The Hydrogen Economy

Why hydrogen? Because hydrogen is a clean universal fuel that can be used to power cars, trucks, planes, trains, buses, boats and ships. Hydrogen can heat homes and commercial buildings, and generate electricity. Hydrogen can replace all forms of fossil fuels. A nation that has converted all of its power systems to run on hydrogen will no longer be dependent on oil because hydrogen can be made from many different sources of energy such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal as well as fossil and nuclear. A nation powered by hydrogen will be free to choose from many sources of energy, all of which will produce the one universal fuel: Hydrogen.

BMW and Ford Motor Company have developed hydrogen powered internal combustion engines that will perform as well as gasoline engines. These new engines will allow Ford and BMW to take advantage of existing automobile technology for mass production. The question remains: Will the hydrogen gas that powers these new cars be made from imported oil or from America’s own natural resources?

Hydrogen gas produced in America, using America's natural resources and technology, would be under the control of U.S. Sovereignty.

Pure hydrogen gas does not exist as a natural resource. Hydrogen must be extracted from natural resources such as oil, water, methane or coal. In order to extract hydrogen from these natural resources energy must be spent.

Hydrogen is considered a carrier of energy like electricity, or a store for energy like a battery, rather than a source of energy like oil. For this reason, the Hydrogen Economy and energy independence are separate but related issues.

Hydrogen is superior to gasoline because hydrogen can be extracted from many different natural resources. Gasoline is superior to hydrogen because gasoline is easier to store, transport and handle.

Filling a fuel tank with hydrogen is not as easy as filling a tank with gasoline. The energy density (amount of energy for a given volume) of liquid hydrocarbons such as gasoline or diesel is much greater than the energy density of either compressed or liquid hydrogen. Storage of hydrogen gas is believed to be one of the most difficult challenges facing the hydrogen economy.

The problem is the difference in Energy Density between hydrogen and gasoline. It takes 2.2 pounds of hydrogen to equal the energy in one gallon of gasoline. Hydrogen is a gas, not a liquid like gasoline. Getting 2.2 pounds of hydrogen into a one gallon container is a very serious challenge. Many of the world’s best scientists are working to solve the problem.

One company, QUANTUM Technologies, has developed a storage tank that may solve the problem by holding compressed hydrogen at 10,000 PSI.

Another company, Millennium Cell, has developed a hydrogen Borax liquid fuel called Hydrogen on Demand™, a very promising techology.

Carbon nanotubes may hold the answer. Scientists are researching the possibility of storing and transporting hydrogen inside of porous metal powders: Carbon Nanotubes would work like a sponge to store hydrogen gas.

Tiny glass micro spheres smaller than a grain of sand may sove the problem: Researchers envision tiny spheres storing hydrogen gas in cars.

Crystals may be the ultimate answer. Scientists have created a chemical structure that has the largest internal surface area ever observed in a porous metal-organic material. Omar Yaghi at the University of Michigan and co-workers at Michigan and Arizona State University have created a new porous crystal with an estimated surface area of 4500 meters squared per gram. The crystal can bind large quantities of hydrogen gas and may have potential for use as a hydrogen storage tank in transportation vehicles.

NREL Scientists Take On Hydrogen Storage: "The real challenge of hydrogen storage is finding a way to store enough of it to make it worthwhile—enough to fuel a vehicle for its required driving range, within the constraints of weight, volume, efficiency, and cost."

Transporting hydrogen from where it is made to where it will be consumed is also a challenge. Another challenge is public safety when handling hydrogen. Visualize yourself filling your tank with hydrogen; what do you see? Is it compressed to 10,000 PSI? Or is it liquid at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit? Would you want to handle that?

The many challenges facing the hydrogen economy, along with many proposed solutions, are presented and explained by Physicist Armory Lovins in Twenty Hydrogen Myths, a 50 page PDF document that can be downloaded from the Rocky Mountain Institute web site.

Opposing views:

A rebuttal to Armory Lovins Twenty Hydrogen Myths-
         I agree that hydrogen looks good on the surface. Unfortunately, once you delve deeper than that, it begins to make absolutely no sense. The energy that you get from burning a hydrocarbon fuel comes from the hydrogen in the fuel - so, several decades ago, engineers started thinking "why not just separate out the hydrogen, so you wouldn't have to carry around all those carbons". That approach makes a lot of sense for rockets - where the most important thing is minimizing the mass. NASA can handle extremely expensive and inefficient-to-produce forms of fuel, since they have a huge budget. Minimizing mass is most important to them (for rockets, it's the mass that's most important - it doesn't matter if the fuel has a very low energy density so you need an enormous fuel tank, as long as the energy per unit mass can be kept low). Plus, the additional danger isn't all that important, since rockets are very dangerous to begin with. The problem is, that approach (wanting to not carry the carbons with the fuel) is utterly useless with automobiles. You have to use a lot of energy (and money) to extract the hydrogen from the fuel feedstock (whether biomass, fossil fuel, or water), and end up with a very undesirable fuel for automobiles - a very hard to contain gas with extremely low energy density. So, you have to compress or liquify it to get a reasonable energy density (or store it in a solid form, which ends up being considerably less efficient than even liquifying it).
         What the hydrogen proponents like Amory Lovins ignore is that compressed or liquified hydrogen is orders of magnitude more dangerous than uncompressed hydrogen. In Lovins' "20 myths about hydrogen", in #2 he claims that hydrogen is perfectly safe due to it being lighter than air, dispersing rapidly, and (the utterly false claim) that it requires a container of oblong shape to detonate. The first two are true of uncompressed hydrogen - it IS lighter than air, and disperses rapidly. The problem is, compressed or liquified hydrogen is not lighter than air, and does not disperse rapidly. With compressed hydrogen, a leak escapes with enough velocity that the static electricity is almost always enough to ignite the fuel, and it can not be extinguished (you can douse the leak with water continually, but the hydrogen will just continually reignite due to static electricity. And in fact, in the accidents involving hydrogen tankers that sprung leaks at valves, fire departments always had to continually douse the tanker all over with water until the hydrogen burned itself off (sometimes taking a full day to do so in a tanker), to prevent the tank from heating up enough to explode - which could level city blocks due to the stored mechanical energy in the highly compressed gas, not even counting the hydrogen igniting/detonating. Liquid hydrogen can be just as dangerous - do a search on Google for "BLEVE" - Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion.
         The main underlying problem with the hydrogen economy is that those carbons in the feedstock that you separate the hydrogen from serve some very useful purposes. They allow the fuel to have a much higher volumetric energy density (which is what matters for automobiles - not the mass energy density, which only matters for rockets), and depending on the type, can give it a very low volatility, high flash point, and simply make it far safer and more practical. So, why expend all that energy (and money) separating the hydrogen from those carbons, just to end up with a less desirable fuel? Consider this - for the most part, hydrogen is produced by extracting it from something else that could be turned into a liquid fuel far more easily (i.e. biomass, petroleum, coal, etc.) or from natural gas.
Michael S. Briggs
UNH Physics Department

A growing number of scientists are warning that valuable time and money is being wasted on hydrogen research-
The Hydrogen "Illusion" By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
The Physics of the Hydrogen Economy By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
Renewables, Not Hydrogen, Is The Answer By David Doty, Ph.D.
Hydrogen vehicle won't be viable soon, study says
The Future of the Hydrogen Economy: Bright or Bleak?
By Ulf Bossel, Baldur Eliasson and Gordon Taylor
(Downloads a 39 page (240 KB) Adobe PDF document.)
The World Needs a Sustainable Energy Economy, not a Hydrogen Economy By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
Reviewing the Hydrogen Fuel and FreedomCAR Initiatives By Dr. Joseph Romm
Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy
Author, The Hype about Hydrogen (Island Press, March 2004)
(Downloads a 10 page (60 KB) Adobe PDF document.)
A Better Way to Get From Here to There: A Commentary on the Hydrogen Economy and a Proposal for an Alternative Strategy

Hydrogen cars are being road tested, but probably won't be affordable for most drivers for at least ten years-
The challenges to reach a hydrogen economy, however, are enormous, considering today’s state of knowledge and technical capabilities. The hydrogen economy consists of many physical and chemical processes linked in an interdependent network that connects production, distribution, storage, and use. Hydrogen in its various forms flows throughout the network, linking primary sources like hydrocarbons or seawater to storage media like alanates to end-use functions like fuel cells. Many of the processes in the network have been demonstrated in laboratory or prototype tests at some level, but nearly all of these processes remain to be proved in competitive environments against existing technology for cost, performance, and reliability.

The gap between present-day technology and commercial viability is vast. To be economically competitive with the present fossil fuel economy, the cost of fuel cells must be lowered by a factor of 10 or more, the cost of producing hydrogen by a factor of 4, and the performance and reliability of hydrogen technology for transportation and other uses must be improved dramatically (Abraham 2003). This gap cannot be bridged by incremental advances of the present state of the art. Bridging the gap requires not only creative engineering, but also revolutionary conceptual breakthroughs in understanding and controlling the physical and chemical processes that govern the interaction of hydrogen with materials. Such breakthroughs can only come from comprehensive basic research focused on the behavior of hydrogen at the atomic level, exploiting the remarkable recent advances in materials synthesis capabilities, forefront characterization tools, and creative theory and modeling. The best scientists from universities and national laboratories and the best engineers and scientists from industry must work in interdisciplinary groups to find breakthrough solutions to the fundamental problems of hydrogen production, storage, and use.

The formulation of such a basic research program must be coordinated with the needs of applied research and development and have coupled experimental and theoretical components for maximum impact. The hope is that these discoveries and related conceptual breakthroughs from basic research will provide a foundation for the innovative design of materials and processes that will produce qualitative improvements in the performance, cost, and reliability of the production, storage, and use of hydrogen so that an economically competitive hydrogen economy can eventually be realized.

As we ponder the benefits of a hydrogen economy, we also must consider other factors. The time scale required to develop the technology and the infrastructure needed to produce the amount of hydrogen required for a hydrogen economy is significant. In recognition of this long-term focus, we must consider complementary routes for achieving significant energy savings and environmental benefits in the near term, such as internal combustion/electric hybrid vehicles.
-Excerpt from Basic Research Needs for the Hydrogen Economy
A 178 page report from Argonne National Laboratory, funded by the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The report is a 7.5 MB Adobe PDF document.

Hydrogen References:
Hydrogen
Hydrogen Cars
DOE Hydrogen info
Ford readies hydrogen vehicles
Hydrogen Storage Research Report
11 page (370 KB) Adobe PDF document.
Hydrogen cars ready to roll — for a price
The Ford Model U hydrogen powered ICE
BMW and the hydrogen combustion engine
Hydrogen: A Key Component of Energy in the Future
Comparing Hydrogen and Electricity for Transmission, Storage and Transportation

Hydrogen web sites:
Hydrogen Now
www.H2go.info
Think Hydrogen
Altergy Systems
www.clean-air.org
www.H2nation.com
California Hydrogen Highways
www.energyindependencenow.org
California Hydrogen Business Council