Warning: The Hydrogen Economy May Be More Distant Than It Appears

4. HYDROGEN GAS LEAKS ARE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
Hydrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and it burns almost invisibly. A tiny fire may go undetected at a leaky fuel pump until your pant leg goes up in flames. And it doesn´t take much to set compressed hydrogen gas alight. â€A cellphone or a lightning storm puts out enough static discharge to ignite hydrogen,†claims Joseph Romm, author of The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate and founder of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions in Arlington, Virginia.


A fender bender is unlikely to spark an explosion, because carbon-fiber-reinforced hydrogen tanks are virtually indestructible. But that doesn´t eliminate the danger of leaks
elsewhere in what will eventually be a huge network of refineries, pipelines and fueling stations. â€The obvious pitfall is that hydrogen is a gas, and most of our existing petrochemical sources are liquids,†says Robert Uhrig, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee and former vice president of Florida Power & Light. â€The infrastructure required to support high-pressure gas or cryogenic liquid hydrogen is much more complicated. Hydrogen is one of those things that people have great difficulty confining. It tends to go through the finest of holes.â€

To calculate the effects a leaky infrastructure might have on our atmosphere, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, looked at statistics for accidental industrial hydrogen and natural gas leakage-estimated at 10 to 20 percent of total volume-and then predicted how much
leakage might occur in an economy in which everything
runs on hydrogen. Result: The amount of hydrogen in the atmosphere would be four to eight times as high as it is today.


The Caltech study â€grossly overstated†hydrogen leakage, says Assistant Secretary David Garman of the Department of Energy´s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energy. But whatever its volume, hydrogen added to the atmosphere will combine with oxygen to form water vapor, creating noctilucent clouds-those high, wispy tendrils you see at dawn and dusk. The increased cloud cover could accelerate global warming.


5. CARS ARE THE NATURAL FIRST APPLICATION FOR HYDROGEN FUEL CELLS
â€An economically sane, cost-effective attack on the climate problem wouldn´t start with cars,†David Keith says. Cars and light trucks contribute roughly 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S., while power plants burning fossil fuels are responsible for more than 40 percent of C0₂ emissions. Fuel cells designed for vehicles must cope with harsh conditions and severe limitations on size and weight.


A better solution to global warming might be to hold off building hydrogen cars, and instead harness fuel cells to generate electricity for homes and businesses. Plug Power, UTC, FuelCell Energy and Ballard Power Systems already market stationary fuel-cell generators. Plug Power alone has 161 systems in the U.S., including the first fuel-cell-powered McDonald´s. Collectively, however, the four companies have a peak generating capacity of about 69 megawatts, less than 0.01 percent of the total 944,000 megawatts of U.S. generating capacity.


6. THE U.S. IS COMMITTED TO HYDROGEN, POURING BILLIONS INTO R&D
Consider this: President George W. Bush promised to spend $1.2 billion on hydrogen. Yet he allotted $1.5 billion to promote â€healthy marriages.†The monthly tab for the war in Iraq is $3.9 billion-a total of $121 billion through last September. In 2004 the Department of Energy spent more on nuclear and fossil fuel research than on hydrogen.


The federal government´s FreedomCAR program, which funds hydrogen R&D in conjunction with the big three American carmakers, requires that the companies demonstrate a hydrogen-powered car by 2008-but not that they sell one.


â€If you are serious about [hydrogen], you have to commit a whole lot more money,†contends Guenter Conzelmann, deputy director of the Center for Energy, Environmental and Economic Systems Analysis at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Conzelmann develops computer models to help the energy industry make predictions about the cost of implementing new technology. His estimate for building a hydrogen economy: more than $500 billion, and that´s if 60 percent of Americans continue to drive cars with internal combustion engines.


Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies are unwilling to invest in production, distribution, fueling facilities and storage if there are just a handful of hydrogen cars on
the road. Nor will automakers foot the bill and churn out
thousands of hydrogen cars if drivers have nowhere to fill them up. Peter Devlin, head of the Department of Energy´s
hydrogen-production research group, says, â€Our industry partners have told us that unless a fourth to a third of all refueling stations in the U.S. offer hydrogen, they won´t be willing to take a chance on fuel cells.â€

To create hydrogen fueling stations, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who drives a Hummer, has championed the Hydrogen Highway Project. His plan is to erect 150 to 200 stations-at a cost of at least $500,000 each-along the state´s major highways by the end of the decade. So that´s one state. Now what about the other 100,775
filling stations in the rest of the U.S.? Retrofitting just
25 percent of those with hydrogen fueling systems would cost more than $13 billion.


7. IF ICELAND CAN DO IT, SO CAN WE
Iceland´s first hydrogen fueling station is already operating on the outskirts of Reykjavk. The hydrogen, which powers a small fleet of fuel cell buses, is produced onsite from electrolyzed tap water. Meanwhile the recently formed Icelandic New Energy-a consortium that includes automakers, Royal Dutch/Shell and the Icelandic power company Norsk Hydro-is planning to convert the rest of the island nation to a hydrogen system.


Impressive, yes. But 72 percent of Iceland´s electricity comes from geothermal and hydroelectric power. With so much readily available clean energy, Iceland can electrolyze water with electricity directly from the national power grid. This type of setup is impossible in the U.S., where only about 15 percent of grid electricity comes from geothermal and hydroelectric sources, while 71 percent is generated by burning fossil fuels.


Another issue is the sheer scale of the system. It could take as few as 16 hydrogen fueling stations to enable Icelanders to drive fuel cell cars anywhere in the country. At close to 90 times the size of Iceland, the U.S. would require a minimum of 1,440 fueling stations. This assumes that stations would be strategically placed to collectively cover the entire U.S. with no overlap and that everyone knows where to find the pumps.


8. MASS PRODUCTION WILL MAKE HYDROGEN CARS AFFORDABLE
Simply mass-producing fuel cell cars won´t necessarily slash costs. According to Patrick Davis, the former leader of the Department of Energy´s fuel cell research team, â€If you project today´s fuel cell technologies into high-volume production-about 500,000 vehicles a year-the cost is still up to six times too high.â€

Raj Choudhury, operations manager for the General Motors fuel cell program, claims that GM will have a commercial fuel cell vehicle ready by 2010. Others are doubtful. Ballard says that first there needs to be a â€fundamental engineering rethink†of the proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell, the type being developed for automobiles, which still cannot compete with the industry standard for internal combustion engines-a life span of 15 years, or about 170,000 driving miles. Because of membrane deterioration, today´s PEM fuel cells typically fail during their first 2,000 hours of operation.




Ballard insists that his original PEM design was merely a prototype. â€Ten years ago I said it was the height of engineering arrogance to think that the architecture and geometry we chose to demonstrate the fuel cell in automobiles would be the best architecture and geometry for a commercial automobile,†he remarks.
â€Very few people paid attention to that statement. The truth is that the present geometry isn´t getting the price down to where it is commercial. It isn´t even entering into the envelope that will allow economies of scale to drive the price down.â€

In the short term, conventional gasoline-burning vehicles will be replaced by gas-electric hybrids, or by vehicles that burn clean diesel, natural gas, methanol or ethanol. Only later will hydrogen cars make sense, economically and environmentally. â€Most analysts think it will take several decades for hydrogen to make a large impact, assuming hydrogen technologies reach their goals,†notes Joan Ogden, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Davis and one of the world´s leading researchers of hydrogen energy.