The Hydrogen Emperor Has No Clothes

By John R. Wilson and Griffin Burgh

Executive summary of soon-to-be-published white paper on draw-backs of using hydrogen as an energy carrier

'' Hydrogen has been greatly oversold by "evangelists" in the USDOE and elsewhere and also by the environmental lobby, including some very persuasive writers who are adept at choosing half truths top fit their preconceived conclusions.''

http://www.evworld.com/databases/storybuilder.cfm?storyid=551

This piece was written by John Wilson and Griffin Burgh. They both work for the Detroit-based "The Management Group". In fact, John Wilson is the founder and CEO of The Management Group.

Here's a slice of Mr. Wilson's biography:

"He served in process equipment design and development with Exxon (Fluid Coking and Flexicoking) and Shell (with the latter in the Canadian Tar Sands and then in Shell Development Co. in Houston, TX)."

Maybe the paper has a point, maybe it doesn't. But I'd be hard-pressed to ever believe anything said about alternative energy sources by a former employee of Exxon and Shell.

...seems to be that a fixation on hydrogen as the actual fuel carrier for "clean" fossil fuel (in fuel cells) is counterproductive because there are better carriers.

Probably no one who reads EVWorld regularly would assume that fossil fuel is better than renewables, whether fuel cells are used or not.

It would be if there were vast reservoirs of pure hydrogen out there for the taking.

Instead it would be better to characterize hydrogen as an 'alternative energy storage medium' - and as has been pointed out already in this thread, an initial source of energy is still required (i.e., hydrocarbons which can serve as a sourve of hydrogen, or electricity which can be used to extract hydrogen from water).

"It would be if there were vast reservoirs of pure hydrogen out there for the taking."

That would be our current problem in reverse: Instead of releaseing surplus CO2, we would run out of oxygen!

Solar is one truly safe energy source "for the taking": this includes direct solar electric/heat, biofuel, wind. Addditionally there is geothermal and tidal.

I don't think it would be all that serious of a problem for a few decades, however. Apparently carbon dioxide has about doubled from buring fossil fuels, however, this doubling only occurred because the starting amount of carbon dioxide was so low (about 0.3%). By contrast, oxygen comprises slightly over 19% of the atmosphere, so a depletion rate of 0.3% per century won't be problematic for a while (I suspect life could adapt to 18% - after all, there's less oxygen available at high altitudes and life goes on). Of course, all the newly-formed water produced by the combustion of hydrogen could hasten the rise of the oceans?

OK, since the above problems are entirely theoretical, there's no pointing beating them to death. And you are definitely correct (as shown in the tables in the link provided below) that there's plenty of solar energy available to meet our energy needs - provided we learn how to harvest it efficiently (and I suspect the political obstacles towards meeting this goal will be greater than the technological hurdles that will need to be overcome).


http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html

If hydrogen is produced from water by electrolysis, then oxygen is released. When it is burned, then the same amount of oxygen is consumed.

...not a bound-up source like water.

z

using the cold war plutonium...produced with OUR tax dollars, and Sold back to us.

It would eventually make sense to use for vehicles if battery technology doesn't improve at least 4 fold. But it will always take electricity to first turn it into usable hydrogen, which then has to be stored and rendered back into electricity.

I always thought there was something fishy about the incumbent's sudden interest in hydrogen as an alternate fuel source. George UUalker Bush's administration has been anything but enviornmentally friendly, and this administration has always given alternate energy the short end of the stick and the lowest funding priorities when alternate energy got any funding at all.

Personally, I believe that the hydrogen initiative is a typical Deucey-U Bush administration / right-wing smoke screen to "prove" that alternate energy systems are "uneconomical" and "impractical." By choosing a technology that has so many unsolved problems--ranging from hydrogen production to hydrogen storage and distribution to the immense capital costs of converting the energy infrastructure that hydrogen, the incumbent and his oil producing buddies could more easily squelch other alternate energy systems that would be cheaper and far easier and quicker to move from the laboratory to the marketplace.

As many of the rest of us know, fuel cells don't have to run on hydrogen. There are a lot of fuel cell designs already out there that run on such things as methane, natural gas, and other carbon compounds that don't have to have the exquisite care that hydrogen does. Those designs could readily be brought to the marketplace with far less bother and expense than hydrogen fuel cells would need.

Moreover, genetic engineering could redesign microbes to produce the methane or what have you at a loss less cost and energy input than cracking water molecules with electricity.

For that matter, Ballard already has a fuel cell design out in the marketplace that uses a borax-like compound as a catalyst to break up water molecules into water and oxygen. The Ballard system does have a drawback; that borax does have to be mined.

So hydrogen fuel cells won't be practical for a few years. So what?There are cleaner, lower-polluting fuel cell systems that can be put into production well before the hydrogen infrastructure can be put into place. There's no reason to let the incumbent and his "awl bidness" buddies get away with his attempt to maintain the fossil fuel status quo.