Hydrogen: Happy trails time?

Are we finally seeing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles heading off into the general direction of the sunset? Possibly, although I wouldn’t bet my keyboard on it.

WSJ: Running on Empty: Obama Budget Cuts Funding for Hydrogen Car:

President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget calls for cutting funding for a program at the Department of Energy that carries out research on hydrogen technology for vehicles by roughly 60%, or $100 million, as part of an effort to shift to technologies “with more immediate promise.”

The administration’s proposal illustrates how much has changed in Washington and the wider world of vehicle research in recent years. Six years ago, President Bush called for new federal funding for research into how to produce and distribute hydrogen and then store it in tanks so it can be used in fuel-cell-powered cars.

…

Because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and using it to power cars would be so clean, proponents have often described it as the Holy Grail of alternative fuels.

But lately, enthusiasm among auto makers and politicians has been shifting away from hydrogen toward electric vehicles. One reason: the enormous projected cost of developing an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations. The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year that the total cost of deploying a national hydrogen network could be as high as $200 billion, including $55 billion in government aid through 2023. And that amount, the council said, would be enough to put only two million hydrogen cars on the road – a small fraction of the total U.S. vehicle population of about 300 million cars and trucks.

Here we go again. First we have the “hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe” idiocy, which just might be the the all-time best example of a true but totally irrelevant energy factoid. Then we have the “cost of the infrastructure” canard. Ouch.

On the abundance of hydrogen: Of course it’s abundant. It’s also in places and forms that make it very inconvenient (read: expensive) to use as a motor vehicle fuel. This is why you so often hear people say that hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier. You have to consume a lot of electricity (and possibly natural gas, if you go that route instead of electrolysis) just to make the hydrogen, and then you have to consume quite a bit more electricity to compress it for storage in a fueling station and on board the vehicle. You put a lot of energy in to get energy out, about three times the amount of energy per mile driven that you would need to charge a battery in an EV. Think of the hydrogen fueling infrastructure as an inefficient and very complex way to recharge a battery in the vehicle.

Without belaboring the point for the Nth time, let me point out that hydrogen as a transportation fuel has several very high hurdles to get over, and the refueling infrastructure is not high on the list.

“But wait!”, I can imagine people saying, “wouldn’t it cost A Lot Of Money to build even a minimal hydrogen refueling system from coast to coast in the US???” Of course it would, but that’s not what any rational person would consider doing, at least initially. You could build out a refueling infrastructure at a much lower ratio of stations to population, compared to gasoline stations, simply because there would be so many fewer HFC vehicles on the road for years. As the vehicles sold, companies like our friends who provide us with gasoline would leap at the chance to add hydrogen dispensing facilities to some of their existing stations so they could sell us another form of fuel.

The immediate economic hurdle for HFC vehicles is the cost of the vehicles themselves, assuming you can come up with a design that provides enough range per tank, has no performance issues at high and low temperatures, has an acceptable longevity for the fuel cell, etc. Yes, with more R&D and the proper invocation of the ghost of Adam Smith to endow your project with the proper economies of scale savings, you just might be able to get the price below, say, $100,000 for a Civic-size car in the next 10 years. Maybe.

Beyond that gigantic hurdle there’s the climate chaos factor I’ve mentioned countless times. If we’re really struggling to make an 80% reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2050 (and make no mistake, it will be a struggle), then we won’t have the luxury of consuming three times as much clean electricity per mile in an HFC vehicle as we would an EV. As we electrify transportation, imagine having to build three times as many nuclear power plant, wind turbines, concentrating solar power plants, etc. to support that sector of the economy. We’ll be hard pressed to find an affordable combination of conservation and clean electricity generation to make our CO2 reduction goals as it is, without this huge burden being added to our to-do list.

Is this really the end of the HFC vehicle nonsense? I doubt it. Even though the current administration is moving in the right direction, they won’t be in power forever. Before we know it, whether it’s in 2012 or 2016 or whenever, the US will elect a president much more like George W. Bush than Barack Obama, and we’ll see enough policy reversals to give any observer whiplash.[1] I only hope that PHEV/EV technology is advanced enough and has demonstrated enough market success that even a profoundly disappointing, stupefyingly weird selection by the voters at large would not resurrect HFC vehicles.

[1] If you think I’m being overly cynical or skeptical, consider recent US elections history, particularly the dual nightmares of 2000 and 2004, from which we’re still trying to awake, and convince me I’m wrong.