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A Hydrogen-Based Economy
Glog writes "Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of Wired magazine have written an amazing article explaining why we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Lots of info there, estimated cost and benefit ... very good solid reasoning for whatever floats your boat - national security, environment, super-duper-charged automobiles."
Photons + Water -> Hydrogen & Oxygen -> Water.
These guys who use solar power in their homes, and sell the surplus to the power company, could also use the surplus to create hydogen fuel for their cars. That's self-sufficiency.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
The Hindenburg "got flamed" because it was painted with Aluminum Powder (Rocket Fuel for close friends) in order to reflect some sunlight.
The burn begun whem a spark (thanks to static electricity) crossed one canvas to another, igniting the Aluminun.
"Peter Schwartz s a partner in the Monitor Group and chair of Global Business Network... [and] a former futurist for Shell Oil"
h tml,
I think I better trust the motives and analysis of the MIT folks. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article1205.
Salon has an article that is more realistic - or cynical, as the case may be.
"Tonight I'm proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles. "
George W. Bush, State of the Union 2003.
At least he is interested.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
car talk
"A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy,
which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With
a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome
obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first
car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and
pollution-free." President Bush said these words during his State of the Union
address, introducing the FreedomFUEL proposal--which is really how the White
House spells it. The president wants to spend $1.2 billion over the next five
years to research the production of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline in
automobiles.
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell"
motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants,
including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of
hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the
world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a
hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked
Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by
something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
The attraction of hydrogen is great, since hydrogen-based transportation
would both be environmentally benign and reduce the need for the United States
to import petroleum. But Bush's proposal joins a new convention of
rhapsodizing about hydrogen-powered transportation--Jeremy Rifkin numbers
among current hydrogen zealots--while skipping over the small matter of where
we get the hydrogen. Worse, the White House plan offers a long-term
distraction from a short-term need: While the administration dreams big about
our hydrogen-powered future, it does little to improve fuel-economy standards
today.
here are many impediments to a future in which fuel-cell automobiles
dominate America's roadways. What form--gaseous, liquid, or mixed with
metallic dust to prevent explosion should there be an accident--would the
hydrogen we pump into our cars take? How would the hydrogen be moved in
commercial quantities to those filling stations? Could average motorists pump
hydrogen themselves, considering it is now handled only by specialists? But
these are engineering questions and presumably can be answered.
Unfortunately, a cost-effective answer to the question of how to obtain
hydrogen may prove more elusive than answers to questions about how to handle
it. At first glance, this issue would seem simple. After all, our world
contains gargantuan amounts of hydrogen--two-thirds of the oceans, for
instance, are made up of this element. But the pure form of hydrogen needed to
power fuel-cell cars does not occur naturally on Earth, where hydrogen is
chemically bound to other elements, such as oxygen in the case of the oceans.
And, while the stars contain an almost inexpressible amount of hydrogen in its
pure form, stellar material will not be on sale at your local filling station
anytime soon, or ever.
Because pure hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, any pure hydrogen
for use as fuel must be manufactured. Today, pure hydrogen is most often made
using natural gas as a feedstock, but that means fossil fuels are still being
consumed: Basically, the process turns a fossil fuel, methane, into something
that seems not to be a fossil fuel, hydrogen. Pure hydrogen can also be
manufactured using petroleum or coal, which of course are the very fossil
fuels whose grip we wish to loosen. And, while pure hydrogen has been
manufactured from agricultural products--plants contain hydrogen bound as
carbohydrates--at the research level, it remains to be seen whether this could
work commercially. Enviros rhapsodize about making hydrogen from seawater. But
there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of
electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that
is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic
reactor--must provide the electricity. Indeed, the big misconception about
hydrogen is that it is a "source" of energy. Pure hydrogen is not an energy
source, except to stars. As it will be used in cars or to power homes and
offices, hydrogen--like a battery--is an energy medium, a way to store
power that has been obtained in some other way. Hydrogen makes an attractive
energy medium because its "fuel-cycle" calculations--the sum of all steps of
manufacture and use--show reductions in greenhouse gases compared with any
automotive fuel burned today. But hydrogen is going to be an expensive energy
medium and, in the early decades at least, will be a medium either for natural
gas, a fossil fuel, or for atomic power.
Today, the most practical means to make pure hydrogen is a process called
"steam reforming" of natural gas. A natural-gas molecule has one atom of
carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; "reforming" strips off the carbon atoms,
leaving pure hydrogen. But not only is a fossil fuel--natural gas--the raw
material of this process, energy must be expended for the "reforming" itself,
meaning a net loss of BTUs. Using Department of Energy estimates, the White
House says pure hydrogen from natural gas is currently "four times as
expensive to produce as gasoline."
Applied engineering and commercial-scale production would surely bring
down the price. The most optimistic credible projection I have seen comes from
Jesse Ausubel, a specialist in "industrial ecology" at the Rockefeller
University, who thinks commercial-scale hydrogen made from natural gas could
be produced for about 40 percent more than the price of gasoline. That's
within striking distance of a good deal. But there is a catch to this catch:
Optimistic estimates for hydrogen from natural gas are based on the current
low selling price of natural gas. Significant new demand for natural gas might
raise its price. And, while natural-gas supplies are steady at the moment, who
knows what the effect on supply would be if hydrogen manufacturing caused
natural-gas consumption to skyrocket?
So maybe the hydrogen should be made from coal or petroleum. Fuel-cycle
calculations show that using coal or petroleum to manufacture hydrogen would
lead to some reduction in greenhouse gases but not to a big cut; moreover,
we'd still be digging coal and importing petroleum. Maybe hydrogen should be
made from agricultural products-- "biomass," in energy lingo. But biomass
feedstocks might be grown using fertilizer, which is made mainly from fossil
fuels, and again the fuel-cycle calculations show only a moderate gain in
pollution reduction for the large capital costs entailed in establishing an
agriculture-hydrogen economy. (All hydrogen schemes, it should be noted,
involve large capital costs.) Owing to these concerns, John McCarthy, a
Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The
large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar
electricity." Otherwise, it's just repackaging fossil fuels.
But solar power on the scale required is far from practical. It is
possible to imagine a green-dream-come-true energy cycle that uses solar
collectors to generate electricity to crack hydrogen out of water: zero
greenhouse gases and endlessly renewable. For the moment, solar collectors are
much too expensive. The Worldwatch Institute, a much-admired, left-leaning
environmental organization, recently rated sources of electricity by combining
their capital cost and true social cost--that is, taking into account
"externalities" such as pollution and entanglements with the Gulf states.
Solar power finished last, much more expensive than coal-generated
power, even when coal's external costs are factored in. An indicator:
Solar-derived electricity currently wholesales for around ten times as much
per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired watts.
Even if the price of solar power fell by orders of magnitude, there would
be the not-so-little problem of where to put the solar collectors. To replace
the petroleum we use to power our cars with hydrogen split from water might
entail doubling America's electricity-generating capacity. Doing that with
solar collectors could require covering a land area roughly the size of
Connecticut with photovoltaic cells. In theory, the collectors could be put in
space, where sunlight has eight times as many watts per square meter as on the
ground and where no one's land need be taken. Figures in a recent study in
Science magazine suggested that doubling the electricity-production
capacity of the United States would require placing approximately 40
photovoltaic collector dishes, each the size of Manhattan, into orbit. Even if
capital cost were no object and society possessed the technical means to build
objects in space the size of Manhattan, such a project would take a century.
hich brings us to atomic power, the energy source everyone loves to
hate. In theory, lots of new atomic stations could be built to make
electricity to manufacture hydrogen, and the stations could use new,
"inherently safe" reactors designed so that they cannot melt down. (In
inherently safe reactors, the atomic chain reaction is initiated in such a way
that, if safety systems fail, the chain breaks; researchers have deliberately
turned off all cooling and safety systems of inherently safe prototypes and
nothing happens.) But political opposition to atomic reactors is intense, and
capital costs here would be high as well. Some estimates also suggest that, if
a significant number of new reactors were put into service, uranium--currently
plentiful--would become scarce after a few decades. This could be avoided by
building "breeder" reactors that make more fuel than they consume. But
breeders work by breeding plutonium, and most nations, including the United
States, have suspended construction of breeder reactors because such machines
would increase the risk of plutonium being diverted for nuclear weapons
production.
Many researchers continue to believe that "fusion" reactors, which mimic
the internal process of the sun, someday will be perfected. Over the long
term, fusion reactors might solve all global-energy questions, oddly, by using
hydrogen to make hydrogen! In a fusion reactor, tiny amounts of hydrogen
isotope are fused into helium, generating heat. (The sun fuses hydrogen into
helium for its luminescence, and nuclear bombs get much of their force from
fusing a small amount of hydrogen isotope.) Heat from a fusion reactor would
drive turbines to make electricity; the electricity would crack hydrogen out
of water in large quantities; the hydrogen would power cars or be turned back
into electricity in individual fuel cells in people's homes. Though a
hydrogen-to-hydrogen energy cycle might sound like a perpetual-motion machine,
it could end up being the technology that someday makes global-energy needs a
solved issue.
But this is all blue sky because fusion reactors barely function in the
laboratory--there is nothing remotely close to a commercial prototype. And,
even if a grad student ran from a laboratory tomorrow yelling, "Eureka!" and
clutching the secret of an unlimited-energy-fusion future, it would be another
century-long project to convert the world to an energy economy based on
machines that simulate the centers of stars.
Realistically, these concerns dictate that, for the next few decades,
hydrogen would be manufactured either from natural gas or by using power from
a new generation of atomic reactors. The most cost-effective combination, some
researchers think, might be natural gas heated directly by atomic reactors,
whose high operating temperatures turn out to be ideal for the reforming of
hydrogen from natural gas. But that means our miracle zero-emission hydrogen
will be produced from fossil fuels via an intermediate stop at a nuclear
reactor--not exactly what the Sierra Club had in mind.
All these drawbacks do not rule out hydrogen as a fuel, they merely
represent problems to be overcome. Hydrogen is sure to enter common use
someday, perhaps during the lifetimes of children now being born. After all, a
century ago, smart engineers and economists would have sworn it physically
impossible--to say nothing of impossibly expensive--for the world to consume
75 million barrels of oil per day, as we do today, at affordable prices. But
there is almost no chance hydrogen will make a dent in energy-use patterns
during a two-term Bush administration. Even the White House concedes that the
earliest a significant number of service stations could offer pure hydrogen
would be 2020.
-- john
In my sporadic but sometimes intense investigations of alternate energy sources, I was always the most taken with hydrogen.
It is very clean. It is relatively efficient. I'd prefer a liquid fuel, but then again, I'd prefer a non-volatile, non-toxic fuel, too. You can't always get what you want.
The attractive things about hydrogen are its real abundance. There are so many interesting possibilties for how to make it. I saw a fascinating series of papers (curse me for not being able to find the original links - although you can get familiar with the ideas with some simple google searches, i.e. this conference poster) on the use of genetically engineered bacteria that produce hydrogen when eating various things, even waste products.
"Electric" has massive drawbacks both in storage and distribution, which are both dirty and highly inefficient. Methanol/Ethanol are probably even dirtier, though potentially renewable, but there are questions about how sustainable, for instance, corn power really is. Geothermal and hydro are obviously limited in place and abundance... Solar, wind and tides are ideal but unpredictable and expensive. I'm excited to hear about big improvements in solar power systems, but the big stuff (70%+ efficiencies) still seem a ways away for commercial use.
To me, that leaves good old hydrogen (in combustion? in a fuel cell?) - attractive both for its unparalleled cleanliness and the interesting potential sources. Why not?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Here's a link, it has some other intresting information aboutt the program. http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/actransit/ beck_feature.html
Hydrogen isn't necessarily generated through electrolysis. There are various chemical reactions that may be used to generate hydrogen--mostly from fossil fuels, however.
Really interesting ways for the future might involve some bioengineering. Bacteria already exist which produce hydrogen from water. Another article here. The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.
I fully expect that with some genetic engineering we will have some very cost-effective hydrogen producing microbes in a matter of years--not decades. Alternately, we might just produce the enzymes (hydrogenases et al.) and use them act directly.
Yes, biosourced hydrogen would require some significant infrastructure--but so does shipping millions of barrels of oil halfway around the world, refining the stuff and separating it into hundreds of different products. I also don't foresee massive fluctuations in the price of sewage due to world events.
~Idarubicin
Unless the economy turns around, all I'll be able to afford is a hydrogen-petrol Yugo
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
There are certainly ways to produce hydrogen without resorting to burning fossile fules. The US Governement has spent close to $800 million over the years to prove that Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) works. This is a non-polluting, sustainable way to produce energy which can be used to extract hydrogen from water.
As it isn't using oil or nuclear power, it is currently out of favour with the US Department of Energy, but you should certainly learn more about it. A good overview can be found at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the latest news can be found at OTECnews.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
I think that electric cars can be very efficient and clean but a major problem exists. Imagine that everyone is using an electric car. Where do we get all the electricity? We are currently building new coal power plants just to keep with demand for electricity that does not include power consumption by milions of electric cars...
Cheers.
The problem was that the hydrogen was enclosed in cloth impregnated with (essentially) .
rocket fuel.
"The Hindenberg just had a big Hydrogen balloon that wasn't being depleted"
It wasn't just a big bag of hydrogent, it was a big bag of hydrogen painted with solid rocket fuel.
Think about it: How else do you get a zeppelin to go up in a brilliant fireball when hydrogen burns clear?
There are also plenty of bacteria that will consume biomass. (i.e. the organic contaminants) As far as the inorganic contaminants go, it's basically just heavy metal (well, Beryllium aint all that heavy but it's a problem too) ions, which are removed manually more easily than organic contaminants. (filtration, evaporation, precipitation, you name it)
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Well, this one is $139, but sounds like the sort of thing you're talking about...
"An important thing to remember is that one big generator powered by hydrocarbons is much more efficiend than thousands of little ones"
But you still can't get around the laws of thermodynamics. The energy that comes from burning hydrogen is from the process of breaking the bonds in H2O (a very endothermic process), so sayeth the First Law. And you're never going to get as much energy out of the hydrogen as you put into it, so sayeth the Second Law. Conclusion: It would be cheaper and more efficient to skip the hydrogen middle man altogether.
The only way a hydrogen economy can be appreciably more environment-friendly than what we have now is if we use nuclear power to crack the water. And that won't happen in the US any time soon for obvious reasons (unless Bush delivers on what he said about building more nuke plants).
Not necessarily. We just need massive amount of research for innovative techniques to store and transport hydrogen. Look at this Idea. Basically sodium hydride is pellitized and coated with polythene. Very stable, can be stored for months under water. Once the pellet is crushed, it reacts with water producing hydrogen instantly. No explosions, no pressurized tanks, no transportation problem and yes - no exploding cars. While this might not be a perfect solution, I am mentioning this to illustrate that there might be scores of innovative solutions to the problems of today. We just need the time, effort and money to look for it.
Other than putting a nuclear reactor in my car, or electrifying all of our highways like bumper cars, or some not-invented-yet super-battery, what do you have in mind as a more efficient delivery vehicle for getting electricity into my car?
The only way to evaluate is to look at the fuel cycle. Biodiesel offers the best, most direct fuel cycle. You grow it, you harvest it, you turn it into oil using a press. You mix it up with some ethanol and you got biodiesel from nothing more than grain alcohol and veggie oil. Then, you burn it... its cleaner than gas, biodegradable, yada, yada. That plus the fact that you're growing it helps clean the air. Plany soybeans near the highway... or in the middle of it. Oh, and it doesn't cost trillion of dollars either. Its already available at public pumps. And I can actually buy a car with performance that burns it for the same price. Oh, and I can find somebody that can fix it too. If it breaks down.
Okay, I've looked at a number of studies I googled over the past half hour or something--and though there was lots of studies of biomass usage, endorsing its energy efficiency and effects on CO2 levels, but what the studies don't give me a warm fuzzy feeling on is How much food production capability would be displaced by biodiesel, ethanol whatever if we tried to switch to a mostly biomass economy. The waste oil from French fries (er...I guess The Man wants me to call them Freedom Fries now or something) only takes us so far--if you want to do biodiesel as The Solution To Our Energy Problem are we all going to have to go on a serious diet or what?
Hydrogen requires alot of energy to be produced, and most of that energy will come from coal. I know this has been mentioned, and this MIT study has been mentioned, but here is a link to a more readable news story
There's this too, but unfortunately it's a good chunk more than $30.
No it isn't. Natural gas is found with all oil deposits, and in many cases it's just burnt because there it's just not economic to bring it to where it's used. Secondly, methane can be formed from oil through cracking. Again it's not, because it's not economic to do so. Thirdly methane is found whenever something is decomposing, so if you have a capped landfill, you have to have handle the methane, and this is sometimes used for fuel, eg this program. We will never run out of methane.
Yes contaminents kill off the micro-organisms in wastewater, but that isn't really news to anyone- most modern industrialized nations have been treating waste water for a very long time. It's a very simple process, and in the end if its done right you will be pumping nearly pure water back into a water source like a river. The left over sludge is sold to farmers typically who use it as a fertilizer, some sludge is also kept just in case a contaminant does get into to the system, so you can restart your waste water plant.
If you had read the article you would know that the author suggests using nuclear power for electrolysis. Whether or not that is a good idea is a different question, but the article does address the issue.