Algae to solve the Pentagon’s jet fuel problem:
The brains trust of the Pentagon says it is just months away from producing a jet fuel from algae for the same cost as its fossil-fuel equivalent.
The claim, which comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) that helped to develop the internet and satellite navigation systems, has taken industry insiders by surprise. A cheap, low-carbon fuel would not only help the US military, the nation’s single largest consumer of energy, to wean itself off its oil addiction, but would also hold the promise of low-carbon driving and flying for all.
Darpa’s research projects have already extracted oil from algal ponds at a cost of $2 per gallon. It is now on track to begin large-scale refining of that oil into jet fuel, at a cost of less than $3 a gallon, according to Barbara McQuiston, special assistant for energy at Darpa. That could turn a promising technology into a market-ready one. Researchers have cracked the problem of turning pond scum and seaweed into fuel, but finding a cost-effective method of mass production could be a game-changer. “Everyone is well aware that a lot of things were started in the military,” McQuiston said.
Never underestimate the ability of the not-so-sexy solutions–algae grown and turned into fuel, flywheels or pumped storage to help time shift supply to better meet electricity demand, taking simple efficiency steps, etc.–to deliver some impressive contributions to our energy and environmental challenges once we feel sufficient urgency to take them. In fact, I expect algae fuel to play a much bigger part in our future transportation alternatives than the car companies’ (and semi-informed technophile’s) favorite hobby horse, hydrogen.
As for the claim of $3/gallon jet fuel from algae in “just months”, consider me highly skeptical, to put it mildly. I’m sure that the claim is a reference to being able to hit that price point, not real world production in any significant quantity. Even so, it’s one hell of a claim, and it’s either a gross overstatement of what DARPA’s been up to, or it’s a revelation that they’ve pulled a techno-rabbit out of their hat.
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My post yesterday on the drop in hydrogen fuel cell funding by the US government (Hydrogen: Happy trails time?) is getting a lot of hits over on The Energy Collective, and there were a couple of comments by Garry Golden that deserve a more thoughtful reply than a quick comment. So I’m taking the slightly unusual step of replying at length here and then posting a link to my response on TEC (which will likely run this post).
As I write this, Garry has made two comments, and I’ll quote from them and respond to each. I’m going to make my best good-faith effort to be true to the spirit of his comments; any mischaracterization is solely my fault and accidental, and I apologize in advance.
Lou, No flaming intended here- no personal attack intended- as I know how these conversation descend quickly. But these types of posts frustrate me to no end. Too much Joseph Romm’s paradigm-bound speak here that puts all things hydrogen into the ‘freak’ camp. And hints of attempts to characterize all people who speak reasonably about the potential of hydrogen as wackos. I grow tired of this from Romm - especially when the Case for Plugins is weak and completely aligned with all the challenges of H2. Hard to store, ‘not a fuel’, carbon footprint depends on how you produce, it.
Just to be clear: I certainly don’t put the pro-HFC people in the freak or wackos camps. I reserve those for the Apocalypticons and Cornucopians.
I disagree that the case for plug-ins is “completely aligned with the challenges” of HFCVs. Even ignoring things like the Tesla (which I consider to be little more than a techno parlor trick, thanks to the price), real world EVs and PHEVs will be on the market in the US from major manufacturers in one to two years. And those will be units for sale, not on a lease (like the Honda FCX, which is an enormous per vehicle money loser). That says all we need to know about PHEVs and EVs making it over the first major market hurdle, i.e. mass produced at affordable (which is not to say cheap) prices, and HFCVs not being there yet.
The only thing keeping PHEVs and EVs from selling like crazy right now to at least a certain segment of the US population (more on this below) is the price of the batteries. We know how to do everything else in the car, and at an affordable price. We know how to make the batteries physically perform, too, but not at a low enough price.
HFCVs face more hurdles. They need better fuel cells and better on board H2 storage, both at dramatically better prices than anything we have right now, before we even get to the refueling infrastructure.
As for refueling, there are only two ways to make mass quantities of hydrogen. We can reform it from natural gas, which creates a lot of CO2 we then have to either sequester or release into the air, neither of which is a good answer. Or we can use electrolysis to make it from water, which takes a lot of electricity. However we make it, we then have to compress, distribute, and dispense the hydrogen, all steps that take more energy. I know I’m long past the point of sounding like a broken record, but I think that any serious discussion of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel has to start with Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF]. He goes into quite a bit of detail on the energy losses for both EVs and HFCVs from the original flow of green electrons all the way to the wheel, and calculates that EVs get exactly three times the number of miles per unit of green electricity as an HFCV fueled via electrolysis.
In my opinion, that’s a showstopper. Assume that we can get the entire hydrogen infrastructure for free, plus we can make and sell the vehicles for the same price as an EV or PHEV. We’re still stuck with the exceedingly nasty problem of climate chaos and how we clean up our electricity supply (which we’d have to do no matter what happens with the transportation sector if we’re to get to an 80% CO2 emissions reduction by 2050). That means we’ll need to get as much out of every green kWh as possible, whether it’s fueling a data center or a car or municipal street lighting. And that’s where the factor of three becomes a back breaker.
Whether you or I or anyone else is tired of worrying about how we fuel the production of hydrogen is irrelevant. (And for the record I am quite tired of worrying about the seemingly endless interdependencies we run into when talking about energy and environmental issues in the context of economics and (ugh!) politics.) Unless someone can come up with a zero or nearly zero CO2 source of hydrogen that makes the entire grid-to-wheels system as efficient as PHEVs or EVs, HFCVs won’t be able to compete.
Infrastructure costs for plug ins? How much will it cost to build wall sockets for our vehicle fleet? Are we really betting on ‘plug ins’ as the solution. Which automaker has stated this as the final end state platform? None that I have recorded. We are the beginning of electrification and hydrogen has a role in delivering electrons. At the end of the day next generation electric propulsion systems will integrate batteries, fuel cells and capacitors. Not one device is likely to provide the right size, cost, performance, et al for vehicle applications.
To make use of a few million PHEVs or EVs right now we need precisely zero infrastructure investment in the US. As I’ve pointed out many times on this site, there’s a huge market for 100 to 150 mile/charge EVs in the form of the Nth car in a two (or more) car household. We will certainly see a diversification of transportation solutions, as you point out, but saying that there’s a high infrastructure cost for getting PHEVs and EVs into the game just isn’t true, just as we shouldn’t assume the cost of a coast-to-coast hydrogen infrastructure is a prerequisite for HFCVs, something I said in my original post.
Why does hydrogen necessarily have a role in delivering electrons? We can make the technology work, and might, with a lot of hard work and some luck, be able to drive the vehicle cost down enough to be affordable. But that doesn’t mean it’s a worthwhile option in the long run. That’s like arguing that corn-based ethanol should be a major component of our liquid fuels sector because we make a lot of it today. As my wife is fond of reminding me, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. (Don’t ask.)
First, yes there is an electric grid. But those sockets were/are built for appliances in homes, not vehicles. (They weren’t even built for mobile devices- hence the headaches of finding a recharge plug in airports or cafes) Access to wall sockets is overstated. I live in Brooklyn and actually don’t have a garage. And if we took a snapshot right now of all the world’s parked vehicles- how many would be within 10 feet of a socket (upgraded or not)? I can see EVs for managed fleets– but not the mass market. This is one of my great frustrations is that people assume we can just bring on EVs without spending money on infrastructure. Startup darling Better Place and Shai Agassi have demonstrated that car companies and govts (local/national) do want a viable infrastructure before they invest in EVs. Better Place is estimating that the Bay Area alone (stations/switch out stations) will cost $1 billion. Then run estimates BP has priced for Israel, Denmark, Australia and Hawaii. It’s not free. EV grid access is not ubiquitous. And (again, not trying to flame or get emotional) but how can we have this conversation without statement of reality. The grid was not built for roadside assistance.
Again, this is putting an artificially high barrier in front of PHEVs and EVs. And adding recharging outlets in places like airports, hotels, parking decks, business and university parking lots, etc. can happen in a piecemeal fashion much easier than can adding hydrogen refueling capacity. Once plug-in vehicles are on the road in appreciable numbers, many organizations will find they have an incentive to provide their visitors or employees with recharging facilities. Some will be free (employee benefits), some will be discounted or subsidized (airports and government offices), and some will be full grid price plus a markup (whoever can get away with it). And don’t underestimate the value of quick charging, as I first wrote about in March of 2008 (The revolution is in the second plug). That allows the centralization of recharging stations and a much cheaper infrastructure build out, while still allowing those with easy access to an overnight plug to exploit that option, as well.
2) In terms of EVs and batteries pulling ahead of H2 Fuel cells- I don’t see it. We are in Year 0 or Year 1 of the EV age. There are no commercially viable product lines out there. Just a handful of promising platforms. But there is no declared winner in electric propulsion support systems. I think EV advocates miss the challenges of moving vehicles- and pricing out costs of batteries over next 5 to 10 years as fuel cells (via membrane price reduction) offer a more competitive and higher performance system. We are early on in a multi-decade long transition- and I cannot say that batteries have ‘won’. Not at all. It’s just that the combustion engine has lost. And we can all celebrate that!!! H2 (solid state storage via MOFs, hydrides is actually progressing nicely. And nanostructured catalysts to produce H2 via reforming or low temp electrolysis are moving forward.
Of course there are no winners, and I would certainly not claim that there are what I would consider widely available and successful PHEVs and EVs on the market as I type this. But for the reasons I’ve mentioned above, I think they’re far closer to being ready for prime time than HFCVs, and will ultimately out-compete them. I don’t know what the technologies you mention will deliver in the future, but again, we can’t escape two realities: Whatever we come up with has to result in a mainstreamable grid-to-wheels system that matches plug-ins for efficient use of our scarce green electricity supply and also puts us on a track for the scale of greenhouse gas reductions we need. If that happens and hydrogen turns out to be a major part of the answer, then great! I’ll be the most obnoxious, relentless supported of HFCVs one could imagine, simply because the demonstrated facts would demand it. I don’t have any skin in the game regarding which mixture of solutions works for us, I just want us to find at least one combination that can provide the functionality we want and at a bearable price in terms of dollars and environmental impact.
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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.
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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.
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Seriously, I just have to ask–are the CNG vehicle and hydrogen fuel cell people having a contest to see which group can drive me insane first? Just when I think one of them (most recently the CNG camp) has pegged the absurdity needle with their claims about how vastly cleaner CNG is for use in vehicles and now lawn equipment(!?), all the while ignoring CO2 emissions, the hydrogen people leap back into the lead with something like the following, as reported by Green Car Congress.
Automakers Still Targeting Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles for Long Term Sustainable Mobility:
Despite the current enthusiasm for electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) will be an important component of the vehicle mix in 2050, according to panelists from Nissan, Toyota and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in a conference session at the SAE 2009 World Congress in Detroit.
Dr. Kev Adjemian, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Manager - Fuel Cell Laboratory, Nissan; Justin Ward, Advanced Powertrain Program Manager, Toyota; and Keith Wipke, Senior Engineer, NREL all agreed that the future would see a mix of the different types of vehicles out of necessity. Tailpipe GHG emissions need to be reduced by 70% by 2050 to maintain a 550 ppm concentration according to Nissan’s calculations, Adjemian said. (Nissan bases its assessment on the AR3 analysis from the UN IPCCC.) Adjemian also noted that neither EVs or FCVs would be able to contribute to that required reduction unless the electricity or the hydrogen was sourced from renewables.
Adjemian said that Nissan’s powertrain roadmap in the short term is focused on the expansion of highly efficient internal combustion engines, with the mid- and long-term bringing expansion of its EV efforts and maintaining the competitive advantage of its core electric power trains. By 2050, Adjemian sees an approximately equal mix of ICE, HEV/PHEVs, and fuel cell vehicles.
Justin Ward said that Toyota sees market opportunity for small EVs, but that according to Toyota’s latest calculations, the fuel cell hybrid vehicle has the advantage in well-to-wheel efficiency even now.
With natural gas as the feedstock for hydrogen and power generation, Toyota currently calculates 40% WTW efficiency for a fuel cell vehicle; 33% for an EV; 34% for a hybrid (Prius); and 19% for an internal combustion engine.
Before I flip into full-bore Exorcist mode, let me start by saying there’s one part of this vision that I definitely agree with: We’re looking at a future where personal transportation is fueled by a mix of technologies and sources. Right now, we essentially have a monoculture, with almost all transportation fueled by petroleum (or petroleum substitutes, like ethanol and biodiesel). You can argue whether the split here in the US–gasoline in cars and diesel in large trucks–means it’s not truly a monoculture, but in any case it’s very close.
I fully expect to see something like a mix of EVs with increasingly longer effective ranges[1] and PHEVs/HEVs running on biofuels (most likely algae-derived biodiesel).
Why no CNG or hydrogen vehicles?
CNG vehicles reduce CO2 emissions by a negligible percent, far less than we’ll need as we respond to climate chaos. Many of us constantly highlight the problems caused by things like coal plants historically not having to pay a price for the CO2 they emit, and that’s a valid point. But it applies just as well to CNG vehicles: They’re popular now because CNG is cheaper per mile than gasoline, and the car companies and other interests pushing them are doing a brilliant job of bragging about how much “cleaner” they are than gasoline powered vehicles in terms of NOx emissions, particulate matter, etc., while never mentioning the monster under the bed, CO2 emissions.
And in this respect, I have to wonder what our friends from the car companies are thinking. 550ppm of CO2 is the goal and not 450 or even 350, which is increasingly looking like the “right” answer? Tailpipe emissions have to be reduced, and not total life cycle emissions? Talk about two examples of playing tennis without a net. They’re basing their efficiency assumptions on hydrogen reformed from natural gas? And tying us to dependency for a critical service (transportation) to yet another fossil fuel, and then having to deal with yet another CO2 source, is a good idea why, exactly?
If you assume that climate chaos is a real and serious problem, which our friends claim to believe, even if they’re making some insanely convenient assumptions, then we will need all the green electricity for end use by consumers we can find. We will continue to build out wind and solar (and possibly geothermal, wave, and tidal) at a fast clip, but we’ll still be very hard pressed to replace any significant portion of our coal and natural gas generation in just a few decades. As a result, we’ll need to use the green electricity we do have as efficiently as possible. That means either you find a way to do CCS with the emissions from hydrogen reforming from natural gas (which would minimize the electricity input to the process, albeit at a hefty energy and money cost to do the CCS), or you make the hydrogen via electrolysis and consume three times as much per mile driven as you would in fueling an EV.
Surely you must be wondering if I’m getting to the point in this post where I recommend, for perhaps the 9 millionth time, that you read Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF]? Yes, I am, and yes, you should read it, if only to see how he arrives at a much higher efficiency for EVs (69%) than the 33% reported above by our friends.
CNG and hydrogen as motor vehicle fuels are both dangerous wastes of money and time and intellectual capital. I’m confident they will be abandoned eventually, but nowhere near soon enough.
[1] By “effective ranges” I mean that the localized rise of things like battery swap and quick charge filling stations will let drivers in some areas make much more use of EVs than the average driver. These islands of support would likely grow over time and even merge in places like the US Northeast or anywhere else population centers are relatively close to each other. If there happens to be a good EV support infrastructure in the Rochester area, for example, then I would not only be able to drive my Electron 5000 farther, but I would be able to buy one with a smaller battery pack, possibly knocking thousands of dollars off the initial purchase price.
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The US Dept. of Energy has issued a set of spreadsheets on the use of alternative fuel vehicles, available from two web pages:
EIA Alternative Transportation Fuels-Supplier Data
EIA Alternative Transportation Fuels-User and Fuel Data
A few observations:
Again, not a huge surprise, all things considered.
As always, for more US transportation stats than you could want, see the Transportation Energy Data Book, published by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Joe Romm over at Climate Progress has another article up about the absurdity of hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles. Joe is the author of The Hype About Hydrogen, a book I consider a must read for anyone interested in hydrogen or the future of transportation.
In the posting in question, “The car of the perpetual future” — The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen, Joe says:
When the world’s uber-centrist magazine of choice runs a headline almost identical to mine (see “The Last Car You Would Ever Buy — Literally“), you know it’s all over. Especially when one of that magazine’s leading energy columnists, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, used to sing that technology’s praises (here). Here’s the bottom line:
But the promise of hydrogen-powered personal transport seems as elusive as ever. The non-emergence of hydrogen cars over the past decade is particularly notable since hydrogen power has been a darling of governments worldwide, which have spent billions of dollars in subsidies and incentives to make hydrogen cars a reality….
Here’s the fatal flaw in the H2 economy:
…the logistical, technological and economic problems facing hydrogen fuel-cell cars mean that they are very unlikely to make it to market any time soon. One thing holding back hydrogen vehicles is a chicken-and-egg problem: why build cars if there is nowhere to fill them up, or hydrogen filling-stations if there are no cars to use them? Just around the corner, honest.
From there it gets truly ugly, as Joe beats hydrogen like a rented drum. Near the end he says:
The magazine includes as an afterthought yet another major fatal flaw, one that I have written a lot about. While some say “the solution to large-scale hydrogen production lies in using renewable electricity to extract hydrogen from water via electrolysis” or using “nuclear power. But it would surely be easier simply to use this energy to charge the batteries of all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles.” Easier, hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper, and you don’t throw away 75% of the valuable carbon free electricity in the process!
And this is where I have to disagree just slightly with Joe. In my opinion, this last item, the notion that hydrogen can’t compete with all-electric transportation, is “the” fatal flaw, and should be the beginning and the end of any discussion.
Since many people still don’t quite get this, let me indulge myself on a Friday afternoon, while I’m trying not to think about the horrors of Hurricane Ike, and take one more crack at explaining my view of this complex topic.
You probably think I need to do some explainin’ at this point. OK, here goes:
We absolutely must find a mass-market, personal transportation solution that emits vastly less CO2 per mile. That whole global warming thing won’t stay sequestered in its convenient pigeonhole no matter how much we’d wish it would while we’re talking about energy issues. The universe doesn’t operate according to our wishes, never has, never will.
The extremely low CO2 emissions requirement means that creating hydrogen from fossil fuels is out of the question as a mass market solution. CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is not about to be a solution for coal-burning electricity plants, and it sure as heck won’t emerge as one for the level of hydrogen production we’re talking about for personal transportation. This leaves us with hydrogen produced via electrolysis.
Producing hydrogen via electrolysis loses horribly to EVs in terms of kWh/mile driven. The magic number is 3, as in an EV will drive three times further per kWh than a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle using the same amount of electricity. Three times. For a very complete discussion of where this number comes from, I don’t just recommend but demand that you read Ulf Bossel’s paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF], which was published in the October, 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE. He performs a detailed analysis that takes into account all the energy losses along the way in a hydrogen economy, and shows that you get 23% of the original energy input at the wheel in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, and 69% in an EV.
Assume that you can make all of the arguments I identified as red herrings–infrastructure, hydrogen’s inherent nastiness, vehicle cost, and CO2 emissions–go away. We’ll make some killer technological breakthroughs, we’ll find affordable ways to build out that massive infrastructure, we’ll devise safe ways to handle hydrogen on that scale, etc. We wave our magic wands and POOF! all those problems disappear quicker than a politician’s promises after election day. Just to keep the playing field reasonably level, let us also assume that our wand waving makes batteries for EVs cheap enough that the cost of the in-car hardware for an EV equals that for the HFC vehicle.[1]
What do we then have? That same 3:1 ratio in the per-mile fuel cost, favoring EVs.
With increasing pressure to make our electricity generation cleaner, does anyone reading this think electricity will get cheaper? I sure don’t; if anything, just dealing with the 50% of US generation that comes from about 1,500 staggeringly filthy coal plants ensures that we’ll have a lot of new expense to convert or replace old hardware. Add to that the ongoing push to build new nuclear plants and expand and upgrade the grid, and nearly all of the US will likely be looking back on 2008 electricity rates wistfully in just a few years. This will only amplify the impact of EV vs. HFC vehicle per-mile cost differences.
Put another way, even with much more aggressive conservation and efficiency measures, we’ll still be hard pressed to meet our overall electricity demand with “clean electrons”; this means we won’t have the luxury of using three times as many of them per mile in transportation.
Now, I can imagine a lot of people talking about cruising range, and pointing out that a 150-mile/charge EV is not a direct competitor for a 300- to 500-mile/fill up HFC vehicle. Why would we assume that EVs will be so limited five or ten or 15 years from now? We’re already seeing a lot of work on quick recharge capability for cars, giving people the option of recharging an EV in an acceptable amount of time at a gas station and not being limited to overnight, at-home charging. This is something I wrote about back in March, in The revolution is in the second plug. Consider it the primary anti-EV red herring, if you will.
This all leaves us with an inescapable conclusion: Even under wildly optimistic assumptions hydrogen has a huge, inherent, and permanent economic disadvantage compared to the other emerging transportation technology. Therefore it won’t be able to compete in any reasonable future energy and environment scenario.
[1] To be blunt, this is an insanely generous assumption, as there’s virtually zero chance that HFC hardware to be as cheap as EV hardware, ever. If you want to turn my entire analysis on its head and assume that not only will we solve all of hydrogen’s technological and policy problems in a timely fashion, but that all those companies and universities working on better EV batteries will fail, then knock yourself out. Make your case in a comment or e-mail it to me directly.
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Report: Four Key Clean Energy Markets Increased 40% in 2007:
Solar photovoltaic products, wind power, biofuels, and fuel cells collectively experienced a 40% growth in revenues in 2007, according to a new report from Clean Edge, Inc. Global revenues for the four clean energy markets increased from $55 billion in 2006 to $77.3 billion in 2007. And although the fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market remains relatively immature, with revenues of $1.5 billion in 2007, the three other renewable markets each exceeded $20 billion in revenue. Of the four energy markets, wind power earned the highest revenue, at $30.1 billion. In terms of production, the biofuels industry produced 13 billion gallons of ethanol throughout the world, as well as 2 billion gallons of biodiesel, while solar photovoltaic system installations fell just short of 3,000 megawatts.
The Clean Energy Trends 2008 report looks ahead ten years and predicts that global installed solar photovoltaic capacity will increase eightfold, to 22,760 megawatts, global wind power capacity will nearly quadruple, to 75,781 megawatts, and biofuel production will nearly triple, to 45.9 billion gallons. It also projects a tripling of the three clean energy markets over the next ten years, with the largest growth rate in the nascent fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market, which grows more than tenfold to $16 billion. But for biofuels, wind power, and solar photovoltaic products, the projection actually represents slower growth compared to recent years. For instance, the solar photovoltaic increased fivefold in the past four years and is projected to increase by a factor of 3.6 over the next ten years. That’s a 13.8% average annual growth in the coming decade, compared to 50% average annual growth over the past four years. See the Clean Edge press release, report summary, and full report (PDF 1.9 MB).
The report anticipates continued revenue growth in 2008, and highlights five major trends: the growing participation of overseas companies in the U.S. wind power market; a renaissance for geothermal energy; the launch of new electric vehicles by relatively small startup companies, rather than the large automakers; the use of new, clean technologies for oceangoing ships; and the design and construction of entirely new sustainable cities.
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Nanoparticles could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline:
The hydrogen economy is getting a shot in the arm from a start-up that says its nanoparticle coatings could make hydrogen easy to produce at home from distilled water, and ultimately bring the cost of hydrogen fuel cells in line with that of fossil fuels.
QuantumSphere Inc. says it has perfected the manufacture of highly reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings that could up the efficiency of electrolysis, the technique that generates hydrogen from water. Moreover, the coatings could also eliminate the need for expensive metals like platinum in hydrogen fuel cells.
Boasting 1,000 times the surface area of traditional materials, the coatings can be used to retrofit existing electrolysers to increase their efficiency to 85 percent–exceeding the Department of Energy’s goal for 2010 by 10 percent. The scheme holds the promise of 96 percent efficiency by the time cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells hit automobile showrooms, according to the Santa Ana, Calif., company.
“Instead of switching 170,000 gas stations over to hydrogen, using our electrodes could enable consumers to make their own hydrogen, either in the garage or right on the vehicle,” said Kevin Maloney, president, chief executive officer and co-founder of QuantumSphere. “Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car.”
Here we go again.
The 85% conversion factor would indeed be a major advance, and 96%, if it ever happens, would be truly remarkable. But the real question, of course, is how much difference could it make? Once again, let me refer to one of the people who’s done the most detailed analysis of hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells for use in transportation, Ulf Bossel.
In Bossel’s paper “Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?” (12 pages, 459KB PDF), published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in October 2006, he includes an energy analysis of using renewable electricity to power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles vs. battery electric vehicles, neatly summarized in a flow chart on page 1835. In each case, Bossel begins with 100kWh of renewable energy, and then walks the reader through all the steps and losses of energy to turn that into energy actually propelling the vehicle down the road.
For hydrogen fuel cells, he shows:
For a BEV, we have:
Notice that Bossel is generous and assumes that we have industrial scale electrolysis at 75%. But if we boost that number to the 85% figure in the article, the net energy delivered in the hydrogen fuel cell analysis is 26kWh. Assuming we do manage to invent and scale up a 96% efficient electrolysis technology, it get us only 29.4kWh.
Put another way, if the hydrogen fuel cell were 100% efficient, something not even the most fervent hydrogen supporter would claim is on the horizon, it would get us to about 58.8kWh at the wheel, still less than the EV can deliver.
The bottom line remains the same: Hydrogen fuel cells need several technological breakthroughs to reach even the base model Bossel uses in his analysis, and even then they’re nowhere competitive with EV’s, especially in a world where there will be an ever higher premium placed on low- or no-CO2-emitting electricity generation.
(Let me save some of you the time and effort of writing to say that EV’s aren’t yet perfected. That’s inarguably true, and I would never make that claim. But the only thing stopping plug-in hybrids and then 100% EV’s is the cost of the batteries. We know how to make these platforms deliver more than adequate performance characteristics; it’s purely a matter of driving the price of the batteries down far enough to make them economically viable. Compared to the multiple hurdles hydrogen fuel cells face as a transportation technology, I think it’s clear that PHEV’s and EV’s have an enormous advantage that will only grow as we (finally) get serious about reducing CO2 emissions from transportation and electricity generation.)
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Yes, I’m obsessed with hydrogen fuel cells and the onslaught of private and governmental efforts to somehow, someway, force this technology to be a major part of our transportation future.
One resource I can’t recommend highly enough is the European Fuel Cell Forum, and their page of reports. While you’ll find more hard facts and analysis in those reports than you can shake an empty gasoline can at, the best single item is paper E21, “Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?” (12 pages, 459KB PDF), which was published in Proceedings of the IEEE, October 2006. In particular, the hydrogen vs. electrons flow chart on page 10 (page 1835 in the original publication and the PDF) presents as simple and dramatic an argument as one could imagine for why hydrogen is a techno-boondoggle of massive proportions, even if the the author, Ulf Bossel, doesn’t stoop to using such expressions.
Another critical paper comes from Michael E. Webber, “The water intensity of the transitional hydrogen economy”, which is packed with analysis I’ve seen nowhere else and makes the widespread use of hydrogen for transportation seem all the more ridiculous. (Just to be unmistakably clear, the “ridiculous” part is my own interpretation of the numbers, not Webber’s.)
For a short treatment of the Webber paper, see this summary on PhysOrg.com.
And let me not forget one of the seminal works in this area, Joe Romm’s book, The Hype About Hydrogen, which very clearly makes the point that we can’t afford to use vast amounts of electricity generated with renewable sources to make hydrogen when we will so desperately need those electrons to displace as much coal-fired generation as possible. One of the primary battlegrounds between peak oil and global warming will be electricity generation, once we begin to electrify transportation and look for other, non-petroleum, ways to gas up.
So, if hydrogen for transportation is an absurdity wrapped in an inanity, masquerading as a boondoggle, why give it any more attention?
First, as long as policy makers insist on throwing money at this pipe dream, it’s in everyone’s best interest to understand what’s going on and try to influence elected representatives to stop doing that. Those funds can be much better spent somewhere else, as in battery or renewable energy research.
Second, there’s the whole question of electrohydrogenesis. “The what?”, you ask? Isn’t that some kind of thing Scotty made with transparent aluminum? No, it’s the breakthrough that’s been widely talked about recently in which a professor, Bruce Logan, and his team at Penn State University figured out a way to use a trickle of electricity and some bacteria to generate hydrogen from cellulose and other materials.
On this front, see:
So, wait–has someone found a way to use biology to make a loophole in the economics of hydrogen as a transportation fuel?
The key point here is that I said “economics”, not “energy”. As I never tire of pointing out, the economy allocates resources based on relative prices–this car is cheaper than that comparable one, so customers flow toward the cheaper alternative, etc. This is why we continue to manufacture, use, and dispose of a truly breathtaking number of batteries in the US every year. Each one of those penlight, C, or D size cells delivers an amount of electrical energy that is only a very tiny fraction of the amount of energy needed to make and distribute it. From a purely energy flow standpoint, this product is an abysmal failure. But they’re an economic success simply because people are willing to pay this exorbitant fee for a tiny amount of portable, convenient electricity.
Could the same thing happen with hydrogen? Could we find a way to leverage some nearly free resource, like sunlight + bacterial action, to make hydrogen make sense? As best I can tell from reading the above material: No. Or at least not yet.
Check the second page of the Cheng/Logan paper above, and you’ll see that the best efficiency they report is 82%, when using lactic acid as a feedstock. Plug that percentage into the Bossel flow chart mentioned above, beginning at the “Electrolysis” step, and you see that you still get killed by the compression, transportation/transfer, fuel cell, and vehicle efficiencies. (In the original Bossel analysis, 100 kWh of energy turns into a mere 23 kWh at the wheel. Using the Cheng/Logan efficiency value (82%) only gets you up to about 25 kWh at the wheel, compared to 69 kWh for an EV. Ouch. And that’s not even taking into account all the energy needed to deliver the feedstock to the hydrogen plant.)
The problem that I have with all of this, and the reason why the hydrogen dream will likely die a very protracted death, is that it’s such an enticing proposition. You make this gas, which people think of as being “kinda like natural gas”, something they have considerable familiarity with, and you run your car on it and it emits only water. For most mainstreamers that’s about one step short of commuting to work with your very own personal jet pack.
But… won’t governments, like California and their “hydrogen highway” initiative, and car companies “force” the matter? Won’t they keep rolling out fueling stations and vehicles until people just use them, even if it make no sense economically? Only if there’s a colossal failure to develop cheaper batteries for EV’s or longish (> 30 miles) battery-only ranges in plug-in hybrids. If the battery guys can accomplish even a fraction of what the hydrogen guys are saying they must do to make hydrogen viable, then hydrogen will be ridiculously out-competed in the marketplace. As Ulf Bossel points out, hydrogen is competing with the energy sources needed to make hydrogen, and will therefore always be more expensive.
Faced with such a challenge, I do what any self-respecting economist and contrarian would do: I try to conjure up a scenario that everyone else has overlooked that could conceivably make sense. And you know what? I can’t find one. Generate the hydrogen inside a wind turbine, at the gas station, or in your home, as long as you’re making it with electrolysis (which is the only acceptable answer for sustainability reasons), you’re cooked. The cost to split water, handle the hydrogen before you use it, and then use it in a 50% efficient fuel cell in a car are too high a hurdle to get over, when you can move and use electrons vastly cheaper.
Once again, I think we’re on a path to plug-in series hybrids, which will immediately and dramatically reduce the oil consumed by any one driver. A shift in the liquid fuels provided to such vehicles–cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel made from bacteria fed on coal plant CO2 emissions, etc.–further reduces the petroleum consumption and CO2 emissions needed to move vehicles. As battery technology improves, the plug-in range gets longer, and we transition to ever greater electrification of transportation.
So, let me ask you all one simple question: What have I overlooked? If you see a loophole for hydrogen to work, tell me.
Subaru to double the battery range on its electric car concept:
Subaru recently released a vastly improved second cut at a plug-in battery-electric commuter car. It seems that the 65-kilowatt, 5-seater G4e’s new high energy-density lithium-ion batteries gives it a 200km range from a charge and with the help of a quick-charger it can reach up to 80% in just 15 minutes.
With 40 units of Subaru’s older EV R1e battery-electric vehicle already out and being evaluated by TEPCO’s regional sales team and local government officials, the constructor also announced the launch of an updated 5-door model with more than twice the range thanks to advances in lithium-ion battery technology.
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A normal full charge takes around 8 hours to reach full capacity, which will deliver around 200km of normal driving. Subaru has also developed a quick-charger that would allow the battery to be brought up to 80% charge in around 15 minutes. The company envisages that such quick-chargers could be easily located in carparks outside supermarkets and other public facilities. As you can see , energy per mile is a lot cheaper than a gasoline.
Forty test units on the road proves nothing, of course. As I keep pointing out when a handful of hydrogen fuel cell cars go on the road, you can build a tiny fleet of cars that run by burning wood chips, but that doesn’t mean the technology would, could, or should be generalized to the market in general. I consider EV’s to have an immensely more promising future than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned countless times.
Two hundred km on a charge for a car that appears to be about the size of my Scion xA 5-door wagon (or whatever the hell they’re calling that form factor today) is decent.
But the killer detail in this article is the ability to reach an 80% charge in just 15 minutes.
Think about that for a few seconds, and start to work through the ramifications of an affordable car with those characteristics. What’s on your list? I have:
A long-term future for gas stations, which will begin dispensing electrons in addition to liquid fuels.
The death of the mirage of using hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles. Give people a way to operate an affordable, clean vehicle over long distances without being tethered, even metaphorically, to a very small number of outlets (home, work, etc.), and pay one third to one fourth the cost of fuel per mile as a hydrogen fuel cell car would require, and they’ll race to buy it.
Once vehicles like these start to appear on the road, the charging infrastructure will spring up pretty quickly. Yes, there’s definitely a chicken and egg problem here, but it presents far less of a barrier to entry than does building out a hydrogen infrastructure. I’m not saying there’s no barrier, since clearly there is; you can’t recharge one of these cars 80% in 15 minutes from the 15 amp extension cord in your bedroom. It takes a heavy duty subsystem with some first-rate engineering to safely deliver the needed amps and not cook a customer. But that’s still a much easier chore than generating all that hydrogen in a CO2-free way and dispensing it at a local gas station.
Get vehicles like this from just one major manufacturer on the market, and the dam will break, leading to cars from several other companies in short order. As I’ve pointed out before, car company execs play the “copy someone else’s success” game as well as the executives at television networks and movie studios.
Once there are widely available offerings from even one company, expect to see alterations in public policy. If nothing else, they’ll have to adjust formulas for rebates and such to account for cars that burn zero gasoline and therefore get an infinite number of miles to the gallon. They’ll also have to account for ways to get road upkeep tax revenues from people who don’t buy gasoline. (My guess–they’ll tax the electrons at the gas station by enough to approximately include the recharging people do at home.) Perhaps the biggest change will come in the alteration (or introduction) of a feebate system that strongly favors EV’s over gasoline vehicles.
The electricity sector will quickly have to deal with quickly growing demand that starts to even out the traditional disparity in demand between day and night. Most people in their day to day driving of this kind of EV will likely opt for nighttime recharging, a whole new category of electricity consumption.
Third-party companies offering EV-specific goods and services, most notably larger and replacement batteries, will flourish. There will be the endless debates about whether it’s a good idea to augment your car’s basic battery with an add-on booster pack, what kind you should buy, whether it’s safe to install it yourself, etc. Expect to see these goods and services offered through not just newcomers, but established companies, like Midas, Monroe, etc. who not only want a piece of the new pie, but are worried that some of their old business is going away–EV’s don’t have exhaust systems that need to be replaced, engines to tune up, etc.
This technology–acceptably quick recharges of an EV–is the breakthrough that “changes everything”. It’s coming and it will kick off change in the transportation and electricity sectors like nothing we’ve seen before.
And with peak oil and all its attendant horrors–some more self-imposed than others–breathing down our neck, it can’t happen soon enough.
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Is Hydrogen the Answer to Our Future Transport Needs?:
It’s the most commonly-occurring element in the universe, it can be burned in a combustion engine or used to fuel electric motors, and it’s vastly cleaner emissions-wise than gasoline. The automotive industry seems to have settled on hydrogen as the magic bullet solution to the looming energy crisis, and each year we see a number of fuel cell concept cars showcased by the major manufacturers — but it’s a technology with some serious hurdles to overcome before it becomes viable. So how does hydrogen compare to batteries as a means of propelling transport in the future?
Is hydrogen the answer? Honda is one of many major auto companies that think so — stating in a recent release on their FCX concept that “Hydrogen will fuel the next generation of global vehicles. It’s a fact accepted by the entire industry. And given that it’s the most commonly-occurring element in the universe, supply is not an issue.”
But what about the new and coming generations of plug-in electric vehicles? As with Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, its early days yet, but pure electric vehicles seem to have a few strong points of their own. So, with a focus on fuel cells rather than hydrogen fueled internal combustion engines, let’s take a look at the set of requirements a transportation fuel source has to meet to be viable, and see how hydrogen and batteries compare:
[See the article for the areas of comparison: Abundance, efficiency, safety, refueling practicality, environmental factors, and economics.]
On the whole, a pretty balanced treatment, although I have a nano-nit to pick with the refueling topic–the author points out that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle can be refueled very quickly, allowing a driver to make long trips. Batteries and the associated technologies are in development to allow quick charges, but that seems to be years away. True enough, but it overlooks the basic chicken-and-egg issue–you can quickly refuel your hydrogen fuel cell car only if you can find a hydrogen filling station. (A point mentioned later in the same article.) For a long distance trip to grandma’s, it will be very problematic finding filling stations along the way, unless you and grandma both just happen to live in hotbeds of hydrogen infrastructure development.
Honda offers FCX for ‘08, bitchslaps Google:
Honda has confounded green-motoring analysts by announcing that it will offer a hydrogen-powered car for general sale in 2008, years earlier than expected.
The car in question - the third generation of Honda’s FCX fuel-cell demonstrator platform - was always expected to debut next year, but until now the plan had been to lease it to users in a motoring beta test. Now Honda has amazed the motoring world by saying that the car will go on sale in the US and Japan for just £50,000 - despite the scarcity of hydrogen filling stations.
“When the car was invented, countries weren’t full of petrol stations,” Honda chief exec Takeo Fukui said. “When the demand is there [the hydrogen economy] will happen.”
Honda is trying to get more hydrogen pumps deployed, but also has another trick up its sleeve: the planned Home Energy Station. This might be bought by FCX owners in future, and hooked up to their domestic gas supply to produce hot water and electricity for the house as well as hydrogen for the car. The Energy Station isn’t ready yet, however.
So, how many of these puppies do you think Honda will sell in the US next year at a cool $114,000? 100? 500? Not only will buyers have to deal with the scarcity of filling stations, but the depreciation on the first fuel cell cars will likely be staggering.
I’m not impressed with the Home Energy Station concept, as it ties the car to your home just as sure as an EV would, plus it will generate a lot of CO2, as it produces hydrogen by reforming natural gas. I guess the earliest adopters will feel so green and superior driving their “only emits water vapor from the exhaust!” car that they’ll overlook the CO2 emissions from their home filling station.
And yes, I realize that electrolyzing water to make hydrogen will create CO2 emissions for the majority of customers, but that scenario has at least one possible saving grace: When the source(s) of your electricity get(s) cleaner, all your electricity consumption gets cleaner, automatically. Put in a natural gas reformer and you’re stuck with its CO2 emissions as long as you use it.
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Now here’s something interesting. AutoblogGreen posted an item, Greg Blencoe discovers hydrogen gauntlet, throws it down at Joe Romm’s feet, that says, in part:
Are any of our readers the kind of people who love to defend hydrogen to the hilt? If so, you’ll probably like the attitude that Greg Blencoe, CEO of Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc., displays in an attention-getting challenge to Joseph Romm for a one-on-one debate. Romm, the author of “The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact And Fiction In The Race To Save The Climate,” is no stranger to public debates but has not yet agreed to take Blencoe on.
The “interesting” part is not that there’s a vocal hydrogen supporter challenging Romm to a debate, but the numerous, insightful comments from AutoblogGreen’s readers on the whole issue of hydrogen fuel cells for transportation.
While I agree, in broad strokes, with nearly all of the comments, my main problem with hydrogen for transportation is the issue of what else you can do with electricity besides make hydrogen to power cars. In economics speak, the lost opportunity cost of using electricity that way is too high. (I’m not rejecting the arguments about having to build an immense infrastructure for hydrogen creation, distribution, and retail sale; I merely think the “electricity can be better spent in other ways” argument is more compelling.)
Why do I say this?
Put another way, if you drive 70 miles on hydrogen, you consume 1kg of H2, or 50kWh of (potentially) zero-CO2 electricity in the hydrogen fuel cell car. In an EV you consume 14 kWh of electricity, leaving the other 36 kWh to displace fossil fuel usage. You travel just as far in the EV, but you do more to reduce overall CO2 emissions.
On a related note, I’m still anything but impressed with things like GM’s hydrogen fuel cell parlor trick, First impressions: Hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Chevrolet Equinox:
General Motors is about to put about a hundred hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Chevrolet Equinox CUVs into the hands of the public, and before that happens they gave a few of us journos a chance to see and drive them while putting us through a program they call Electric Drive University.
As I’ve pointed out before, you could build a test fleet of cars powered by burning wood chips, and it would prove as much as this non-event. Until a car company comes up with a credible analysis that shows not only how we can create, distribute, dispense, and consume all that hydrogen, plus do it at a lower cost, in terms of both money and CO2 emissions, than the emerging alternatives, then I’m not on the hydrogen-for-transportation bandwagon.
I would love to see such breakthroughs–the more viable alternatives we have competing to be “the” transportation solution, the better. But barring a truly amazing set of advances I don’t think hydrogen will be a major component of our transportation future before battery technology out-competes it.
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From Ford: Hydrogen Cars Close to Production:
The relatively quick-and-easy answer to foreign oil dependence and automotive greenhouse gas emissions is circling the grounds every day at Orlando International Airport in Florida, according to a top Ford Motor Co. official. It’s a utilitarian 12-passenger parking lot shuttle bus powered by a 6.8-liter internal combustion hydrogen engine, which Ford officials said is their hydrogen technology that’s closest to mass production.
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Lapetz said Ford has the ability to bring internal combustion hydrogen technology to market in cars within five years. But that’s only if fuel storage limitations can be solved, public fear of hydrogen can be allayed, filling stations set up, and gas prices stay high.
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Internal combustion hydrogen could be a bridge toward the ultimate hydrogen vehicles powered by fuel cells, which are as far off as 2015 or beyond, said Scott Staley, chief engineer of Ford’s hydrogen and fuel cell technology department.
Oy.
Notice the lack of mention of how the heck we’re supposed to create the hydrogen for all those H-ICE vehicles, in addition to the storage, distribution, and other problems.
And they’ll have this on the market in five years, with hydrogen fuel cells being ready for prime time “as far off as 2015 or beyond”? Can I lay a really hefty bet on the “beyond” part of that claim, as long as we’re talking about mainstream commercialization?
Honestly, no one should be allowed to write about hydrogen in a mainstream media outlet until they’ve read Joseph Romm’s The Hype About Hydrogen.
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I suspect many people here have already written off hydrogen as a near-term transportation fuel, but I wanted to recommend Joseph J. Romm’s The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate anyway. (Note that I read the 2005 edition of the book.)
Romm (say “Rome”) was a big wig in the Dept. of Energy during the Clinton administration, and that background show throughout his book. This is clearly the work of someone with a deep background in energy and not a book that was slapped together by someone who recognized that energy was a hot topic.
Romm’s basic conclusion regarding hydrogen is in the introduction (page 9) (emphasis in the original):
This book makes the case that hydrogen vehicles are unlikely to achieve even a 5 percent market penetration by 2030. And this in turn leads to the book’s major conclusion for all readers, from policymakers to corporate executives to investors to anyone who cares about the future of the planet: Neither government policy nor business investment should be based on the belief that hydrogen cars will have meaningful commercial success in the near- or medium-term.
He does, however, see the potential of CHP (combined heat and power) hydrogen fuel cells as way to efficiently provide electricity and heat in buildings. But even there he doesn’t see any mass conversion to that technology looming.
Even for those who have already concluded hydrogen in vehicles is a boondoggle, this book is well worth reading, simply because of how thoroughly Romm looks at the big picture of hydrogen and all the challenges it presents, from reducing the cost of fuel cells to the endless joys of figuring out how to economically and safely generate, transport, and store hydrogen on a mass scale.
In particular, he talks about how making hydrogen from natural gas (which accounts for the vast majority of hydrogen production today) creates a lot of CO2, and making it from water via electrolysis only makes sense if you have green electricity. And even in that latter case if your choice is between using a given number of kWh of electricity from a green source to make hydrogen or feed the grid and displace fossil fuel generation, you’re better off with the second option; hydrogen from renewables only makes sense from a CO2 emissions perspective if the entire electricity generating infrastructure is already green.
My one criticism of the book is that Romm is far too sanguine about peak oil and doesn’t really discuss the possibility that the peak will arrive soon and not 20 or 30 years away. Clearly, that’s an event that will radically rewrite the rules of our energy situation, whether or not hydrogen is ready for use in vehicles or stationary installations when it happens.
Bottom line: This is an excellent book for anyone who cares about the intersection of energy and global warming issues.
I know, I know–you thought we’d put the hydrogen thing to rest and concluded that it won’t be able to compete with BEV’s (battery electric vehicles). But let me delve into this again, as I wanted to hang a little more detail on the whole “we can make hydrogen from natural gas” thing just so we’re all on the same page.
I found a document from an industrial hydrogen generator from the company H2Gen, called (I kid you not) the HGM-2000. From the spec sheet (2 page, 241 PDF) for this model, we have the following details:
OK, so what does all this give us?
For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore the “dry instrument air or dry nitrogen” and water inputs, which I’m sure require some energy to produce but are small enough and hard enough to quantify that I will have an easy conscience. I’ll peg the natural gas and electricity consumption in the middle of the quoted range of consumption–call it 824 scf per hour at the stated 1020 BTU/scf specification and 10.5 kW.
For energy input we then have 840,480 BTU/hour for the gas, or 246 kWh, plus another 10.5 kWh for the electricity, for a total of 256.5 kWh every hour.
On the output side, we get 2,000 scf of hydrogen, which is about 4.8 kg. The CO2 production from the HGM-2000 is about 43.2 kg per hour (each kg of hydrogen creating by reforming results in about 9 kg of CO2) or 95 pounds per hour. But wait–we have to account for the CO2 from generating the electricity consumed in the process. Using the US national average of 1.25 pounds of CO2/kWh, we have another 13.1 pounds, for a total of 108.1 pounds.
Put this hydrogen into a Honda FCX and you can drive about 336 miles at an energy consumption of 0.76 kWh/mile or 2,593 BTU/mile, with CO2 emissions of 0.32 pounds of CO2/mile.
A similarly sized hybrid car that gets 50 MPG consumes 2,480 BTU/mile, and emits 0.4 pounds of CO2/mile.
And a BEV that gets 5 miles/kWh consumes 682 BTU/mile and emits 0.25 pounds of CO2/mile.
So, reforming natural gas into hydrogen for use in a vehicle really seems like a pretty bad deal.
Adding a little more reality to the picture: You can buy the hybrid today, and the BEV will be here in 2010, assuming Mitsubishi stays on schedule for their product introduction and no one beats them to market. Even with the FCX going into limited production next year (presumably very limited), highly likely as a lease-only model at around $500/month, ala the current FCX, it’s fair to say that of these three options, the hydrogen path is the one least ready for prime time.
I would have included a plug-in series hybrid like the upcoming Volt in this number crunch-a-thon, but I don’t yet have a good feeling for the number of miles per gallon of liquid fuel such a car will average. Use a car like that for local errands and commuting trips that are less than the vehicle’s battery range and you’ll never start the on-board gasoline engine, which is an infinite number of MPG. Use it for long commutes, particularly if you’re lax in plugging it in between trips, and you’d get something like the MPG of a really good hybrid.
Could there be a series of game-changing breakthroughs in hydrogen generation and in-vehicle storage that gives it the edge over even BEV’s? Of course, but based on everything I’ve seen so far, I sure wouldn’t bet that way.
See also Sweetening The Hydrogen Economy and Breakthrough May Improve Range Of Hydrogen Powered Cars.
