National Academy Of Sciences - Hydrogen Potential Oversold

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's plan for cars running on clean, efficient hydrogen fuel cells is decades away from commercial reality, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Bush, promoting the technology a year ago, said a hydrogen car might be available as the first vehicle for a child born in 2003. On Monday, the Energy Department included $318 million for hydrogen technology and fuel cell cars in its proposed 2005 budget. "A hydrogen economy is where the world is headed," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. But the National Academy study called some of the Energy Department goals "unrealistically aggressive."

EDIT

The report said battery-powered cars or hybrid cars, which use gasoline and electric motors, could prove a better choice. And over the next 25 years, the effects of hydrogen cars on oil imports and global warming gas emissions "are likely to be minor."

A second pessimistic assessment came from Joseph Romm, chief Energy Department official for conservation and alternative energy in the Clinton administration. "Fuel cell cars will not be environmentally desirable for decades, because there are better uses for the fuels you can make the hydrogen out of," he said. Most hydrogen is made from natural gas, and using that gas to make electricity instead, and thus replace coal-based electric plants, would be better for the environment, he said."

EDIT/END

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=4976

[never cry wolf]

1. But, but.......

Georgie says it's a good thing!!

Actually, soon after this first came out a few years ago I read an article on how impractible it was. Not only the efficiency of the cars themselves but we would need an entirely new national distribution and production infrastructure. Gas stations would have to have the capability of selling both hydrogen and gasoline for a time. There would have to be hydrogen producing facilities and transportation all over.

Gee, guess who would be set up to run this new industry, yeah, big oil, of course. It is all a sham.

[Kolesar]

2. Hey, I like the idea of battery powered automobiles

It just seems right to me. EVs claim lower Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG). I am rather concerned about manufacturing batteries. Lead is bad, and I have heard Lithium is bad, so that leaves us with Nickel-Metal Hydride as the choice, but those sound expensive.

As for EV range, people should be happy to be able to commute. Nowhere is it written that citizens are entitled to driving vacations. Seriously, EVs would make great second cars, or one could rent a hybrid for trips.

[Viking12]

3. Here's the NAS report

http://books.nap.edu/books/0309091632/html/

It's not quite as dismissive of hydrogen tech as the AJC editorial implies but it does identify significant and possibly insurmountable obstacles in the development of a hydrogen economy.

What the report clearly does, however, is recognize: a) the environmental, geological, geopolitical limitations of a fossil fuel economy, b) the unliklihood that a single, "savior" technology is going to come along and bail us out, and, therefore c) we are, by necessity, going to have to invest significant resources into R&D of a variety of alternative energy sources, energy carriers, and energy reliant technologies to avoid major social & economic malfunction. Hoepfully, this is the message gets to the public rather than the message that we should abandon hydrogen programs.

On edit: spelling and grammar

[hatrack]

4. I wouldn't recommend abandoning these programs either

But people need to know that it's not going to be some painless deus ex machina answer to our energy problems.

[Viking12]

5. That's the point...

I was trying to make. Perhaps in my haste I didn't articualte it clearly enough. I just hope that the "necessary, not simple, not cheap, and not painless" message is the one the emerges from report.

[hatrack]

6. Oh, I agree - it's exactly the point you made

Whatever soluion we stumble into as part of fixing long-term energy problems (assuming we ever do), there isn't going to be any single solution.

Renewables, conservation & efficiency, hydrogen, maybe even nuclear (though I'm not enthusiastic about the prospect) will each be only parts of a very large solution. It will not be easy and it will not be quick.

[NNadir]

7. Hydrogen as a transportable fuel is an unfortunate shell game.

It sounds good but it doesn't hold water (pun intentional).

Hydrogen is and will be (even more in the future) an important reaction intermediate for the manufacture of liquifiable fuels, and so the idea of producing it by sustainable means (solar, geothermal and nuclear) is worth pursuing it.

Storing it, shipping it great distances, or worst of the worst, putting it in automobiles is not attractive at all on economic, environmental and especially safety grounds. It would be insane to do that.

Here are the properties that one needs in a desirable fuel: It must be liquifiable under pressures accessible without extreme conditions. Functionally this means it must have a critical temperature that is near or above room temperature. It must have high energy density. It should ideally have low toxicity. If soluble in water, it should be easy to remove or separate. It should be easy to manufacture on an industrial scale at high efficiency. It should be safe to store. It should combust cleanly with the generation of minimal pollutants.

Hydrogen fits almost none of these criteria except the clean burning part. Methanol fits more of these criteria, but its water solubility and difficulty of removal makes it less than ideal.

Methyl ether is probably the best choice of a hydrogen equivalent.

[hunter]

8. methyl ether a.k.a. dimethyl ether...

...is interesting stuff. It is easily synthesized and its use in transportation would be similar to butane or propane -- "bottled gas."

[jmcgowanjm]

9. but all of the above can only be made with hydrocarbons

or w/ methanol- vegetative matter from
4.15 times the land area of Texas

[NNadir]

10. DME can be made from any carbon source, including carbon dioxide.

One needs to input a primary form of energy to make it and its intermediate, hydrogen. If one insists that all that energy come from biomass, then it will take a huge amount of land area as in all biomass to fuel schemes. If one accepts the use of nuclear energy, it is less problematic for the long term.

I know I posted over at SmirkingChimp a year or so ago, and maybe I've posted it here as well at DU, that DME runs diesel engines very well. Sandia National Laboratory ran an ordinary stock Cummings Diesel for quite some time on DME. It was necessary though to change some of the seals, but the engine showed no major ill effects in either performance or longevity. The engine burned remarkably clean for a diesel (or for that matter for any internal combustion engine.) This suggests another plus for DME: It will minimize the need for gross infrastructure changes.

I neglected to note one important drawback to the use of the competing option methanol above: It is toxic, causing blindness along with death.

Like any option we can imagine DME has some drawbacks. It, like methane, is probably a greenhouse gas in its own right. It also has anesthetic properties, although it is probably much less toxic than either diesel fuel or gasoline. It is miscible with water, but since it's a gas at room temperature, it is easy to remove via aeration.

[Viking12]

11. Another thought...

Perhaps the potential of hydrogen is unrealistically optimistic, but attempts at predicting the technological future are always limited by imaginable possibilities at that moment in time. Unforseen developments, such as the potential of the one below, can easily change the picture.


WASHINGTON - Researchers say they have taken another step toward understanding how plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms — which may provide a cheap way to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

Producing hydrogen from water is the stuff of science fiction — and some comments by President Bush. But the team at Imperial College London and Japan Science and Technology Corp. in Yokohama said they had taken the best pictures yet of the plant structures that do it every day.

-snip-

“Without photosynthesis life on Earth would not exist as we know it,” Jim Barber of Imperial’s Department of Biological Sciences said in a statement. “Oxygen derived from this process is part of the air we breathe and maintains the ozone layer needed to protect us from ultraviolet radiation.Now hydrogen also contained in water could be one of the most promising energy sources for the future. Unlike fossil fuels, it’s highly efficient, low-polluting and is mobile, so it can be used for power generation in remote regions where it’s difficult to access electricity.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4184857

[treepig]

12. hydrogen - more pollution on the way?

Dealing with the issue of dirty hydrogen


By Dave Neads

The Other Side of the Story

President George Bush has launched a hydrogen initiative as part of his administration’s Clean Air policy. Touted as the new fuel of the future because it is abundant and clean burning, hydrogen technology could be the way to solve the problems created by traditional fuels. The device that will be used for the conversion of hydrogen to energy will most likely be the fuel cell which could -- and should -- be produced in an environmentally sensitive manner. A look at the other side of the story shows how political machinations are subverting the process of fuel cell production and ultimately,the hydrogen dream.
One of the essential elements in the construction of hydrogen fuel cells is a group of palladium isotopes called palladium group metals or PGMs for short. These metals speed up the hydrogen oxygen reaction inside fuel cells while decreasing the amount of corrosion that occurs.

In a deal recently brokered by presidents Bush and Putin, Norelisk Nickel, a major Russian producer of nickel, took over Stillwater Mining Co. which has major palladium mines in Nye, Montana. Immediately we’re off to a bad start -- Norelisk Nickel is known to be a notorious polluter in its home operations. Satellite imagery shows 100 mile long plumes spreading from Norelisk’s smelting operations in northern Siberia. Estimates are that two million acres of forest are affected or killed annually by the two million tons of sulphur dioxide the smelter releases into the atmosphere each year.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Norelisk Nickel hired a law firm run by former Secretary of State and Bush family friend, James Baker, to obtain regulatory approval for the deal. With that in the bag, Norelisk named five new directors to Stillwater’s previous board. These new appointments are American and are pro-Bush friends and supporters.

Now that they control the primary production of palladium, Norelisk will be able to significantly influence the price of these precious metals. The potential for increased profits is huge. The brokering of this inside deal driven by political expediency is potentially the first of many such ‘arrangements’ to emerge under the Clean Air Policy based on the hydrogen dream.

U.S. domestic coal fields are expected to be part of the energy sources used to produce hydrogen. Big coal is expecting windfall profits from these deals. The nuclear industry has also been lining up to be involved in the hydrogen process. Coal and nuclear, both proven in the past to be very dirty and very harmful, have been the target of huge campaigns in the past decades. But now under the guise of being part of the clean, non-polluting hydrogen initiative they are receiving new life and opportunity. For example, the U.S. Senate recently passed a bill that will give an $8 billion subsidy to fossil fuel production, especially coal bed methane. This is twice the amount set aside for renewable energy sources such as wind, tidal and solar.

Forward thinking that cared about the health of the nation would use non-polluting energy sources to produce hydrogen. Instead, the push is to go back to yesterday’s fuels that have already created a plethora of unhealthy conditions from asthma to global warming. The promise of hydrogen-based energy is that these problems would be reduced; yet the reliance on traditional polluters in the implementation of these new technologies could destroy the hydrogen dream. The Clean Air Initiative may simply become another profit-making scam for the same old group of fossils.


http://www.wltribune.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=37&cat=48&id=184715&more=1