We don't have hydrogen powered cars for the same reason we don't have Chuck E. Cheeses on Mars: the economics of the thing stink. Just like space enthusiasts who want the government to brute force the situation with other people's money, hydrogen enthusiasts are only making the situation worse by injecting the government.
If someone eventually finds a cheap way to produce hydrogen or electricity becomes cheaper than oil nothing will stop hydrogen cars from coming in force. And until that happens, nothing can be done to make them come.
Like fusion power and space travel?
The problem with hydrogen is that a bunch of utopians imagine it to be some magical panacea without giving any considerations to costs vs. benefit. "Could we switch to a hydrogen economy?" completely ignores the fact that if it was a good idea, we would already be there.
These people cannot imagine that the market drives things in certain directions for very good reasons and defying or brute forcing the market can be downright disastrous.
If this sort of thing could be brute forced into being, we would all be speaking Russian.
Stop it, you're making sense. These guys have some sort of hydrogen fetish. If we knew that putting one more pound of CO2 into the air would cause some climactic tragedy, then all their hydrogen schemes would make sense. If they want to use less oil, coal,natural gas, or reduce our dependency on foreign sources, then their ideas are stupid.
Guess you didn't watch the State of the Union address. Bush is, unfortunately, firmly on the hydrogen bandwagon.
And why is a hydrogen economy a good idea? To reduce CO2? Is CO2 a threat?
Not anymore. Kyoto is one example. There are many more and a lot of it isn't PC even by FR standards.
That sounds reasonable. Sounds like mechanic is one of your trades. How much do you know about Ford 300 6's?
Sounds like a nice machine. Hope they get to do something with it.
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