Although this may be true it means we have to look at the issue differently. if Hydrogen is produced locally using renewable energy, solar, wind, hydro, even at the point of sale, we don't need to transport it. also, hydrogen can be burned in an internal combustion engine so that should be considered until fuel cell technology is up to par

A lot of these reasons are why I'm such a fan of investing in battery technology and having all-electric cars instead (or plug-in hybrids at least). If we're to make hydrogen with electricity, why not use that electricity directly instead? Fuel cells seem more appropriate for other uses than private transportation anyway.

Erik, that might be an argument for fuel cells that work, and are ready to power cars costing less than $250,000 ... but how good an argumentis it for hydrogen which does not work?

The real danger with the hydrogen fantasy is that we don't look for real solutions, that will work.

Well, at the same time, David Freeman (Western Hydrogen Storage) is reminding us that internal combustion engines would be quite happy with hydrogen and we can get busy producing it by electrolysis with electricity from intermittent renewable sources like sun and wind.

As he said Tuesday at the Great Energy Efficiency Debate II:

There's no money to bring new technology to the market because deregulation is trying to make a buck; see The Corporation and you'll understand. So, we can't change on a dime but we could turn on a dollar and you're [the automakers] not doing anything about it. Get a response by getting a million Americans to ask for a hydrogen-run vehicle.

As pointed out, using electricity to split water to power your car would ( will ? ) be an unusually perverse way to do things. Why not just use the electricity in the first place ?

Answer : If everyone starts using electric vehicles powered from the grid, how are governments going to tax it ? Far better to continue to keep consumers ‘filling up’ as usual – then the H2 can be taxed - like gasoline is now.

Plus, if the ‘hydrogen economy’ ever does take off, I would take a wild guess that the vast bulk of H2 will be coming from cracking fossil fuels – just as it does today.

Oh, and it’s lethally dangerous too – think ‘crash gasoline tanker’ - then think ‘crash H2 tanker’ . . .

I’m coining the term H2ype

See : http://www.ohpurleese.com#13MAY05

From recent developments, I don't think that making hydrogen by electrolysis is the way to go. Microbial production will probably be the best way.

Along these same lines, see also:

"Major challenges to make fuel-cell cars reality"
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7882

Spend enough time reading about actual fuel cell prototypes running off natural gas and you'll see numbers like 200,000 hours of continuous run with 6% dropoff in effiiciency. And that includes the reformer. On pure hydrigen, the perfomannce is far longer.

The problem with fuelcell propulsion in personal vehicles is lack of elbow room for experimentation and very high expectationis for speed and acceleration. When cars were young, say in the early 1900's, performance was compared to actual horses. The solution then was to run off a very small engine and keep a driving range to perhaps 80 miles on a fillup. A hundred years later we have 300 mile ranges on 260HP ICE cars and now we expect a fuel cell car to compare directly with that standard and meet it after only 5 years of engineering development. See whats wrong with this picture?

It is reasonable to expect that fuel cell powered cars will be uncommon for at least two decades after the major engineering and materials selection sisues have been resolved. It is also reasonable to expect that the most sucesssful applications for fuel cells with be in micro apps and in distributed power production, instead of for automotive uses.

This paper says we've been trying to make fuel cell cars for 30 years, not 5. And the estimages by people doing the work are that we are still "several decades" away, not just a couple.

Look, as an engineer I appreciate breakthroughs, but I think the non-engineers viewpoint might be that you get breakthroughs where you want them.

Maybe that's because, if you look back in retrospect at every working technology ... it struggled and then had a breakthrough.

But that misses the filtering process, the ideas and technologies that are gone because they didn't have enough, or the right breakthroughs.

It also misses the breakthroughs that came in some place we didn't expect ...

If we could just "name" our breakthroughs and then do them ... what would be the point of NASDAQ? Every tech company would just succeed!

Forgot yet again that links don't go ...

Article one:

http://www.cato.org/dailys/11-03-03-2.html

Article two:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/05/hydrogen_econom.html

The article correctly states that hydrogen is not an energy source but a medium, but it forgets to explain the consequences this important fact has on a potential hydrogen-economy.

First, this means using hydrogen instead of fuel is not more or less ecologic than using oil, gas or nuclear power. It all depends on how the hydrogen was produced.

Second, it means that energy must be consumed to produce hydrogen, some being lost in the process (the laws of thermodynamics dictate it to be so).
Currently, the most efficient process to produce hydrogen is to extract it from oil. The chemical industry has been doing it massively for years, almost all of the hydrogen which is used in scientific/chemical applications is produced from the exploitation of oil and oil-derivated-gases.

The production of hydrogen by other currently available means, hydrolysis (which separates oxygen and hydrogen present in water) being the most easily implemented are completely inefficient, energy wise. Burning hydrogen produced by theses means then produces only a very small part of the energy that was spent to produce that hydrogen.

So, currently, the most economical solution to produce hydrogen, is the extraction from oil and its derivates, and it will be long until usable alternatives emerge.
This has the regretable consequence that hydrogen production actually leads to an increase in co2 emissions because of the oil chemistry it imposes.

This is quite surprising to hear, but unsurprisingly the industrials who push the hydrogen economy forward are the oil ones : this will allow them to continue to use their current production chains without changing them much.

All it takes to work is a gullible public who believes hydrogen is clean by itself and who forgets to ask where and how it is produced.

We still need a lot of technical advances before hydrogen production and use is actually environment friendly. Currently it is not and won't be before long.

There have been some good scientific publications about this fact, some bit of googling should allow everyone to find them quickly.

To reinforce that aspect, the vast majority of commercially produced hydrogen comes from natural gas.

It would be far more efficient (and practical) to burn that gas in today's $22,000 Honda GX (by some measures "the greenest car in American").

To back up a bit, this is really about placing bets on future technologies, and whether we need to pick "a winner" or let multiple winners evolve.

Not so long ago, the same players (GM and the government) told us electric cars were "the winner." They built their prototypes, they installed their infrastructure, they did their photo-opportunities.

Then they scrapped the prototypes, ripped out the infrastructure, and moved on to a new "winner" in hydrogen, despite the fact that it is "several decades" away.

They are again building out infrastructure (the "hydrogen highway") on the assumption of success.

This is all about the appearence of action (and success), while continuing business as usual.

A more prudent plan would be to:

* tax “bad” energy, and “hogs” of bad energy higher
* research possible replacements
* allow a free market in those replacements

Let the best technology win, and don't trust your congress-critters (excellent engineers all?) pick your winner.

Check out the information sources. Cato is a libertarian think tank, populated by political science-types and techno-dreamers with agendas.

Making H2 from natural gas (nmethane) is relatively energy intensive and inefficient if you count distribution storagae and use. Making it near to the point of use with a domestic or local scale electrolyzer is not horribly inefficient" by any means. And if the electrolyzers are powered by renewable sources such a statemente is way off the mark.

Again, examine the sources, consider their potential agendas (often cleverly buried), and think abaout the language and whether comparative analysis versus criticism is being offered.

The "cato" paper I gave you was the one co-authored by Dan Becker, director for the Sierra Club's global warming and energy program.

Regardless, I was fact-picking in that example, rather than policiy boosting.

I think it is a fact that hydrogen programs started in the federal government ~30 years ago, with Nixon's "Project Independence."

But tell me, what method would you use today to make H2 "near to the point of use" and what is the equivalent price per gallon-equivalent?

The numbers I've seen, after 30 years of research, are something like $50/gal, and $650 to fill up your tank.

A fantastic history of US future-car programs, from "TomPaine.com" self billed, not as a bunch of libertarian sneaks, but rather "The best progressive insight and action. All Day."

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7210

In particular:

"Unfortunately, the hydrogen car George Bush first gushed about in his state of the union -- and the $1.2 billion program offered to help create it -- are simply more of Detroit�s fantasyland politics, designed to keep Congress from enacting tough fuel economy standards. Every time Congress and the public get close to thinking that real fuel economy is a good idea, Detroit rolls out some whiz-bang autorama to provide the illusion of progress. Bush�s proposal to provide for clean cars -- which is laudable on its face -- is but the latest in a long line of Detroit-White House "partnerships" dating to the Nixon-era that only provide diversion and political cover, not actual clean cars."

I should start my response by explaining that I have had the fortune of attending several fuel cell trade shows and neaaring many technical papers by fuel cell experts from all over the world. What I know from this experience is now about two years out of date. Having laid that out, here are my comments.

Few people realize that there are three major types of fuel cell technology. Almost all that the media speaks of is what is referred to as "PEM" fuel cells of the type manufactured by Ballard. Check out their site if you want operating details. But even within their technology there are major variations: e.g. direct H2 powered (which gets all the media attention due to the "thrill" effect caused by the spectable of the Hindenburgh explosion); fueled by methanol with reformer on board; fueled by low mole weight blend gasoline with reformer on board; and fueled with natural gas with reformer on board. Several schemes have been proposed for local or residential reformation of methanol, nat gas, and even ethanol to create enough H2 to keep a commuter at last partly fueled up from home. Other schemes involve reformation at filing stations. Some involve shipping pure hydrogen by either truck or pipeline to filling stations (see California for example). There are several schemes for storing H2 on board. Each of these PEM stack technologies have their own R&D schedules, competitive designs, commercialization limiting factors and presence or lack of government involvement. Put all these permutations together for H2 reformation/distribution/on-board storage and you can easily see that no single cost estimate does it justice. There is a sub-tech alternative for direct methanol fuel cells stacks that comletely bypass H2 storage and any reformation in anyform. This is what is being put forward for micro-fuel cells presently. There have been car prototypes made to run on it but there were poltical constraints due to fear of methanol in the US that caused it to be set aside for the time being (the dread caused by other fuel oxygenates figures in). The alkaline fuel cell pioneered by NASA and still in use by them is only appropriate for fixed installations and works best with pure hydrogeen as it becomes poisoned by even very low levels of CO in the air or fuel stream. REportedly a less CO vulnerable version is in the offing for vehicles but I have not kept up. At least two other high temp operating systems designs are working in the distributed power market already. These are not likely to be put into tranportation save in such large vehicles as trains. These take natrual gas in directly by the way.

Distributed Energy Systems is in precommercial stages of work on a reversable fuel cell that both creates and consumes H2; funtioning as a battery when the electricity is not in demand fully on its own circuit and as a generator only when demand is high for current. Pairing this with a wind turbine of mid-size SPV makes such a system of interest for off grid living and for defense or small commecial operations that intened to drain off extra H2 for their vehicels at times. I plan to write a post on this latter technology withing coming weeks.

The penultimate combination for transportation is a hybrid car that uses such a reversable system instead of a battery and is hybridized with a multi-fuel ICE engine that can switch between a hydrocarbon and H2 for its needs, depending on what is in the tank so to speak.

Polar comparisons of what is economic and practical are difficult with all these combinations in the development path.

Finally, its worth noting that BMW has sold a fair number of ICE engine cars that burn pure H2; and there is work underway by other makers to do the same soon both in EU and in the US. What is holding this back is reluctance to work on the filling station infrastrucure outside of CA/.

Mhy fingeres are too tired to go on. Hope this is worthwhile.

So given those complexities, and the difficulties specifically for H2 fuel cells in the traditional "family car" role, what do you think of President Bush's (and his energy bill's) emphasis on this technology over, say, improving CAFE standards?

Well, as someone in this thread or another related on indicated, it has the appearance of being a ruse. Did someone say CAFE? "Look..over there...its a runaway bride"! Using the vision of a pre-commerical technology as a distraction works particularly well in the US because, as a people, we have a romantic faith in new technology that stems from the Apollo moon project, amplifed by the miracle of the "internets".

The key breakthoughs in PEM fuel cell stacks are less than a decade old, and most of these developed with no significant US government involvement until late 2001, when some DOE effort was put into setting research goals for Solid Oxide Fuel cells (SOFC's). The test beds for those prototypes were all defense facilities by the way. Consider also that the priimary maker of PEM fuel cell stacks (which is what car makers are looking at), is a Canadian company. What did Bush's announcement acomplish that was not already happening? Hard to imagine what in the way of promoting better designs or reshaping markets that was not already underway. On the other hand, it takes public attention away from CAFE standards, regardless of how effective those standards really are: a handy thing for those who make inefficient buy highly profitable trucks and SUV's. Seems like a contradiction but its not. Large industies are like many headed beasts, in which inernal reconciliation of public policy positions is not always required. Thus, it is possible that a large transportation company can be investing huge sums in hydrogen propulsion systems in one division, as they were in most of the big makers before President Bush's staff even paid attention to hydrogen, and be lobbying against CAFE improvments to protect the profits of another division at the same time.

One thought that occurred to me, people often talk about "Manhattan Projects" for energy, and/or global warming.

The interesting thing to remember is that the original Manhattan Project only needed a little less than 4 years. They were dealing with a technology very close to "deployment."

We should definitely continue basic research, the kind of research that will bring transportation innovations 30 years down the pike ...

but that isn't "develoment" in the same sense as a 4 year Manhattan Project.

If it was, we'd be done already.

Transporting hydrogen may be expensive, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper than aggressively defending a strategically weak position of control over worldwide petroleum production and transport. For the cost of the Afghan/Iraq War (I'm going with $400 billion, when all's said and done), we could have built a hydrogen distribution infrastructure throughout the United States TWICE. And that's not counting the reduced income and damaged families of war-worn veterans, the cost of providing veterans' health benefits to military victims of this thing for the next 50 years, or the increased cost of financing the federal government's increased debt.

One commentor suggested comparing a gasoline transport crash with an H2 transport crash. OK:

OIL
Valdez Oil Spill: $billions of property damage and irreparable harm to ecosystems. This happens multiple times per year (month?) all over the world.

H2
Natural Gas or H2 tanker explosion: instant damage with relatively minimal long-term effect on ecosystems, fisheries and other aspects of our world and economies. I fully admit I'm shooting in the dark, but I would guess the cost of H2 transport accidents (and sabotage, mostly in the US, where most of the transport for US consumption would occur) will be on the order of 1/10 that for oil, per unit of recoverable energy transported.

Hydrogen cars? I don't know. Hydrogen solutions for a range of other problems seem not far off at all.

I just recently learned that PECO in the mid-Atlantic (unlike California energy companies, which charge a flat rate per kwh of actual usage) charges residential electric utility customers using the peak consumption for any 24-hour period in the billing month, times 30 days. That means you can save a lot by shaving peak consumption on a few high-demand days, which means there are opportunities for locally, sustainably-produced electric energy. Many of these involve simple, direct consumption of energy from a local renewable source such as solar panels powering air conditioners when the sun is blazing and the day is hot, but there are potential applications for storing renewably-generated energy, too.

With PG&E in bankruptcy, response-time for new electric service connections is on the order of 6 months. For mid- to large-sized commercial or industrial building projects, the cost savings associated with avoiding resulting downtime and/or uncertainty could finance the hardware for an off-grid electric system. Then there are the fees and materials costs of cabling and connecting to the grid. Depending on the project, these again could offset much of the cost for local-generation hardware. Tax deductions for implementing renewable energy systems and reducing new demand on an over-loaded power grid (such as California's and those of many other regions nationwide), creating local capacity to handle major grid outages and emergencies (terrorists hit a major power plant, for example), and finally, savings over long-term purchasing from an energy utility, all might very plausibly combine to make us say, "Ten years from now? Why weren't we doing this ten years AGO?"

Someone suggested a problem with taxing H2-fueled cars. It's probably appropriate for motorists willing to invest in a renewable automotive power system having zero emissions and producing massively-reduced noise pollution to get a reprieve from highway taxes in exchange for not polluting, and to offset war-for-oil taxes unavoidably paid in the form of federal income tax with the same tax-free highway use. And there's no reason in the world we can't tax those who wind up pumping oil-derived H2 at filling stations. Taxation could distinguish between 'green' (renewable) H2 and fossil-derived H2 the same way the electric grid 'distinguishes' renewable electricity suppliers from non-renewables: on paper. The vendors have to meter flow to bill the customer anyway, and must pay sales tax to the state based on the metering. They already have systems in place to pay highway taxes levied at gasoline pumps. If a vendor buys half her H2 stock from non-renewable and then mixes that with the product of a local renewable source, they pay half the tax on each unit sold. There's every incentive for them to expand local renewable production and seek partnerships with renewable distributors. So there's no problem around taxation.

--------
Does anyone know actual figures on the efficiency of the electric-hydrolysis-H2-fuel-cell cycle? Or, how much hydrogen is produced by how many watts? What is the most efficient voltage at which to operate an electrolyzer, and how many amps would one draw to produce enough hydrogen to produce 10,000 watts?

A site that publishes this kind of information?

Thanks,

- Rob Monk
www.banecorp.com
"Don't fear the Reaper."