Reflections on a Hydrogen Economy

by David Morris

The energy world is abuzz these days with talk of a hydrogen economy. A little over a year ago the U.S. government launched a $1.5 billion initiative to convert our transportation fleet to hydrogen. About the same time, the European Commission began to fund the European Integrated Hydrogen Project, a 20 industry-member effort to harmonize regulations and new codes for hydrogen fueled vehicles and filling stations.

This November, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham unveiled the National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap. A few days before his press conference, the European Commission established a High Level Group to evaluate the potential for a hydrogen economy within the European Union. Japans hydrogen program may be the most advanced of all. And then there’s the latest from President Bush.

What makes the hydrogen economy so attractive? One reason is that hydrogen can be produced from any existing fuel source. No one is left out.

The nuclear industry sees a hydrogen economy boosting nuclear power because, as Nucleonics Week recently asserted, it is the only way to produce hydrogen on a large scale without contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

Almost 20 percent of hydrogen produced in the world currently is made from coal. At the 2000 World Hydrogen Energy Congress in Beijing, Italy and China announced formal plans to cooperate to dramatically raise that percentage.

The automobile and oil companies, unsurprisingly, see conversion of gasoline to hydrogen as the way forward. Indeed, some thirty years ago, the phrase the hydrogen economy was coined by General Motors. In January 2001, Toyota joined the GM-Exxon/Mobil alliance to develop gasoline-based fuel cell cars. In June 2001, Nissan and Renault announced they would make gasoline-based fuel cell cars their priority.

Today, almost half of all commercial hydrogen is produced from natural gas. Most observers expect natural gas to be the feedstock of choice for hydrogen producers at least for the next one to two decades.

Renewable energy advocates embrace the hydrogen economy as vigorously as nonrenewable energy champions. Many envision a hydrogen economy based on the electrolysis of water by wind energy. Biomass may prove an even better short-term prospect.

At the risk of being considered the skunk at the picnic, I must say that this unqualified tidal wave of support for the hydrogen economy worries me. Remember the wise words of Albert Einstein: Perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age. What kind of hydrogen economy do we want? Few people are asking the hard questions.

Do we want on-board reforming of gasoline? A 1999 paper from the Hydrogen Technical Advisory Panel, a group of scientists charged with providing hydrogen policy advice to the US government, argued that both industry and government were providing substantially greater support for on-board fuel processing, despite the significantly greater long term societal benefits of direct hydrogen.

How do we respond to studies such as that reported below by two Swiss engineers who conclude that transporting and storing gaseous hydrogen is an energy sinkhole and that we should favor relying on hydrogen-carrying liquid fuels like methanol (or ethanol)?

Coal is the second cheapest feedstock (next to low-cost natural gas) for making hydrogen today, and for the foreseeable future. A hydrogen economy could well be based on coal. Is that what we want? At a minimum any coal gasification plant should be a zero emission facility that includes carbon capture and storage. In October 2000 BP and Ford donated $20 million to Princeton University to establish a Carbon Mitigation Initiative to explore the technical and economic viability of this approach. Carbon sequestration might add 11.5 cents per kilowatt-hour to the wholesale cost of coal, an additional cost that might still make coal-derived hydrogen the cheapest way to go.

For those of us who support decentralized and distributed energy sources, the thought of massive coal gasification plants in North Dakota transporting the gas by pipeline a thousand miles and more to Chicago is disconcerting.

Is there a better way? We should keep in mind that in most cases the energy used to make hydrogen could be distributed directly to the end user.

Indeed, back in 1993 William Hoagland, senior project coordinator at NRELs hydrogen program told Time magazine, I cant see why anyone would invest in additional equipment to make hydrogen rather than simply putting the electricity on the grid. This remark may be especially appropriate for decentralized electricity sources.

Photovoltaics, for example, generate electricity at a very high price. But as we are discovering, that high price may still be competitive with conventionally generated electricity when the transmission and distribution costs and impacts are taken into account. Similarly, as the price of solar cells drop, one could imagine that on-site storage of electricity (or the generation of hydrogen on-site) might be competitive with the generation of hydrogen in remote, large central power plants. Rather than on-board reformers, one could imagine a transportation system powered by a scaled up version of Medis Technologies direct liquid ethanol fuel cell.

Biomass generated hydrogen could produce hydrogen at a price competitive with that of natural gas and coal if markets were found for the co-products of the process. Given the massive amounts of hydrogen that would be needed, we need to begin now to identify and develop such markets.

Hydrogen is an energy carrier, like electricity. Like electricity, hydrogen can be produced from many kinds of feedstocks and in many kinds of system configurations. The long and difficult experience of trying to modify and fashion an electricity system based on decentralized and renewable energy based technologies offers a sobering reminder of the challenges before us. Do we want a centralized or decentralized, renewable or nonrenewable hydrogen future? What are the strategies that take us in the decentralized, renewable direction?

Even as billions of dollars in public and private money are being poured into producing hydrogen and perfecting fuel cells, we are very much at the beginning of the hydrogen era. Now is the time to ask the hard questions. Now is the time to design incentives and regulations and standards that foster technologies and an infrastructure compatible with our values.

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