Issue #3 – Hydrogen is not cost competitive with gasoline
This may be the most absurd claim of all. A report issued in 2004 by the National Research Council [NRC] of the National Academy of Sciences provided a fuel economy and cost comparison for operating gasoline powered [IC] cars, hybrid cars [HEV] that burn gasoline and fuel cell [FCV] cars running on hydrogen. The study assumed the IC would average 24 mpg, the HEV would average 34 mpg, and the FCV would average 58 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. A kilogram of hydrogen is roughly equivalent in energy to a gallon of gasoline. The FCV in the study was rated at 58 mpkg because it is two or more times as efficient at delivering power to the wheels as a gasoline IC engine. The cost of the gasoline was assumed to be $1.80/gallon. The cost of the hydrogen was assumed to be between $3.51/kg and 2.33/kg. Based on these parameters, the cost per mile to run an IC car was 8.3 cents; the HEV was 5.9 cents, and the hydrogen FCV was between 6.1 cents and 4 cents per mile. The HEV beats the FCV, using the highest cost assumed for the hydrogen. Of course, that was when the cost of gasoline was set at $1.80/gallon. The prices of gasoline and of natural gas have increased since the NRC study was completed. Even so, the cost comparison holds up. Hydrogen, in high volume production, is very competitive economically with gasoline. It goes beyond that. There are many indirect expenses that go with gasoline that are not reflected in the price at the pump. There are the billions in cost to defend foreign and domestic oil supplies. There is the enormous health cost from air pollution caused by our use of oil. There are the incalculable costs that go with atmospheric global climate change caused by our addiction to fossil fuels. None of these countless billions show up in the price of gasoline at the pump. If they were included, some estimates suggest the price of a gallon of gasoline would be ten dollars or more. By comparison, there are no energy fields, no defense costs that go with hydrogen. There are no health costs that go with hydrogen. There are almost no environmental costs that go with hydrogen, except, and this is a big exception, when the electricity used to make it comes from fossil fuel burning power plants. The answer to that problem is more renewable generating capacity and less reliance on fossil fuel energy.
Issue #4 – Hydrogen cars will be too expensive for average consumers
This issue revolves around fuel cells and the ability to produce them at a cost that is competitive with the cost of an internal combustion [IC] engine. It costs $30-50/Kw to mass produce an IC engine. To be competitive, an automotive fuel cell would have to cost something on the order of $50/Kw. In his book, Hell or High Water released late in 2006, Joe Romm states that fuel cells for cars cost about $2,000/Kw. That may be so when you build them by hand one at a time, but not when you mass produce them. At the end of 2005, Ballard Power Systems, partially owned by Ford and Chrysler, announced that they had reached a cost for an automotive fuel cell of $73/Kw, based on a projected annual production of 500,000 units. This projected figure was confirmed by an independent, external audit. Ballard expects to be at or below $50/Kw per projected unit within the next few years. General Motors has already announced that its projected fuel cell production cost will be at or below $50/Kw by 2010. Other automakers around the world are likely keeping pace as they are engaged in a feverish race to ready their fuel cell technologies for the competitive marketplace. Honda, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Hyundai, Nissan, Volkswagon and other car manufacturers are aiming to have mass produced fuel cell cars by 2015 or shortly thereafter. When it does happen, the cost of automotive fuel cells is expected to be competitive with the gasoline IC engine technology that has been dominant for the last 100 years.
Issue #5 - Producing hydrogen is the wrong way to use renewable energy
Why does it have to be either or? The solution to this problem is to build more renewable energy capacity. Not only is that the most environmentally benign way to generate hydrogen, it is also the best way to get off our dependence on coal fired power plants to meet the demand for electricity. There is more than enough wind, solar, geothermal, and hydrokinetic power potential to meet all of the world energy needs many times over. Researchers Mark Jacobson and Christine Archer from Stanford University studied 8,000 potential wind sites around the world. They found that 13 percent of those sites had enough wind to justify placement of a modern wind turbine. If all those sites were developed, the total generating capacity would be something like 72 terawatts. That is roughly 4-5 times the energy consumption for the entire world. The amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth is about 6,000 times the total amount of energy used by humans. We are just starting to exploit the potential of biofuels. There is also a huge amount of untapped geothermal energy capacity around the world, and the technologies to harvest the vast amounts of hydrokinetic power in river currents and ocean tides are just beginning to be commercialized. In the case of wind, geothermal, and hydro, the energy does not stop flowing at night when grid demand is at a minimum. The lower cost off-peak electric generating capacity can be turned to producing hydrogen that can be stored for later use when needed. It will take decades to fully implement the transition to renewable energy. The good news is it is already well underway, and with the right public policy, the pace of the transition to renewables can be accelerated to address the dire global climate change emergency at hand.
Issue #6 – The cost of building a hydrogen infrastructure is prohibitive
In his recent book, Hell and High Water, Joe Romm claims that a fully realized hydrogen production and fueling infrastructure in the U.S. will cost $500 billion dollars. Maybe… if you take on the whole enchilada at once. That’s not the way things work. A single hydrogen fueling station able to support a modest number of vehicles each day costs something on the order of $500,000 to $1,000,000 to put in place. A study commissioned by General Motors estimates that for about $12 billion dollars, 11,700 hydrogen fueling locations could be built, putting a station within 2 miles of 70 % of the U.S. population and every 25 miles along all interstate highways connecting our 100 largest cities. What about the hydrogen fuel for those stations? It will be made right on site, at first using natural gas, supplemented by biogas and methane from landfills, all steam reformed to hydrogen. As time goes on, and more clean, renewable energy capacity is on line, water electrolysis will assume more and more of the burden. An investment in hydrogen of twelve billion may seem like a lot of money, but…put in context, that’s about what it costs the U.S. Treasury to fund the occupation of Iraq for about three weeks. Imagine that, for about what Americans spend annually on chocolate candy or half of what we spend on cosmetics, we could install a new hydrogen fueling infrastructure that would help clean up the atmosphere, dramatically reduce the impact of global warming, improve the public health, end our dependence on foreign energy, and eliminate any justification for going to war over oil. Not a bad return on investment. The vision put forth by General Motors would support about a million hydrogen vehicles nationwide. It would be a good start, a foundation for an infrastructure that can be expanded as market forces reflect demand. With its ‘Hydrogen Highways’ Initiative, the state of California is already far ahead of the pack and will likely be the place where the hydrogen automotive revolution will gain a foothold. How long would it take to implement GM’s hydrogen infrastructure vision? With the right public policy incentives in place, how ‘bout a decade with money and time to spare.
Issue #7- Hydrogen vehicles do not have adequate range between fill ups
Range is one of the key performance factors that consumers will look at in considering an alternative automotive technology. The presumption is that 300 miles range between fill-ups is the threshold for public acceptance. Until recently, hydrogen powered vehicles were unable to carry enough hydrogen to meet this minimum range requirement. That is no longer the case. Compressed hydrogen storage systems designed for automotive use have passed a rigorous series of tests that far exceed the standards required for gasoline fuel tanks. These high pressure hydrogen storage systems are certified as meeting the safety requirements of the U.S. Department of Transportation as well as standards in Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world. The Honda FCX fuel cell vehicle and the General Motors fuel cell powered Equinox, using safety certified compressed hydrogen fuel tanks, have passed endurance tests on public highways, each going 300 miles on a single fill-up. More recently, Toyota’s Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle traveled 350 miles without stopping, and reportedly could have gone 480 miles on a single tank of hydrogen fuel. Other on board storage technologies are on the horizon. One employs carbon nanotechnology; another is built around solid, metal hydride materials. These two emerging technologies offer the possibility of even better range performance in future generations of hydrogen powered vehicles.
Issue #8 – Making Hydrogen will use too much water
Not so. John Turner, a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, has calculated that if the entire light duty vehicle fleet in the U.S. were all powered by fuel cells, the water required to make hydrogen fuel would be about 100 billion gallons annually. Compare that to the 300 billion gallons of water used annually in the production of gasoline, or the domestic, personal use of water, which amounts to about 4,800 billion gallons yearly. While we’re at it, another specious deception that has been getting extended play is the one that implies that the production of hydrogen generates massive amounts of global warming pollutants. Well, yes, when the electricity used comes from fossil fuel power plants. The hydrogen does not produce the pollution, the burning of coal or oil or natural gas to make electricity causes it. To characterize hydrogen as a direct cause of air pollution is a major stretch. The solution to this problem is to replace old dirty fossil energy plants with electricity generated by clean, renewable sources of energy. This is precisely what Al Gore, the Apollo Alliance, and many other advocacy groups have been urging the incoming Obama Administration to pursue. Inspired leadership and bold energy policy add up to both a revitalized economy and a clean energy future.Hype is mischaracterization to a more, rather than a lesser degree. There is positive hype and there is negative hype. It would be fair to say there was some positive hyping of expectations early on with hydrogen. It would also be correct to say there has been more than a little overblown, negative hype coming from Romm and his small but determined band of followers. When you carefully examine the charges put forth by these naysayers, they just don’t hold up. Anybody who still has doubts about that should read a paper by Amory Lovins and his outstanding team at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The reader can reference, Twenty Myths about Hydrogen’ at http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Energy/E03-05_20HydrogenMyths.pdf
The value of a level playing field
Is hydrogen a perfect energy carrier? There is no such thing, but in the current scheme of things, hydrogen does appear to go hand in hand very well with electricity.
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