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.
I am not the one promising a brave new world with hydrogen fueled cars. Until you can back up your assertion that hydrogen is such a wonderful panacea, you are full of it.
And I don't have to "prove" anything, because the readily observable reality is that we have a hydrocarbon economy.
Without a way to produce hydrogen in the same economic ball park as gasoline, gasoline wins hands down. That is the bottom line.
That doesn't mean it can never be done, in fact it may be possible with existing nuclear technology, but the same wild eyed radicals screaming for hydrogen have made that avenue impossible.
Irrelevant. The purpose of hydrogen-burning engines (or whichever other technology ultimately replaces gasoline) is as a portable storage mechanism for energy obtained from some other source. You can't very well put a nuclear reactor under the hood of your car, but you can certainly use nuclear power to generate hydrogen (or whatever).
Yes, it requires pushing the high priests of peasant superstition out of the way, but that needs to be done anyway.
Yeah, great point. The nice thing about oil is that it comes out of the ground already chock-full-of energy. Looking at hydrogen to solve our energy needs is still silly.
Hydrogen or batteries or whatever, it won't replace oil, coal and natural gas. Nuclear might. Why don't we hear people talking about a nuclear economy and electric cars? Because your superstitious peasants think hydrogen grows on trees.
You still don't know that. I have pointed out to you that the measure is not the energy input but the market value of the energy output. You also don't know what the future price of the alternatives will be. That is why the article is wrong. It assumes that simply because it would require more energy to crack H2 than it can deliver, it is not a viable transport fuel. That is a wrong-headed assumption. There are other measures that must be considered before you can make an judgment. We don't even know if it will be an energy intensive effort to generate H2. There is a possibility it could be a relatively simple biological process.
I have no problem with using nuclear, solar, wind, hamsters on a wheel or micro-organisms to generate the H2 as long as the delivered product is economical when compared to the alternatives. Without knowing the costs of all the other components of a future H2 infrastructure and comparing them to the future cost of hydrocarbon infrastructure, I am not prepared to rule H2 out as you and this writer have so boldly done. In fact, no one knows what those costs will be and no one can even predict them right now. Only the market can ever sort that out and looking at the history of how our markets have done amazing things in the past (the electrical and hydrocarbon infrastructures that grew from uneconomical nothings to fully developed in just a few decades) I'll be content sit back and see what happens.
BTW. This would normally be the point where I would trot out some old quotes by very learned people in the past confidently and authoritatively declaring that the airplane had no future, that man would never get meaningful energy from the atom, that electricity would only be valuable to large industry and municipal lighting, that the automobile was a passing fad or that AC could not possible run a motor. But I feel this conversation has gone on long enough. You have your mind made up and I'm not going to change it for you.
People are more likely waiting for someone to do it instead of talking about doing it. I guess that the "doers" are waiting on someone (the government?) to start passing out free money to get them interested.
The people who think H2 will "solve" our energy problems don't understand that it takes more energy to produce H2 than is released when it is burned or used in a fuel cell.
I thought our energy problem was that we don't have enough and that its too expensive. The energy "lost" in making H2 doesn't fix the first problem and I don't see how it would reduce our costs. Maybe I'm missing something here.
H2 only makes sense (at least in the short term) in places where there is no infrastructure for refueling (like outer space)
I'll leave the safety problems to the engineers.
You seem to have me tagged as some kind of old man who refuses to believe that modern technology will ever work. Quite the opposite is true. I'm just realistic and have a better grasp on physics then most.
TANSTAAFL. Only when we've solved our energy problem and its cheap and plentiful enough to use the "extra" to make H2 will we start to see it used for transportation. If we built solar power satellites that could be the case in the next 40 years (I'm being optimistic).
I just hope I live long enough to see the dropping cost of H2 for my car intersect the rising cost of gasoline. I'm 37 years old. Please ping me when the market value of the energy output reaches that point.
Frustration (pulling hair out) You really don't get it.
Look up "Pumped Storage" and tell me how electric utilities are so stupid for building them. But every utility that doesn't have one wishes they did.
I don't give a rat's ass what uninformed people think. The economics will drive the decision, and neither you or I nor anyone else knows enough at this time to rule H2 out or to declare it to be the future.
Yeah, 50 or 100 years from now it'll make sense. Lets continue this discussion then.
When I was a child we cut up jar lids (I believe that they were zinc) and put pieces in a coke bottle. We poured sulphuric acid in the bottle to produce hydrogen to fill balloons. If you consider the effort to cut up the lids in addition to making the coke bottle and acid it probably wasn't energy efficient. I can't see too many people stopping along the highway to do this to refuel.
When someone discovers a more energy efficient method to manufacture hydrogen .... Well then maybe we will have more available energy.
You are one of the few people that gets it.
When hydrogen becomes a more efficient way to power cars than gasoline, it will be used. If that was the case now, we would already be using it. That will be the case when oil is no longer the primary source of energy, and that will only happen when something else is cheaper than oil.
Even then, the solution isn't H2 it's nuclear. We might use it then to store energy, but that's not what most people on this thread are thinking of when they say it's a solution to our energy problems.
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