Posted on 11/20/2004 10:02:46 AM PST by SierraWasp
'Hydrogen highway' bad route, group says
Alternative fuel championed by governor flawed, but proponents say give it more time
By Harrison SheppardSACRAMENTO BUREAU
Saturday, November 20, 2004 -
SACRAMENTO -- A report by a libertarian think tank seeks to debunk Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans for a "hydrogen highway" by claiming hydrogen-fueled vehicles will make little difference in reducing harmful emissions.
The report released this week by the Reason Foundation argues that even while hydrogen itself may be clean-burning, the processes used to manufacture and distribute hydrogen are dirty enough to nearly negate the benefits -- and the cost of conversion isn't worth the difference.
The study instead advocates more conservation, lowering freeway speed limits and making gasoline-powered cars smaller.
"Until we figure out ways to create hydrogen that are less energy-intensive or the performance of hydrogen improves, it's not a good air-quality measure," said Adrian Moore, the study's project director.
State environmental officials concede the study's argument has some merit -- if one only considers the current state of technology. But hydrogen is still an emerging science with rapid advances, and it is expected to be cheaper and more efficient in the future, said Michele St. Martin, spokeswoman for the California Department of Environmental Protection.
Ultimately, she said, the goal is to produce hydrogen through clean, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biomass, rather than natural gas.
"Every day these vehicles coming out are lighter and more fuel-efficient," St. Martin said. "At the end of the day, experts are saying hydrogen-powered vehicles will be at least twice as fuel-efficient as gasoline vehicles."
Earlier this year, Schwarzenegger proposed a "California Hydrogen Highway Network" that would result in a network of up to 200 hydrogen fueling stations on the state's freeways by 2010. The project is expected to cost $75 million to $200 million, with much of the costs picked up by the private sector.
The state has already opened three hydrogen fueling stations -- in Los Angeles, Davis and San Francisco -- and expects to have 18 more open soon, she said. City governments in those regions are using hydrogen cars in pilot programs.
Hydrogen car supporters say they are the clean-burning wave of the future, producing only water, not dirty carbon dioxide, in their exhaust.
The Reason study said it is not the emissions of individual hydrogen vehicles that is troubling, but the way in which hydrogen is produced and distributed. Hydrogen plants would most likely run on natural gas, which results in high emissions of carbon dioxide, the study argues.
The study also notes that converting some vehicles to hydrogen may actually make them greater polluters because hydrogen vehicles are heavier and therefore take more energy to generate the same horsepower.
According to the study, a Hummer H2 that is converted to hydrogen use will be about 1,000 pounds heavier. In order to get the same performance as a gasoline powered Hummer, a greater amount of carbon dioxide will be produced.
Schwarzenegger, who was criticized during the recall campaign for driving a Hummer, promised to convert one of his vehicles to hydrogen.
Last month, he appeared at a press conference at Los Angeles International Airport driving a hydrogen Hummer to open a fueling station there, although it turned out the vehicle was a prototype loaner from General Motors that is not available to the public.
V. John White, an adviser to the Sierra Club on clean-air issues, said he is skeptical of findings by the Reason Foundation because of the group's ideological bias. Hydrogen, he said, is only one part of a multipronged strategy to reduce emissions in California, and the hydrogen field continues to improve.
"The Reason Foundation doesn't accept we're living in a carbon-constrained world, and petroleum is rapidly reaching its peak and will soon begin a long decline," White said. "The alternatives to our addiction to petroleum are important to develop."
This is very important. We can stop trading with the ME. The Islamocrazies can have their countries back and can roll the clock back to the seventh century when the camel was the ultimate SUV. We will live in the twenty-first century and ignore them.
That "paragraph summary" is a powerful compilation of some very pursuasive information, indeed!!! Excellent work!!!
Where you hidin, dude? I miss your input! Did you git banned er sumthin???
"You couldn't plant enough biomass if you used all the airable land in the nation"
Do you have a source of data that supports this claim?
It is an alternative to gasoline only in one sense--both are point energy sources you can drive around with.
The difference is that gasoline is itself an energy source. That is, you get a lot more energy out of gasoline than it takes to make it.
Hydrogen is NOT a source of energy. It is best thought of as a battery, and not a very efficient one. Why? It takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you get burning it.
Deceitful greens and gullible conservatives run around proclaiming hydrogen is how we break free of the sheiks. Nope. Unlike oil, there are no pools of hydrogen lying around that we can mine. Instead, we have to extract it from water (H2O) and that takes a lot of energy.
So while greens are driving around in their hydrogen cars feeling self-righteous, they ignore that it took more oil or coal to produce that hydrogen than they would have used were they driving a gasoline powered hummer.
So in it's most important sense, hydrogen is NOT an alternative to gasoline. It is just a way to get energy from fossil fuels to a car, albeit indirectly--a battery.
Arghhhh. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It takes more energy to make the hydrogen from water than you get back when you burn it. It is a battery. To make hydrogen, you will have to burn fossil fuels or have a huge nuclear energy industry.
This is true but misses the point. As I said in my previous post, it takes more energy to extract hydrogen from water than you get back from the hydrogen (the point which you then restated in the above quoted language).
But the opposite is true for extracting oil from the ground or digging uranium--it takes less energy to extract than you get burning it. That's why nuclear can replace oil as a primary energy source and why hydrogen is only an storage medium for energy obtained from primary energy sources--a battery.
Do you really believe that hydrogen is an alternative to oil in the sense that it could act as a primary energy source? If not, I don't understand your initial point--that is, hydrogen should be set up as a competitor to oil. Even if we had an intact hydrogen infrastructure (so I've just saved you billions of dollars) hydrogen can't compete with nuclear and oil because we would still have to get the energy somewhere to store in the form of elemental hydrogen. And that somewhere would almost certainly be nuclear and fossil fuel.
If your point was that oil is a battery too, that is technically correct. Oil contains stored energy from the sun and geologic processes. But that's on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years--not really relevant to this discussion.
Here's the deal: free hydrogen (H2) is reduced relatively by easily by O2 producing energy and water, so if there were any free hydrogen on earth, we could reduce it with oxygen which is readily available in the atmosphere. The problem is, there isn't any free hydrogen, because the earth's gravity is so weak and the mean free path of hydrogen (distance that hydrogen can zip around in the atmosphere without hitting any other molecules) is so long that all free hydrogen in the earth's atmosphere has already been reduced into water or hydrides in the earth's crust or has escaped into space.
That means that, yes, if you want to use hydrogen you have to produce it, which as you correctly surmised means it has to be made available through electrolysis. The energy for electrolysis has to come from existing energy sources. H2 is freed from oxygen, stored, and then recombined in a fuel cell with O2, releasing no more energy than that which was used to separate it in the first place.
That's why I say hydrogen isn't an energy source, but a storage medium. Given how dangerous hydrogen is to transport and store, it's not clear that it's superior to the methods already used. And for those concerned about such things (many people--of whom I am not one) water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Catalysts don't make energy prohibitive chemical reactions happen. What they do is make chemical reactions which have favorable energies but bad reaction kinetics happen more quickly. In English: certain reactions release energy, but they don't happen (or don't happen quickly enough) because they're so complicated. Complicated organic molecules need to be aligned by catalysts so the reacting sites "line-up". Some other chemical reactions require three or more molecules to collide simultaneously; that's unlikely, but a catalyst might capture some of the molecules long enough to reduce the complicated reaction to a two-body collision, which is much more likely. The catalysts don't change the energy part of the equation.
My high school chemistry teacher explained catalysis thus: "two shy people in the presence of alcohol will simply do what comes naturally. " This was 35 years ago. Today she would probably be thrown out of the place, but, uh, she was a nun so she had a lifetime appointment.
We already do have "free" energy. It comes in the form of uranium. We simply don't have the political will to burn it.
So it is OK for a liberal to be skeptical of scientific skeptics because of their "ideological bias" but.....
...... it is heretical for an AGW skeptic to be skeptical of the hysteria (non-science) because of those people's ideological bias (socialism, gaia worship, anti-human/pro animal).....
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