By Carl T. Hall

09-02-04

Despite all the promise of pollution-free vehicles, a transportation system based on hydrogen fuel cells is anything but a sure bet, members of a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded. Even if the most optimistic predictions prove true, and the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicles reach commercial showrooms by 2015, it would take at least another quarter-century before they have a major impact on the market, the panel concluded.

"This is a tremendously important, transforming opportunity we are talking about, but it's not going to happen with current technology and current knowledge," said Dan Sperling, a panel member and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.

The report was designed mainly to guide research programs and set priorities for hydrogen development at the US Department of Energy. Backed by a year of study, the report is perhaps the most comprehensive non-partisan attempt yet to analyse hydrogen's potential, along with its drawbacks. Both President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have pinned their energy policies on a quest to develop hydrogen, touted as the "fuel of the future," capable of ending our dependency on foreign oil imports while greatly reducing tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases.

In his recent budget message to Congress, Bush called for a $ 228 mm hydrogen program in fiscal 2005, a 43 % increase from 2004, aimed at developing hydrogen fuel cell cars and the roadside infrastructure needed to keep them running.

Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger wants the state to turn its freeways into "hydrogen highways," tempting motorists to make the switch with a network of 200 fuel-cell replenishment stations. Details are expected to be announced in March along with an executive order from the governor's office.

"It will be an order for the state to march aggressively forward, using all available state resources and interaction with all public agencies and public-private partnerships," said Alan Lloyd, chairman of the California Air Resources Board.

Against the background of hydrogen's true believers, the National Academy of Sciences report seemed calculated to stay reasonably optimistic despite a host of reasons to be sceptical. Experts said those reasons involve basic performance and cost issues that will take research breakthroughs to solve:
-- For starters, fuel cells, which convert chemical energy into electricity, have a short lifespan and cost at least 10 times too much to present a cost-effective alternative in the consumer market.
-- A fuel-cell vehicle's driving range is only about half that of conventional cars.
-- Hydrogen must be manufactured, stored and transported using other energy sources, whether natural gas or coal or renewable generation strategies such as wind or biomass, which is made up of organic materials such as rice straw, switch grass, orchard prunings, agricultural waste and even dedicated crops.
-- There is no supply and manufacturing system capable of serving a mass market,and it's unclear how to bring such a system into existence.

Hydrogen, usually stored as an odourless gas under high pressure, needs specialized tanks and pipelines. Handling it raises some difficult safety issues, including the scary prospect of leaky tanks and exploding garages in the suburbs. The National Academy of Sciences panel, which included representatives from oil companies, car markers, environmental groups and academia, agreed with the politicians and manufacturers on one point: The most ubiquitous element in the universe, if harnessed here on Earth, has tremendous potential.
Hydrogen "could fundamentally transform the US energy system," the panel concluded. It's only a matter of time. Lots of time.
As the scientific panel noted, "there will likely be a lengthy transition period during which fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen are not competitive with internal combustion engine vehicles, including conventional gasoline and diesel fuel vehicles, and hybrid gasoline electric vehicles."

The scientists worked out what they considered to be an optimistic "upper bound" scenario for this transition to occur, using projections based on how quickly motorists are embracing the gas-electric hybrids now on the market, a much easier transition than the switch to hydrogen.
Optimistically, assuming hydrogen fuel cell cars hit the US market around 2015, as Bush suggests is possible, the panel concluded that hydrogen cars still would claim only a 25 % share by 2027 or so. Production of hydrogen for transportation would amount to 9 mm tpy by then, or just 8 % of the 110 mm tons needed to fuel a complete changeover from gasoline to hydrogen on the nation's roadways.

After the first hydrogen car is ready for showrooms, "it will take at least 25 years before it will have any big impact," said Michael Ramage, chair of the academy panel and a former executive vice president for technology programs at ExxonMobil. "Even if the cars are introduced in 2015, which is the president's vision, to get those cars intothe market, and the infrastructure built, is a long process."
By 2040, perhaps, hydrogen cars may have taken over new-car showrooms. Yet that might be too late to inoculate the United States against the vagaries of Middle East oil producers and reduce noxious fossil-fuel emissions in time to arrest devastating global climate changes.
"The bottom line is that it's going to be at least two or three decades before there's any significant number of fuel cell vehicles out there being bought by the public, and that's the optimistic scenario, if all goes well and the research challenges are met," said Antonia Herzog, a staff scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington, DC, who served as a member of the academy panel.

Given the risks of the hydrogen bubble bursting, the academy panel urged the Bush administration to adopt a "balanced portfolio" of energy research projects as a fallback. Also, the entire hydrogen program should be re-evaluated by outside experts every two years, and the program stopped and resources diverted elsewhere, if the many "challenges" turn out to be impassable barriers.
Because of the high cost of generating hydrogen from "green" renewable energy sources, some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of overselling hydrogen as a fix to problems that would be addressed better with here-and-now answers, such as better fuel efficiency or reductions in carbon emissions.

Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official during the Clinton administration and author of an upcoming book called "The Hype About Hydrogen," referred to hydrogen cars as "everybody's favourite techno-miracle."
Romm drives a hybrid, which he said is the best practical alternative now. Hydrogen is "a post-2030 technology," he said. "If your concern is global warming, hydrogen cars are not what you'll be doing for the next 30 years."

The National Academy of Sciences panel stopped short of writing off hydrogen, however. The birth of the hydrogen economy "won't be quick," saidpanel member James Sweeney, an economist at Stanford University. But he called it "a grand challenge" well worth taking up. The experts insisted that hydrogen fuel cells are the only futuristic energy carrier with a real chance of supplanting the internal combustion engine.
"Hydrogen is not going to happen in a major way tomorrow," Sperling said. "But if you look long term, at least for the transportation sector, there is no other good option."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle