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Science Technology

Bringing the Hydrogen Economy Back to Reality 56

Posted by michael from the reality-based-community dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Popular Science has created a list of 9 myths and misconceptions about getting our future hydrogen economy into full swing. If you are hoping your next car purchase will be a hydrogen car, don't hold your breath. Car manufacturers must still make some significant breakthroughs before being ready for primetime, specifically longer lasting fuel cells and better hydrogen storage capabilities."
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Bringing the Hydrogen Economy Back to Reality More

Bringing the Hydrogen Economy Back to Reality

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  • Refreshing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mark of THE CITY ( 97325 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @01:34PM (#11083366) Journal
    It's refreshing to see Robert Ballard speak candidly about the shortcomings of a technology he helped to develop. Usually, hype prevails.


  • Let's not forget the multi-trillion dollar Oil Industry. I'm really sure it's going to help this 'new hydrogen' economy along...

    • At present, hydrogen comes chiefly from natural gas. Big Oil (which is also Big Gas) would love a new market that looks green, but isn't (that carbon has to go someplace).

      • Re:Maybe they would (Score:5, Insightful)

        by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @02:06PM (#11083726)
        Big Oil (which is also Big Gas) would love a new market that looks green, but isn't (that carbon has to go someplace)

        Big Oil would love a new market. Period. They're not intrinsically opposed to "green", they're indifferent to it. Make "green" profitable, and they'll be on it like white on rice. Make it MORE profitable, and they'll drop gasoline so fast your collective head will be spinning.

        As to the carbon going somewhere. That's certainly true. It'll be CO2 if natural gas is cracked into H2 and other stuff. Doesn't actually have to be, but that's the way to bet (since it is currently the easiest, most profitable, way).

        • Big Coal and the utility companies would go ape over this. Oxygen-blown IGCC plants already produce a great deal of hydrogen in normal operation (the syngas product is a mixture of H2 and carbon monoxide), and coal is roughly 1/4 the cost of oil per BTU. Utility companies operating IGCC plants for power would be able to tap off syngas during off-peak hours and scavenge the hydrogen, which creates a bigger market for their product as well as the coal producers.

          On the other hand, if we get solar hydrogen ei

    • Sure they will. It's just like that Simpsons episode, where "The Electric Car of Tomorrow" Is brought to you by Exxon.

      Stereotypical weak, nerdy voice: "I'm the electric car of the future. I don't go very fast, and I don't go very far, plus all of your friends will laugh at you." Cut to 'flamboyant' men giggling and pointing.

      Big Oil will fund hydrogen research, especially if hydrogen research like this keeps saying "Uh... we got nothing. Seriously. Give us ten, uh, no, twenty years, and we'll have s

    • C0rporat3 3v1L (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Shihar ( 153932 )
      The oil industry has about as much say in how hydrogen is going to play as car companies have in the airline industry. The automakers might like to ban airplanes so everyone has to use a car, but it will never happen because public demand on the issue is just too damned strong. Hydrogen is the same way.

      The problem with hydrogen is that it isn't cheaper then oil. Period. The day that changes is the day the oil industry is steam rolled. The energy market is deadly serious to all economies. Energy trump
  • From the article: "Bush and Kerry managed to find one piece of common ground: Both spoke glowingly of a future powered by fuel cells."

    So what we've got are two politicians running for national office endorsing a futuristic, Utopian idea that will not likely happen in any of our lifetimes....

    This is news?

  • I find the H2 leak subject a little disingenuous.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bplipschitz ( 265300 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @01:48PM (#11083503)
    after all, H2 is the lightest gas around. It'll dissipate immediately at a fueling station or wherever. Gasoline vapors, on the other hand, are heavier than air and tend to pool. That seems much more dangerous to me.
    • Yes, the hydrogen would dissipate rather quickly at the fueling station, provided the leak wasn't too large. What about if your car starts leaking in your garage at night though? Since hydrogen is odorless you wouldn't even notice until you went to start the car in the morning and then BLAMMO! I am sure that there could be ways to detect it, etc, but I am just trying to point out that hydrogen could be at least a dangerous as gasoline.

      The article was also trying to make a point not just about the danger

      • Propane is odorless too- so they add odor to it for consumer sales, thus we get our nice onion smell when there is a propane leak.

        BTW- if large amounts of hydrogen were to leak into the atmosphere, you might get an explosion someplace, but far more likely is that it would rise into the Ozone layer creating oxygen and rain.
        • Certainly adding odor would allow easier detection of leaks. My greater point is that in enclosed spaces hydrogen would likely be just as if not more dangerous than gasoline. I am not trying to be alarmist or say that it is too dangerous, but that in their zeal to promote it some proponents of H2 (as with any new technology) pretend as if there would be no danger at all.

          Regarding the quantity of H2 leaked, in the article the concern mentioned was that it would combine with oxygen in the upper atmosphere

          • Certainly adding odor would allow easier detection of leaks. My greater point is that in enclosed spaces hydrogen would likely be just as if not more dangerous than gasoline. I am not trying to be alarmist or say that it is too dangerous, but that in their zeal to promote it some proponents of H2 (as with any new technology) pretend as if there would be no danger at all.

            Wouldn't the same danger exist in an enclosed space with a running gasoline engine? I know my garage in my house has CO detectors hooked
            • Wouldn't the same danger exist in an enclosed space with a running gasoline engine? I know my garage in my house has CO detectors hooked up to fans for just this sort of problem.

              Well, duh. But I wasn't talking about running engines, I was talking about leaks and the probability of an explosion. My point was that while in open air hydrogen would probably dissipate quickly enough to not explode (given the leak was small enough) but in an enclosed space you will be more likely to get an explosive mixture f

            • I personally doubt those clouds would last very long- clouds have a tendency to come back to earth as rain....

              When they're being produced at 15-20 miles up in the air, they would. And the problem isn't just the clouds, it's the humidity; the higher up in the stratosphere (which increases in temperature with altitude, which is why it's stratisfied) you produce the water, the more water the air can hold. Normally water is kept out of the stratosphere by the cold trap at the bottom, but creating free H2 sho

            • check out this presentation on hydrogen safety - http://www.fuelcells.org/info/HydrogenandtheLaw.pd f people tend to forget that gasoline is a dangerous fuel, yet we live and work around hundreds of stations nationwide. hydrogen can be a very safe fuel, there just needs to be safety codes and standards put in place to ensure it.

  • Sad but not unusual (Score:3, Insightful)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @01:58PM (#11083628)
    Politicians push a technology that makes them look "green". The pledge of support is backed by a seemingly large pile of money (well, at least enough to fund the Iraq expedition for almost 10 days).

    Scientists and engineers divide into a couple camps: those who warn about the technology's shortcomings (branded naysayers) and those who stand to profit from the research dollars (often working for the established industries).

    The established industries such as the US auto manufacturers get to delay practical changes for a few years because the Next Big Thing That Will Save Us(tm) will be available Real Soon Now(tm).

    Finally, the technology fails to live up to the hype giving the public one more reason to distrust scientists and engineers.

    Lather, rinse, repeat.
    • Exactly. Remember all the hype about electric vehicles 10-20 years ago? We were all supposed to be using electric vehicles by now. Unsuprisingly, electric vehicles are nowhere to be seen.

  • Hybrid diesels (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @02:31PM (#11084024) Journal
    If fuel cells are still having problems, a decent alternative should be hybrid diesels.

    Diesels are already very efficient. Hybrid diesels would be even more so. Esp if you have regenerative braking.

    Interesting diesel options:
    1) Bio-diesel (waste cooking oil, palm or soya oil).
    2) diesel-water emulsions (e.g. Shell's Aquadiesel licensed from Gunnerman's A-55 fuels/Clean Fuels Tech).
    • Seattle has the largest fleet of hybrid diesel buses in the world, but transportation officials are finding that the expected fuel efficiency isn't there [nwsource.com]. It seems the regular diesel engine buses have a slightly better mpg performance while still having with very low emissions.

      During a check on fuel efficiency in September, the hybrid buses (which are equipped with the regenerative braking system) were getting 3.75 mpg on average while the older model diesels were getting 3.8 mpg.

      The article does go o
      • Here's the part of the article that seems most important...

        "But in July 2003, almost at the end of its testing period for the hybrid buses, Metro suddenly announced that it needed to switch engines.

        The federal government had imposed stricter exhaust emissions standards, and the Cummins engine was not federally certified. Metro sent the bus to the Winnipeg, Manitoba, manufacturer to have a certified Caterpillar engine installed in its place.

        The fuel economy results were never the same after the switch to
      • Longer routes means the batteries and electrical systems become a deadweight - they do nothing much. So no surprise they are not as efficient.

        They should do better in stop and go traffic conditions.

        Probably the caterpillar diesel engines which they switched to just aren't as economical.

        If they had wanted better emissions perhaps they should have gone for a diesel mix- aquadiesel or vegetable oil+diesel, and stuck with the old engines...

        Apparently some 4x4 owners here add a bit of vege oil into their tan

  • E85. Forget H2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by kippy ( 416183 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @02:42PM (#11084194)
    I know this isn't sexy but I'm convinced that this is the real way out of greenhouse and oil problems:

    E85 [e85fuel.com]

    It's an 85%/15% ethanol-gas mix. Outfitting a car to use it is cheap. There are a couple problems with it.

    1. You're still using oil from the ground.
    2. It still makes CO2.
    3. You've got to produce the ethanol.

    Still you can:

    1. just keep using oil. I know that's not popular but e85 effectively multiplies the efficiency by a factor of more than 5. Also, oil isn't going to run out in 10 years if you understand the concept of "proven reserves". Even if you believe in peak oil theory, it staves it off by a good long while.

    2. a lot of the CO2 produced is fixed the previous growing season by the plants.

    3. producing ethanol is a net energy gain since the lion's share of the energy comes from the sun in the first place. Still we currently don't produce nearly enough of it to roll it out nation wide. That's just a matter of making a market for it. The good folks at Oak Ridge national labs are working on engineering plants that grow faster and produce more material to break down into ethanol. They're also working on bacteria that can do the fermenting on more materials. (sorry, no link. Too lazy.)

    It's not perfect but it's a damn sight better than H2 and it's available on a limited basis now. I can go fill up on it today if I want. Best of all in my mind, this could boost the agribusiness industry to a point where farm subsidies are done away with for good.
    • (sorry, no link. Too lazy.)

      Too bored. Here's the link:

      ORNL [ornl.gov]

      Google also turned up this gem:

      Canadian Agricultural Energy End-Use Data and Analysis Centre (Ethanol Page) [usask.ca]

      Enjoy!
    • Unless you have a crop which is far more productive than corn, E85 is just a boondoggle.
      1. It currently produces only 1.34 BTU of ethanol for each BTU of fossil inputs. This means each gallon is about 75% fossil energy.
      2. The tax subsidy for ethanol is currently $1.90/gallon, or about $7.60/gallon of non-fossil energy. (And you thought petroleum was expensive!)
      3. Even if all the corn grown in the USA was converted to ethanol, it wouldn't feed our motor fuel needs.

      Taxpayer funds currently devoted to ethanol subsi

      • Why should taxpayers pay for hybrid research? Let the car companies do that. If anything, the government should be funding research on techniques to grow more starch-rich plants and engineer more efficient bacteria. In fact, they're doing just that.

        Grain isn't the only source either. Municipal waste and switchgrass are other places to get it. There is also research being done to produce ethanol from cellulose [iogen.ca] which will let you pretty much plant weeds and be able to harvest them for fuel.
        • Why should taxpayers pay for hybrid research? Let the car companies do that.
          Taxpayers should help push the car companies, by paying higher fuel taxes (which can subsidize hybrids and plug-in hybrid infrastructure [iags.org]) among other things.
          • You mean consumers should push the car companies. This is already happening. I'm all for a very small CO2 tax but I have yet to hear about an instance where government intervention with the free market has yielded good results.

            Oh, and if you think that a CO2 tax will be exclusively used for any one particular cause, you've got another thing coming. It all goes into one big pot (with some few exceptions) and congress allocates it where it sees fit. a billion taken in from CO2 taxes does not mean 1 billi
            • Incentives matter, because perverse incentives (expensive high-mileage vehicles combined with cheap fuel don't reduce fuel consumption) are proven failures.

              I'm with you on the the nuclear thing, but I'm not so sure that coal powerplants feeding partially-electric cars are such a bad thing compared to the status quo. (Anything you can do to change the mix of generating sources changes the CO2 emission from grid-connected transport right along with it; this is easier than re-engineering the vehicle fleet.)

              W

  • ...are confused about technology, science, and fiction -- and like it that way.

    It was fun reading it when I was a kid and dreaming about flying cars...but come on now!

  • The article states that 71% of the US grid electricity comes from fosil fuels. Unless I'm mistaken it's more like this [doe.gov].

    coal 50%
    petroleum 3%
    gas 8.5%
    nuclear 18.5%
    hydro 8.4%
    hippy stuff 0.2%
    "nonutility" (?) 11.2%

    That's like 61% fosil. How off are my numbers?
    • First, you're using 1998 numbers, which doesn't account for the natural gas generator production boom of 2001 & 2002. Energy Generated by Fuel Type for 2003 [doe.gov] is about 69%, so 71% capacity sounds right. 2004s numbers should be out spring 2005.

      Non-utility is the nomenclature for small units that are not owned by the vertically-integrated-monopoly utility companies (where "small" is on the order of less than 50 MW). NUGs could be anything from trash & landfill gas (sometimes called biomass), to wood

  • Ummm... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by geek42 ( 592158 )
    I'm all for a good round of debunking, and I agree with most of what this article had to say. There are a couple places, though where I think it manages to be a little misleading.

    THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY CAN RUN ON RENEWABLE ENERGY

    If any economy can, hydrogen fuel can. What's the alternative, exactly? An endless supply of non-renewable energy? That'd be a contradiction of terms, no?

    MASS PRODUCTION WILL MAKE HYDROGEN CARS AFFORDABLE

    Maybe this should be "more affordable" - and of course mass pro

  • "don't hold your breath..." (Score:3, Funny)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @03:16PM (#11084651) Journal
    If you are hoping your next car purchase will be a hydrogen car, don't hold your breath.

    If all our cars were hydrogen cars we wouldn't have to hold our breath.

  • ....specifically longer lasting fuel cells and better hydrogen storage capabilities."

    It would also help if there were a supply of hydrogen for the cars to use. Currently this supposedly clean fuel is being generated by processes on natural gas that are actually extremely wasteful of energy and also highly polluting. They just move the pollution and energy waste away from the car itself. But the user still pays for the wasted energy, and everyone breathing the air pays for the pollution.

  • According to the article:

    A better solution to global warming might be to hold off building hydrogen cars, and instead harness fuel cells to generate electricity for homes and businesses.

    This article then goes on and continues to destroy hydrogen as save all to the energy and environmental crisis affecting the world today. (While I might consider it a wastefully inefficient economic crisis I will call it that to avoid confusion of the important part of this post.)

    The real question: What niches

  • You can use hydrogen in a normal car engine (Score:3, Informative)

    by jeorgen ( 84395 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @04:38PM (#11085832)
    With very little conversion, you can use hydrogen in your regular car engine. BMW is doing this [bmwworld.com], and betting on it. From the page:
    The 745h is the latest BMW hydrogen powered vehicle. The 745h is powered by a 4.4-liter V8, featuring bi-VANOS variable valve timing, Valvetronic variable intake runners, and a fully variable intake manifold. The 745h can use either hydrogen or premium unleaded gasoline.

    Running on hydrogen, the 745h produces 184 horsepower and can achieve a top speed of 133 mph. The cruising range is 190 miles. Added to the 400-mile range of the normal fuel tank, the 745h can go 600 miles between fill-ups.

    This is not as fuel efficient as a fuel cell, but it works with the fleet of cars we have today, and it works in cold climates, where fuel cells fail.
    • Hooray!

      It seems to me that everybody assume H2 can only be used in a fuel-cell powered electric vehicle. H2 will also run a conventional internal combustion engine. Thus, it will feel like a "real" gasoline engine, and you can REV it to impress those slutty chicks on the street. It has very few toxic emmissions (maybe a few NOx)

      Also there is no big, expensive, toxic catalyst like in a fuel cell that has to be replaced at regular intervals.

      Plus the BMW 745h can also run on regular petrol, meaning that it
  • Well, I have always been a fan of Gasohol [wikipedia.org] and Biodiesel. [wikipedia.org]
    I wonder why they did not mention that as a viable alternative fuel-source. It seems that, under Jimmy Carter, a bill was passed that exempted taxes on such fuels. So, it would be a little cheaper to use these. Although you might have to modify your engine to get the same gas-effecientcy.

    On another note, IIRC, natural gas and gasoline are also ordorless and colorless, but they add something to them to make them smell like that. The same should be
  • FTFA: "The Caltech study grossly overstated hydrogen leakage, says Assistant Secretary David Garman of the Department of Energys Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. But whatever its volume, hydrogen added to the atmosphere will combine with oxygen to form water vapor, creating noctilucent cloudsthose high, wispy tendrils you see at dawn and dusk. The increased cloud cover could accelerate global warming."

    I don't think so. Leaked hydrogen will quickly rise to the top of the atmosphere, where i
    • Lets not also forget the the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen has a very significant activation barrier. While I am sure UV light can help accelerate this, it is difficult to imagine that the increase in water vapor will be larger than what comes from those damm lakes they have in Las Vegas!
  • Finally, someone in the popular science press have stated the H2 industry's "dirty little secret": It takes more energy to produce, store, transport, and consume H2 than if we consumed fossil fuels; and, if that energy comes from fossil fuels then there is almost certainly a negative impact on CO2 levels, too.

    Now, I'm a fan of NOT using fossil fuels at an increasing rate until we've stuffed all the waste into our atmosphere.

    So, let's instead look at some practical, short-term alternatives that will fore

  • I think electric hybrids will be the way to go short-term - electric motors for city driving, & some sort of combustion engine (petrol, E85, ethnol, gas, hydrogen..) for longer runs. If you can get a reasonable battery storage in there, you can probably charge from the mains overnight with cheap off peak electricity and do short daily city runs without turning the combustion engine on at all!

    There will be a chance also to soak up cheaper off-peak power that renewables like wind generate, as the proport
  • Why are we persuing hydrogen fuel cells at all? From the article, they sound like a terrible idea. They're promoted because they're "greener" than fossil fuels and the only exhaust is water vapour, but the article states that production process of extracting hydrogen fuel from natural gas would lead to an increase in carbon dioxide emmisions and fossil fuel use.

    Can someone give me the definitive reason for the drive to get fuel cells off the ground? Is it purely because it would allow us to centralize the
    • The hydrogen economy has been hyped since Nixon, but especially for the past 8 years by misguided futurists at DOE. Under Bush, it has simply been a ruse. The hydrogen economy will never happen. Joe Romm's book "The Hype About Hydrogen" does a pretty good job of pointing out the many challenges of the hydrogen economy, but he still understates the problems. I've had a number of productive discussions with Joe over the past ten months, and it's clear he's steadily become more negative about hydrogen sinc

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