Coming Down The Pipeline
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 09.15.05
A recent Financial Times story discussed how the major car makers are planning for propulsion systems of the future. Mostly the article summarized things TreeHugger readers have long known of. Buried inside was a wonderful insight from a GM Executive. "Larry Burns, GM vice-president for research, development and planning, says: "We have surveyed how hydrogen can be conveniently available to customers in the US. We have worked out that you would need 11,700 hydrogen stations in the l00 largest cities in the US such that a person is never more than two miles from one and also had them located every 25 miles on the freeway system. "Whether it's a natural gas reformer at a station that already has natural gas coming through it or natural gas converted to liquid hydrogen at a central site and then trucked, we estimate it will cost around Dollars 1m per station."
"To put this Dollars 12bn or so into perspective, the Alaskan pipeline cost Dollars 8bn to install in the mid-70s which equates to Dollars 25bn today. So for half the cost of the Alaskan pipeline you can have hydrogen conveniently available to 70 to 80 per cent of the population of the United States....The numbers came in pretty similar to Europe as well."
We think this cost estimate is far too liberal. If you first invested in networks of car-safe bicycle trails, such that no home was ever more than two miles from an access point, the hydrogen station numbers could be far fewer, significantly lowering the overall cost of a national hydrogen infrastructure. As with so many other technology dreams, our viewpoints, values, and the lobbyists control the future.
Why use natural gas? Hydrogen can be made anywhere there's sun or wind and water using electric hydrogen formers.
Oh, that's why: You can't sell the sun and wind to people like you can with natural gas.
I don't see how hydrogen is going to be the solution it's presented as. There are some of the drawbacks illustrated here: http://www.culturechange.org/hydrogen.htm .
==== author's rseponse follows ===
THink of all the drawbacks of gasoline: oil revenues fund autocratic governments who spawn terrorism; by rpduct of use alters the earth's climate to make it uninhabitable; certain to be exhausted within the next century; causes acid rain which is slowly killing off soil and forests over vast swaths of the nation; pollutes urban airsheds sufficient to contribute to various lung diseases and early morbidity; occasionally spills, destroying major coastal and esturine life forms...and in the latest round making a certain city nearly uninhabitable. I could go on. We did not leave the stone age for lack of stones nor did we do it rapidly. So why not at least make an effort for a hydrogen infrastructure?
Huge networks of "car-safe bicycle trails"?
Wow. Now that's a pipe dream I can get my head around. Sounds fantastic.
What the US really needs right now is for a national, well-organized pedestrian/biker consumer group to join forces with the green design peeps and the NRDC-type peeps to push for this in our major cities.
Love bike paths but they don't work in Canada in the winter nor for many northern American states. Hydrogen has too many problems. Plug in Hybrids (including 2-seaters) with a small diesel engine will be the solution to city pollution, electrical grid efficiency (charging at night), and fuel economy, with no change to service stations.
- david *at* egale [dot] ca
if they plowed the bike paths.
or sheltered the main ones.
doesn't get that cold biking.
Although Exxon-Mobil and some of the other oil majors could finance such a network out of their 2005 profits, no investor would risk $12 billion on a hydrogen system that relies on converting natural gas because the north american (US, Canada, & Mexico) natural gas supply has already peaked and is beginning to significantly decline. There is a reason why natural gas prices are up more than 4X in 4 years. In addition, the natural gas storage facilities are not being filled as much as in the past this year and there is a very high (almost certain) probability that some natural gas fired power plants will have their natural gas supplies turned off this year because of insufficient supply to provide gas to spot market customers.
This is not something that can be easily fixed. Even if one could get past the NIMBY attitudes that are preventing many liquidied natural gas plants from being built, it would take a minimum of 5 years to build the plants and the required ships AND a total investment in the 100 billion range to build enough LNG capacity just to supply existing natural gas demand, let alone added demand for a new hydrogen vehicle transportation initiative.
=== author's response follows ====
Not all hydrogen will be made from methane reformation. Electrolysis has proven commercial worth for H2 production. That aside, LNG ports and ships will ramp up over a decade or perhaps more, driven by a strong demand. That's OK because the percent of the vehcile fleet that is hydrogen driven won't hit 25% until mid-Century. (Important to remember that the design life of a modern car is about 14 years and climbing, so that nearly every car made in 2006 will most likely still be running, on gas or diesel, in 2020). Thus, cumulative demand for hydrogen as a car fuel will not be significant for several decades past 2020.. We need hyper-effficient transportation to get us there as much as we need LNG.