Prophecy

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By Barry C. Lynn
© 2003 The Foundation for National Progress

When President Bush unveiled his plans for a hydrogen-powered car in his State of the Union address in January, he proposed $1.2 billion in spending to develop a revolutionary automobile that will be "pollution-free." The new vehicle, he declared, will rely on "a simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen" to power a car "producing only water, not exhaust fumes." Within 20 years, the president vowed, fuel-cell cars will "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of oil."

By launching an ambitious program to develop what he calls the "Freedom Car," Bush seemed determined to realize the kind of future that hydrogen-car supporters have envisioned for years. Using existing technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water. Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms. The hydrogen is then recombined with oxygen in fuel cells, where it releases electrons that drive an electric motor in a car. What Bush didn't reveal in his nationwide address, however, is that his administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent -- and potentially as dirty -- as the one that fuels today's SUVs. According to the administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels -- in a process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas. The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear energy.

Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the benefits offered by hydrogen. Although the fuel-cell cars themselves may emit nothing but water vapor, the process of producing the fuel cells from hydrocarbons will continue America's dependence on fossil fuels and leave behind carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming.

Mike Nicklas, chair of the American Solar Energy Society, was one of 224 energy experts invited by the Department of Energy to develop the government's Roadmap last spring. The sessions, environmentalists quickly discovered, were dominated by representatives from the oil, coal, and nuclear industries. "All the emphasis was on how the process would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Nicklas, who sat on a committee chaired by an executive from ChevronTexaco. "The whole meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables." The plan does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power generated by the sun or the wind, concluding that such technologies "need further development for hydrogen production to be more cost competitive."

But instead of investing in developing those sources, the budget that Bush submitted to Congress pays scant attention to renewable methods of producing hydrogen. More than half of all hydrogen funding is earmarked for automakers and the energy industry. Under the president's plan, more than $22 million of hydrogen research for 2004 will be devoted to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, compared with $17 million for renewable sources. Overall funding for renewable research and energy conservation, meanwhile, will be slashed by more than $86 million. "Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing them with fossil and nuclear doesn't make for a sustainable approach," says Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The oil and chemical industries already produce 9 million tons of hydrogen each year, most of it from natural gas, and transport it through hundreds of miles of pipelines to fuel the space shuttle and to remove sulfur from petroleum refineries. The administration's plan lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure -- guaranteeing that oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen. Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it succinctly: "We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business."

To protect its fuel franchise, the energy industry has moved swiftly in recent years to shape government policy toward hydrogen. In 1999, oil companies and automakers began attending the meetings of an obscure group called the National Hydrogen Association. Founded in 1989 by scientists from government labs and universities, the association was a haven for many of the small companies -- fuel-cell designers, electrolyzer makers -- that were dabbling in hydrogen power. The group promoted the use of hydrogen but was careful not to take any position on who would make the fuel or how.

All that changed once the energy industry got involved. "All of a sudden Shell joined our board, and then the interest grew very quickly," says Karen Miller, the association's vice president. "Our chair last year was from BP; this year our chair is from ChevronTexaco." The companies quickly began to use the association as a platform to lobby for more federal funding for research, and to push the government to emphasize fossil fuels in the national energy plan for hydrogen. Along with the big automakers, energy companies also formed a consortium called the International Hydrogen Infrastructure Group to monitor federal officials charged with developing fuel cells. "Basically," says Neil Rossmeissl, a hydrogen standards expert at the Department of Energy, "what they do is look over our shoulder at doe to make sure we are doing what they think is the right thing."

As hydrogen gained momentum, the oil companies rushed to buy up interests in technology companies developing ways to refine and store the new fuel. Texaco has invested $82 million in a firm called Energy Conversion Devices, and Shell now owns half of Hydrogen Source. BP, Chevron-Texaco, ExxonMobil, Ford, and General Electric have also locked up the services of many of America's top energy scientists, devoting more than $270 million to hydrogen research at MIT, Princeton, and Stanford.

Such funding will help ensure that oil and gas producers continue to profit even if automakers manage to put millions of fuel-cell cars on the road. "The major energy companies have several hundred billions of dollars, at the least, invested in their businesses, and there is a real interest in keeping and utilizing that infrastructure in the future," says Frank Ingriselli, former president of Texaco Technology Ventures. "And these companies certainly have the balance sheets and wherewithal to make it happen."

The stakes in the current battle over hydrogen are high. Devoting the bulk of federal research funding to making hydrogen from fossil fuels rather than water will enable oil and gas companies to provide lower-priced hydrogen. That, in turn, means that pipelines built to transport hydrogen will stretch to, say, a BP gas field in Canada, rather than an independent wind farm in North Dakota. Even if the rest of the world switches to hydrogen manufactured from water, says Nicklas, "Americans may end up dependent on fossil fuels for generations."

The administration's plans to manufacture hydrogen from fossil fuels could also contribute to global warming by leaving behind carbon dioxide. Oil and coal companies insist they will be able to "sequester" the carbon permanently by pumping it deep into the ocean or underground. But the doe calls such approaches "very high risk," and no one knows how much that would cost, how much other environmental disruption that might cause, or whether that would actually work. "Which path we take will have a huge effect one way or the other on the total amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere over the next century," says James MacKenzie, a physicist with the World Resources Institute.

Even if industry manages to safely contain the carbon left behind, the Bush administration's plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels will wind up wasting energy. John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, says a system that extracts hydrogen from oil and natural gas and stores it in fuel cells would actually be no more energy efficient than America's present gasoline- based system.

"If the hydrogen does not come from renewable sources," Heywood says, "then it is simply not worth doing, environmentally or economically."
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All the Bush bashing, and complaints about who gets the money aside, I do agree with the last statement of this article. If the US is going to use Hyrdogen as a clean source of energy it needs to be completely clean in the whole process from start to finish. Thoughts?

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La Fede È Il Mio Schermo,
Non salti Ciecamente In Incertezza,
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Kadath

I agree, but how? Hydrogen may be plentiful(to the point of being the most abundant element in the universe) but it doesn't exist in a form we can use in too many places, which is to say none, outside of stars. So where do we get our hydrogen from? Water? It takes a lot of solar and/or wind based energy to generate the amount of hydrogen we'd need to fuel the millions of vehicles that are going to be the primary drain on this source. It's going to cost a whole lot of money to put that infrastructure in place, and we need to start today.
I'm not a conspiracy thoerist, but I think we all know that the oil companies have a fair amount of pull with this administration. I'm not Bush bashing, just stating a fact. If you want a hydrogen industry that's clean from start to finish, the oil companies have to be out of the picture. Unfortunately, that won't happen. So basically what we're looking at is a slow shift to cleaner methods of hydrogen production as fossil fuel supplies dry up.

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Unknown Poster

A little off topic, but if cities are populated with millions of cars spewing out water vapor, will it effect the weather? Create more rain, or at least cloudier skies?

Prophecy

To tell you the truth I don't know, but I'd think it would only be a problem in cities with buildings that are very tall and close together, like New York, were the vapor couldn't move freely over the air waves. But like I said I just don't know one way or the other.


what about geo-thermal and the dreaded nuclear power?

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La Disciplina È La Mia Spada,
La Fede È Il Mio Schermo,
Non salti Ciecamente In Incertezza,
E Potete Raccogliere Le Ricompense.

The_Dude

why am i not surprised?

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Kadath

Well, geothermal would be fine by me, but they still have to build that infrastructure, so it's the same problem. Nuclear power is dreaded for a reason. While we're better off than we once were in terms of safety, fission still produces harmful waste, and we can't just keep burying barrels in mountains forever.

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it's quiet in here

Simple_Min

I agree with Kadath, as usual, that due to the political and economic interest in petrolium we will not see much work being done to move away from the current norm.

GM a year back announced it's stopping production/research on their electric/hydrogen (i dont remember which) car. The R&D that is needed for a revolution is at one source or another controlled by someone who has interest in maintaning our dependence on petrolium.

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Charlatan

Iceland is set to be the Hydrogen power of the world... They will be using their abundant supply of geothermal power to create hydrogen for their own use.

They have begun to set up filling stations, etc.

They expect to produce a great surplus of hydorgen which they can sell to the world.

Ingenious...


(how long before a superpower invades them?)

__________________
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- Old Man Luedecke

Charlatan

The main reason the oil companies will have to be involved is the expense involved in creating a network of filling stations.

They already have the network. All they will need is to convert.

As for producing hydrogen from fossil fuels... granted it is a nasty way of creating a cleaner fuel. However, the main benefit is that while there will still be emissions the emissions will be in concentrated areas rather than spewing all over the place as we get with internal combustion engine emmisions.

Ideally we start out this way and move to wind, solar and geothermal as they become more readily available. The trick is to make sure that they do become readily available which requires investment in these alternative methods of producing power.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Lebell

Ummm,

Not to be rude, but you can't pull hydrogen from your ass (unlike methane).

Hydrogen has to be broken out from somewhere, either from water or hydrocarbons (oil). This process itself takes...ENERGY (in the form of electricity.)

So all the ways that we produce electricity (oil, coal, solar, nuclear, etc.) will continue to be used.

The big advantage however, is that that we have better control over the pollution at these point sources than we do when it is spread out over a couple of million automobiles.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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Prophecy

I have no problem starting out using fossil fuels to get the ball rolling. However, after a certain point I’d like to see the process moved to where the U.S. doesn't have to use fossil fuels (a stable gas/fuel price would be wonderful ). None of the past presidents nor the president one has submitted anything that I've seen, that shows the planning of a fossil-fuel-free energy system that seems feasible. I just want to see signs that we won't stay stuck using fossil fuels forever in some way or another. I don't what to have to depend on some other country for fuel for ever.

__________________
La Disciplina È La Mia Spada,
La Fede È Il Mio Schermo,
Non salti Ciecamente In Incertezza,
E Potete Raccogliere Le Ricompense.

Lebell

How will you do that? The only other large scale alternative to fossil fuels used to produce the electricity needed to crack the hydrogen is Nuclear, and we haven't built a new nuclear plant in decades.

As I said, this stuff doesn't come out of thin air. If you want to phase out fossil fuels, you have to come up with an alternative. Wishing doesn't make it happen.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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Prophecy

True enough, but even If I had a full proof plan you still have to know people to get things done. That being said nuclear science and the like are not my strong points or field of study. If I had the knack for that type of science i'd gladly look for an alternative. But also the U.S. has to serious put people to work on this if we ever hope to come up with a solution.

__________________
La Disciplina È La Mia Spada,
La Fede È Il Mio Schermo,
Non salti Ciecamente In Incertezza,
E Potete Raccogliere Le Ricompense.

seretogis

There has to be a benefit to the large energy companies for them to convert to hydrogen. No one in their right mind would spend billions of dollars to convert to something that they will not benefit from in the slightest. Think of this as a step forward, not the entire journey itself.

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

smooth

First of all, wind, water, and sun all provide natural sources of energy--the means to capture it needs to be developed.

Our government already alocates billions of dollars to various agencies and private corporations for research and contracts. For example, the Bush's hydrogen energy "solution" grants millions of dollars to the research and development. The principle argument for profit (dividends, etc.) in a capitalist society is that private entities risk their capital when they invest. Now, however, private corporations invest government money--and then people pay the corporations for the use of the technology (whose development they already paid for).

I think either private corporations engage in competetive development alongside a nationlized research center or the major contributor of the research funds owns the patent (effectively nationalizing patents). If the people pay for the research through tax money, shouldn't they reap the benefits of their money instead of a private corporation that didn't risk its capital to innovate?

Charlatan

The government seeds these projects because it benefits all of us in many ways that aren't neccessarily monetary:

a) less pollution = lower health care costs
b) new jobs will be created thereby strengthening the economy
c) reliance on foreign nations for fuel is diminished (didn't you see... he called it a Freedom Car!)


Add to this the fact that private industry will not get on this bandwagon without a demand for the product. A present it is way cheaper to carry on with internal combustion and fossil fuels.

Who will buy a hydrogen fuel cell car if you can only fill up in one place? It has to be convenient.

Government seed money will/should kick start the whole process...

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Eggy

If we use fossil fuels to create hydrogen energy, won't we eventually be able to use the energy to extract the hydrogen?

Dilbert1234567

this is worse than regular cars, and he knows it, you loose energy when at every step and this is just adding another leg to the process.

but its to be expected from bush

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Sun Tzu

I ask this because I haven’t kept up with it as much as I wanted to: The cars that are developed run on the mechanism you say; so as I’m interpreting the real issue is not the operational problems, but the production of the final product. Is the outcome the same no matter which method is going to be used? If that’s the case is this the oil barrens of the world last chance "per say" to cash in on a technology they know is eventually going to overtake petro anyway? That would mean there withholding development intentionally and I know they would never do such a thing.

I don’t know if outside pressure is guiding President Bush or even if one of his predecessors initiated this before him, but I'm glad something is finally being done. I've heard conflicting reports about fossil fuels doing / not doing damage. I love my unnecessary jacked-up obnoxious mud romping Jeep, but would gladly give it up if I knew there was going to be across the board conversion to something cleaner. Not to mention the fact there is going to be a day when there is no more oil. Hopefully there will be enough progression before that to render oil obsolete. It’s a matter of some few to sacrifice some pocket change. (IMO)

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Macheath

I would prefer they focus on promoting fuel cell powered and hybrid cars. I'd like to see them focus on fuel EFFICIENCY just as much if not more than where the fuel comes from in the first place. A gas-guzzler is going to be a gas-guzzler whatever you put in it.

It all comes down to the tax breaks though and if a "hydrogen" Humvee is a better deal than a fuel cell car - guess what people are going to buy?

I am frustrated about solar energy. It feels like no progress has been made in that field for years. Fact is, the energy in sunlight falling on the earth's surface over one year is 10 times the amount tied up in all the reserves of coal, oil, gas and uranium on the planet. (read that last sentence again). It's been estimated that by 2050, renewable energy wil make up half the energy the world uses. I just wish they had more efficient ways to harness the sun's energy.

I like to call myself an advocate of nuclear power, just as long as there's only one nuclear reactor and its 93 million miles from my backyard.

seretogis

Yes, but eventually there is a point where you put more money into research than the results of the research is saving.

People don't purchase Humvees because they're cheap. It wouldn't matter if they only got 1 mpg, people would still buy them as status symbols.

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

Macheath

These vehicles already exist, the bulk of the initial resarch has already been done. Gotta "iron out the kinks" at bit more, but so what? They've been researching to improve the combustion engine ever since it was first invented.

Sorry, I probably should have said SUVs aka "light trucks".

Dilbert1234567

humvees are geting cheep if you exploit the loop wholes, i can get you one for a cool 10g's

further






i have a nuclear power plant in my back yard, (25 miles or so) diablo Canyon. and i feel safe, i only dont feel save when the protestors run the 18 wheelers off the road that carry the waste.

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GoldenOuroboros

Cold Fusion anyone?

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KillerYoda

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Sun Tzu

Hey Killer Yoda is that a flux capaciter? Or the power source to run one?

Thats classic.

__________________
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking

duckduck

I'm all for the methane car. I've got a 200 hog day supply liquid manure out under our barns. Makes filling up rather easy.

That, and if you ever ran out of fuel, you could just crap in the bacteria convertor to refuel

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Charlatan

Power source to run one...

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

pangavan

Did anybody think about what will happen to this water vapor exhaust during the winter? "sorry I was late, my muffler was frozen"

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Nad Adam

Haha, "Freedom Car". Does anybody else think that Bush actualy have a sense of humor.

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KillerYoda

Power source, generates fusion needed to start the Flux capaciter from garbage.

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"So you're Chekov, huh? Well, this here's McCoy. Find a Spock, we got us an away team."