If business and government both agree that hydrogen is the future, they must be right, right? Well, the "Hydrogen Road Tour 08" has just completed the first hydrogen-powered, cross-country road trip despite the fact that there are only 60 hydrogen stations in he country. So how did the public-private publicity tour manage this feat? Well, they didn't actually. "There were stretches without hydrogen fueling stations when the vehicles were carried on flatbed trucks," reports Reuters. The longest was a 937 mile jaunt from Rolla, Missouri to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But wait, cries DOT Administrator For Research and Innovative Technology (really) Paul Brubaker, all those hydrocarbons were not combusted in vain! One of the goals of the tour was to actually demonstrate the need to build more fueling stations. So, y'know… failure is success. Not to be out-Orwelled, the Department of Energy put out its own fawning "Suggested Talking Points For The Hydrogen Road Tour" (PDF) . There you can learn that the DOE has purchased a fuel-cell Chevy Equinox, and that it is refueled at a Shell station. Furthermore, "data collected from this effort will be integrated with data from the National Hydrogen Learning Demonstration to validate real-world performance." Which is important, because you'll want to know how often you'll have to be towed in a flatbed truck between fueling stations. Unless the hydrogen-producing firms behind the tour get their fat government checks to build an expensive new infrastructure. And all this despite the fact that in a best-case scenario, automakers will only sell about 2 million electric vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells by 2020 according to the National Research Council.
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The Shell game begins…
The problem with hydrogen power is that it’s only a small part of the “total solution”, which should be confined to urban areas where fueling station frequency and zero tailpipe pollution would make the most sense.
But, being pushed by oil interests (with government’s “assistance”) as the “only” solution would be a disingenuous misrepresentation of hydrogen’s role, and indicative of an old monopoly trying to become a new monopoly.
Can someone explain to me why companies are bothering with hydrogen fuel cells?
Over a decade ago, BMW committed to building hydrogen powered ICE vehicles. They chose that path because they have a LOT of experience with ICE and BMW felt that hydrogen ICE maintained many aspects of the driving experience BMW customers love (performance, power delivery and noise). They have the tech so well developed that they have dual-mode Hydrogen 7 cars running around LA in the hands of real people (depending on how uber well connected LA types fit the definition of “real”).
Fuel cells are horrendously expensive, complicated, under-developed and generations from being ready for prime time. Hydrogen ICE seems ready to go once the infrastructure gets built (and the dual mode BMW 7 seems to solve most of that problem).
So what is the appeal of fuel cells?
We really need to decide what the next fuel is going to be. We have the automakers scattering their R&D money far and wide. Will we go electric, natural gas, hydrogen, or E85? It is too expensive to have several infrastructures to support these different fuels.
In the short term gas is the best option, so we might as well start drilling.
gakoenig:
The reason is because burning hydrogen in an ICE is wildly inefficient.
…rmembering a quote from a seminar I attended a few years ago:
“Hydrogen is the fuel of the future…and always will be.”
So the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of hydrogen is that we don’t have enough hydrogen fueling stations? Twenty years ago you couldn’t find a Starbucks outside of Seattle, and now you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. That doesn’t seem like an insurmountable issue to me.
Why the hate? Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe and burning it produces water for exhaust. Seems like an energy source worth developing.
The biggest obstacle is cost. As stated above ICE Hydrogen is inefficient, and while fuel cells are very efficient, the materials used in them (platinum or palladium) are extremely expensive.
Obtaining the Hydrogen is also quite pricey, you can go the green route via solar power, but that provides nowhere near the quantities that would be needed for any kind of national rollout, or go to current (mostly coal or natural gas based) power plants to make it, but you get more pollution and an energy deficit in the end.
Building lots of clean, safe, modern nuclean plants would do the trick, but too many taxpayers are afraid of nuclear power so the politicians don’t push for more of those plants.
The cost will obviously come down with mass production and economies of scale.
Funny how Starbucks and throwing a rock just seem to go together. Maybe we can include those daft Blue tooth types mired in the drive through in the barrage? Their confused driving styles are raising my insurance rates.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m under the impression that currently you can’t really store hydrogen. You can trap it for a while, but it eventually leaks through any container it is put in. Is that true of the latest and greatest hydrogen tanks under R&D? Whoo, baby, wait’ll the tort lawyers hear that the H2 is stored at 300-600 atmospheres. They’ll be just begging for accidents to happen.
We’ll see nuclear power again after enough people spend enough time being cold in the dark. You can expect complaints in NE this winter with $4/gallon heating oil. When you get the nukes you can extract the hydrogen. The energy source is still nuke, the energy storage medium is hydrogen. Hydrogen is not an energy source.
I think a return to nuclear power is inevitable, but what’s wrong with good-old electricity? Batteries are improving so quickly, and the infrastructure is basically in place. How is this not a no-brainer?
Sounds like a standards war like Blueray vs HD or DP vs HDMI vs DVI or VHS vs Betamax.
I think I’ll sit this one out too. Give me a call in 20 years when they get it all sorted out.
I know which direction I want to go – any direction that does not include big oil monopolies. I’ll get my energy from the sun or wind thanks and drive back and forth on battery power.
Totally possible NOW with tech available NOW. Unfortunately I can’t afford much of that tech NOW. Will have to wait two more years and then I’ll start buying the pieces.
There might be long-term potential for a hydrogen economy, but science really needs to improve first. Instead of putting the cart before the horse, we need basic scientific research. If/When the technical breakthroughs come, people will leap on the bandwagon willingly.
BMW ICE hydrogen/gasoline engines: ICE is generally inefficient; a hydrogen ICE gives up even more efficiency in order to accommodate gasoline.
“Cost will obviously come down with mass production and economies of scale.” Some parts of the cost will come down. On the other hand: platinum and palladium, two precious metals used in fuel cells, will grow more expensive with the extra demand.
Hydrogen is the least dense element on earth, so you have to use a huge amount of energy to compress the gas into something reasonably small. You either end up with high pressure gas stored in super-strong cylinders or you cryogenically freeze the stuff (even more energy consumed there) and then have a giant thermos as a fuel tank. That thermos would constantly need to boil off liquid hydrogen in order to not explode. This aspect of hydrogen causes lots of energy loss and complicates storage and handling.
Hydrogen is the smallest element on earth. It tends to escape through containers designed to hold it. As such, you’ll be constantly oozing compressed hydrogen from the fuel tank and other plumbing components. If you push hydrogen through a pipeline to transport it, you’ll lose huge amounts of hydrogen in the process because it will just go through the walls of the pipeline. This aspect of hydrogen makes storage and transfer difficult.
There are two basic ways producing hydrogen. The first is to strip it from natural gas. I believe that hydrogen is mostly made this way now. Lets see… take natural gas, strip the hydrogen, compress the hydrogen, transport the hydrogen, put it in a car at extremely high pressure, then burn it in either an ICE or use a $1,000,000 fuel cell. Using the ICE is clearly stupid: the Honda GX uses an ICE that runs directly on natural gas that you can fuel from your own home, it costs much less, and it uses the natural gas more efficiently than if you go the hydrogen route. How about the million dollar fuel cell? It’s not hugely more efficient when the full hydrogen cycle is considered and then there is the cost. Plus, you can run the fuel cell from compressed natural gas, which would be more efficient and allow for much more compact storage.
Hydrogen can also be stripped from water using electrolysis, an electricity-intensive process. More than 50% of the electricity used in the USA comes from burning coal and about 25% comes from burning natural gas. Burning coal produces huge amounts of sulphur, mercury, radon, particulates, soot, etc. Coal puts out much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than gasoline, diesel, or natural gas. If you are using natural gas to create electricity, then you’re right back to using the Honda GX instead. How about more nuclear plants? It takes 10 to 20 years to build them, so we’ll talk then.
Obviously hydrogen as a viable fuel for cars has a lot of technical challenges to overcome. My point is that of those challenges, lack of fueling stations is hardly a major one, despite how the original post spun it.
Below are links to possible solutions for the problems of storage and generation:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9765819-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1023_3-0-5
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/28/purdue-researchers-perfecting-new-hydrogen-generating-technolo/
Assuming something can’t be done assures it never will be.
We need a huge top-down effort where the government coordinates all our resources to create the best solution in the most efficient way possible. We could start with a Five-Year Plan…