Amory B. Lovins's Hydrogen Primer:A Few Basics About Hydrogen

by Amory B. Lovins

Many diverse authors have criticized hydrogen lately. Some call it a smokescreen to hide White House opposition to raising car efficiency using conventional technology, or fear that working on hydrogen would divert effort from rather than complement renewable energy deployment/adoption. Most reflect errors meriting a tutorial on basic hydrogen facts.

1. A whole hydrogen industry would need to be developed from scratch.

Wrong. Hydrogen manufacture and use is already a large and mature global industry. At least five percent of U.S. natural gas output is currently converted into industrial hydrogen, half of which is used in refineriesmainly to make gasoline and diesel fuel. Globally, about 50 million metric tons of hydrogen is now made for industrial use, about 35 times America’s consumption. Nearly all hydrogen is extracted (“reformed”) from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas, because that’s cheaper than electrolysis.

2. Hydrogen is too volatile and explosive to use as a fuel.

Wrong. Although all fuels are hazardous, hydrogen’s hazards are different from and generally more easily managed than those of hydrocarbon fuels. It’s 14.4 times lighter than air, four times more diffusive than natural gas, and 12 times more diffusive than gasolineso leaking hydrogen rapidly rises away from its source. Also, it needs at least four times the concentration of gasoline fumes to ignite, it burns with a nonluminous flame that can’t scorch you at a distance, and its burning emits no choking smoke or fumesonly water.

3. Making hydrogen uses more energy than it yields, making it impractical.

It would violate the laws of physics to convert any kind of energy into a larger amount of another kind of energy. Converting gasoline from crude oil is generally 75-90% efficient from wellhead to retail pump and electricity from fossil fuel is only about 30-35% efficient from coal to retail meter. Hydrogen is typically converted at efficiencies around 72-85%.

But hydrogen’s greater end-use efficiency can more than offset its conversion loss. From wellhead to car tank, oil is typically 88% efficient (the lost energy mainly fuels refining and distribution). From car tank to wheels, gasoline is typically 16% efficient. The average contemporary vehicle is thus about 14% efficient well-to-wheels. A hybrid vehicle like the Toyota Prius nearly doubles the gasoline-to-wheels efficiency to 30% and the total to 26%. But an advanced fuel-cell car’s 70% natural-gas-well-to-hydrogen-in-the-car-tank efficiency, times 60% tank-to-wheels efficiency, yields 42% – three times higher than the normal gasoline car or one and a half times higher than the gasoline-hybrid-electric car. Thus the energy lost in making hydrogen is more than made up by its extremely efficient use, saving both fuel and money.

4. Delivering hydrogen to users would consume most of the energy it contains.

Wrong. Two Swiss scientists recently analyzed the energy needed to compress or liquefy, store, pipe, and truck hydrogen. Their net-energy figures are basically sound but their widely quoted conclusion that because hydrogen is so light, “its physical properties are incompatible with the requirements of the energy market” is not. In fact, their paper, published by the competing Methanol Institute, simply catalogues certain hydrogen processes that most in the industry have already rejected, except in special niche markets, because they’re too costly, including pipelines many thousands of kilometers long, liquid-hydrogen systems (except for rockets and aircraft), and delivery in steel trucks weighing more than one hundred times as much as the hydrogen carried.

The authors also focus almost exclusively on the costliest production method – electrolysis. They admit that reforming fossil fuel is much cheaper, but reject it because, they claim, it releases more CO₂ than simply burning the original hydrocarbon. That ignores hydrogen’s more efficient use: even under conservative assumptions about car design, a good natural-gas reformer makes hydrogen for a fuel-cell car releases between 40-67 percent less CO₂ per mile than burning hydrocarbon fuel in an otherwise identical gasoline-engine car, because the fuel cell is 23 times more efficient than the engine.

Even more fundamentally, the Swiss authors analyzed only costly centralized ways to make hydrogen. Most industry strategists suggest at least for the next couple of decades decentralized production at or near the customer, using the excess off-peak capacity of existing gas and electricity distribution systems instead of building the new hydrogen distribution infrastructure whose costs the Swiss analysis finds so excessive.

5. Hydrogen can’t be distributed in existing pipelines, requiring costly new ones.

Wrong. If remote, centralized production of hydrogen eventually did prove competitive or necessary, existing gas transmission pipelines could generally be converted by adding polymer-composite liners, similar to those now used to renovate old water and sewer pipes, plus a hydrogen-blocking coating or liner, and by converting the compressors. Even earlier, existing pipelines could carry a mixture of hydrogen, up to a certain level, to “stretch” natural gas; users of fuel cells could separate the two gases with special membranes. Some newer pipelines already have hydrogen-ready alloys and seals, and all future ones should be made hydrogen-compatible, as Japan intends for its big Siberia-China-Japan gas pipeline. As for gas distribution pipes, many older systems are already largely or wholly hydrogen-compatible because they were originally built for “town gas” (synthetic gas that’s up to 60 percent hydrogen by volume).

6. We don’t have practical ways to use hydrogen to run cars, so we must use liquid fuels.

Wrong. Turning wheels with electric motors has well-known advantages of torque, ruggedness, reliability, simplicity, controllability, quietness, and low cost. Heavy and costly batteries have limited battery-electric cars to small niche markets, although the miniature lithium batteries now used in cell phones are several fold better. But California regulators’ initial focus on battery cars had a huge societal value because it greatly advanced electric drive systems. The question is only where to get the electricity. Hybrid-electric cars now on the market from Honda and Toyota, and soon from virtually all auto-makers, make the electricity with on-board engine-generators, or recover it from braking. This gives the benefits of electric propulsion without the disadvantages of batteries. Still better will be fuel cells – the most efficient (50-70% from hydrogen to direct-current electricity), clean, and reliable known way to make fuel into electricity.

Testing of vehicular fuel cells is well advanced. Already, many manufacturers have tens of fuel-cell buses and over 100 fuel-cell cars on the road; a German website reports 156 different kinds of fuel-cell concept cars and 68 demonstration hydrogen filling stations; and Fedex and UPS reportedly plan to introduce fuel-cell trucks by 2008.

Some automakers formerly assumed they must extract hydrogen from gasoline (or methanol) aboard cars, using portable reformers, for two reasons: tanks of compressed hydrog
en would be too big because hydrogen has so much less energy per unit volume than liquid fuels, and it would be too hard or costly to shift today’s fueling infrastructure from gasoline to hydrogen. Both these problems have now been solved, so few automakers still favor on-board gasoline reformers. That’s good, because they’re very difficult and problematic, and would cut gasoline-to-wheels efficiency to or below that of a good gasoline-engine car.

Since almost all automakers now agree that reformers should be at or near the filling station, not aboard the car, there’s no longer any reason to reform gasoline: natural gas is much cheaper, and is easier to reform. Hydrogen will thus displace gasoline altogether, without spending the energy and money to make gasoline first. There is similarly little reason to “bridge” with methanol, except perhaps to run fuel cells in very portable devices like vacuum cleaners, cell phones, computers, and hearing aids.

7. We lack a safe and affordable way to store hydrogen in cars.

Wrong. Such firms as Quantum (partly owned by GM) and Dynetek now sell filament-wound carbon-fiber tanks lined with an aluminized polyester bladder. They are extremely rugged and safe, unscathed in crashes that flatten steel cars and shred gasoline tanks. The car isn’t driving around with highly pressurized pipes, either, because the hydrogen is throttled to the fuel cell’s low pressure before it leaves the tank. That pressure reduction is done inside the carbon shell, eliminating external high-pressure plumbing. Such aerospace-style tanks operating at up to 700 bar and tested above 1,656 bar have been tested by GM in fuel-cell cars and have been legally approved in Germany; U.S. authorities, who’ve licensed 345-bar tanks, are expected to follow suit shortly. The carbon-fiber tanks could be mass-produced for just a few hundred dollars, and can hold 1119 percent hydrogen by mass, depending on pressure and safety margin.

A 345-bar tank is nearly ten times as big as a gasoline tank holding the same energy. But since the fuel cell is 23 times more efficient than a gasoline engine, the hydrogen tank is only 35 times bigger for the same driving range. Lighter, stronger, more efficient cars and their more compact propulsion systems can largely make up that difference. The result works so well in all respects that further advances in hydrogen storage, or costly work-arounds like liquid hydrogen, simply aren’t necessary.

8. Compressing hydrogen for automotive storage tanks takes too much energy.

Wrong. Filling tanks to 345 bar takes electricity equivalent to about 912 percent of the hydrogen’s energy content. However, most of that energy can then be recovered aboard the car by reducing the pressure back to what the fuel cell needs (~0.33 bar) through a turbo expander. Also, the compressor’s externally rejected heat can be put to use. And compression energy is logarithmic it takes about the same amount of energy to compress from 10 to 100 bar as from 1 to 10 bar, so using a 700-bar instead of a 345-bar tank adds only one percentage point to the energy requirement. Modern electrolyzers are therefore often designed to produce 30-bar hydrogen, halving the compression energy required for tank filling. The latest electrolyzers can cut it by three-fourths.

9. Hydrogen is too expensive to compete with gasoline.

Wrong. Using fuel-cell cars 2.2 times as efficient as gasoline cars, onsite miniature reformers made in quantities of some hundreds each supporting at least a few hundred fuel-cell vehicles and using natural gas at $5.69 per gigajoule or $6 per million British thermal units could deliver hydrogen into cars at well below $2 per kilogram. That’s as cheap per mile as U.S. untaxed wholesale gasoline ($0.90 per U.S. gallon or $0.24 per liter). Other countries often pay more for both natural gas and gasoline, so miniature reformers tend to retain their advantage abroad.

Only a tiny fraction of hydrogen is made electrolytically, because this method can’t compete with reforming natural gas unless the electricity is very cheap or heavily subsidized, or the electrolysis is done on a very small scale (a neighborhood with up to a few dozen cars). However, mass-produced (around one million units) electrolyzers each serving a few to a few dozen cars could beat taxed U.S. gasoline even using three cent per kilowatt-hour off-peak electricity, so household-to-neighborhood-scale electrolyzers could be a successful niche market if enough units were made. Yet such units, even initially using fossil-fueled electricity that might increase net carbon output per car, would be small enough to create little electrical load or climatic concern. Their market role would be temporary, or they would switch to using electricity from renewable sources.

10. We’d need to lace the country with ubiquitous hydrogen production, distribution, and delivery infrastructure before we could sell the first hydrogen car, but that’s impractical and far too costlyprobably hundreds of billions of dollars.

Wrong. RMI’s 1999 hydrogen strategy (see “A Strategy for the Hydrogen Transition,” shows how to build up hydrogen supply and demand profitably at each step, starting now, by interlinking deployment of fuel cells in buildings and in hydrogen-ready vehicles, so each helps the other happen faster. Such linkage was adopted in November 2001 by the Department of Energy and is part of the business strategy of major auto and energy companies.

Extensive analysis by the main analyst for Ford Motor Company’s hydrogen program indicates that a hydrogen fueling infrastructure based on miniature natural gas reformers, including sustaining their natural gas supply, will cost about $600 per car less than sustaining the existing gasoline fueling infrastructure, thus saving about $1 trillion worldwide over the next forty years. In absolute terms, a filling-station-sized gas reformer, compressor, and delivery equipment would cost about $24 billion to install in an adequate fraction (1020 percent) of the nation’s nearly 180,000 filling stations. Even a small (twenty cars per day) reformer would cost only about a tenth as much as a modern gasoline filling station costs (about $1.5 million, not counting the roughly threefold larger investment to produce and deliver the gasoline to its tanksa far more capital-intensive enterprise than for natural gas).

Although more work is needed to pin down the numbers exactly, other analysts are also starting to conclude that switching from oil to hydrogen could be not costly but profitable. For example, Mary Tolan, who leads Accenture’s $2-billion energy practice, estimates that a one-time $280-billion investment in hydrogen and the natural gas capacity to make it could save a roughly comparable oil-industry investment, plus $200 billion in oil imports every year by 2020.

12. Since renewables are currently too costly, hydrogen would have to be made from fossil fuels or nuclear energy.

Hydrogen would indeed be made in the short run, as it is now, mainly from natural gas, but when the hydrogen is used in fuel cells, total carbon emissions per mile would be cut by about half using ordinary cars (equipped with fuel cells) or about 80-plus percent using quintupled-efficiency vehicles. That’s a lot better than likely reductions without hydrogen, and is a sound interim step while zero-carbon hydrogen sources are being deployed.

Remember that long-term, large-scale choices for making hydrogen are not limited to costly renewables-or-nuclear-electrolysis vs. carbon-releasing natural-gas reforming. Reformers can use a wide range of
biomass feedstocks which, if sustainably grown, don’t harm the climate. With either biomass or fossil-fuel feedstocks, reformers can also sequester carbon (already being tested in the North Sea, and looking promising). If sequestration doesn’t work, the Victorian carbon-black process for making hydrogen, with zero carbon emissions into the air, is also 50+ percent efficient, offering a good backstop technology.

12a. A hydrogen economy would require the construction of many new coal and nuclear power stations.

This fear of many environmentalists is unfounded. New nuclear plants would deliver electricity at about 23 times the cost of new windpower, 510 times that of new gas-fired cogeneration in industry and buildings, and 1030+ times that of efficient use, so they won’t be built with private capital, with or without a hydrogen transition. The 207 “distributed benefits” recently described in Small Is Profitable further increase nuclear power’s disadvantage, often by as much as tenfold.

12b. A hydrogen economy would retard the adoption of renewable energy by competing for R&D budget, being misspent, and taking away future markets.

This concern is partly prompted by allegations probably unprovable either way that the Department of Energy may have diverted funds that Congress voted for renewable R&D into fossil-fuel hydrogen programs. Such diversion would be illegal and unwise. Unfortunately, such a reallocation is proposed in the President’s 2004 budget. Both many renewables and many hydrogen programs are worthwhile and important for national prosperity and security, so we should do both, not sacrifice one for the other. Fortunately, hydrogen creates important new economic opportunities and advantages for many renewable energy sources, so a well-designed hydrogen economy should speed up renewables’ wide adoption.

12c. Making hydrogen from natural gas would quickly deplete our gas reserves.

At least five percent of U.S. natural gas is currently used to make industrial hydrogen. Making enough hydrogen to run an entire U.S. fleet of quintupled-efficiency light vehicles would take only about one-fifth of current U.S. gas production. But gas use wouldn’t actually increase by nearly that much if at all.

In fact, the sort of integrated hydrogen transition that RMI recommends and GM (among others) assumes may even decrease net U.S. consumption of natural gas by saving more gas in displaced power plants, furnaces, boilers, and refinery hydrogen production than is made into hydrogen. In other words, a well-designed hydrogen transition may well reduce U.S. consumption of oil and natural gas simultaneously.

13. A viable hydrogen transition would take 3050 years or more to complete, and hardly anything worthwhile could be done within the next 20 years.

Quintupled-efficiency vehicles, under development since 1991, could in principle ramp up production as soon as 2007 with aggressive investment and licensing to manufacturers. Such vehicles could make the hydrogen transition very rapid. Although very long transition times have been reported as inevitable according to unnamed experts, many other experts feel the transition could take off quickly. Accelerated-scrappage feebates could turn over most of the U.S. car fleet in less than a decade if desired. The scores of hydrogen refueling stations in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. could grow rapidly: Deutsche Shell has said hydrogen could be dispensed from all its German stations within two years if desired.

14. The hydrogen transition requires a big (say, $100300 billion) federal crash program, similar to the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project.

Many political leaders and activists cite such large, round numbers to symbolize the level of investment and commitment they consider appropriate. However, it’s not clear that a federal crash program is the right model when there’s plenty of skill and motivation in the private sector to introduce hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles rapidly if they can compete fairly. This is difficult when, for example, the latest tax law makes up to $100,000 spent on a Hummer (bought ostensibly for business purposes) deductable in new tax breaks, federal funds for automotive innovation virtually exclude innovation-rich small businesses, global and state initiatives to make carbon costs visible are opposed by the federal government (disadvantaging U.S. businesses), and feebates aren’t yet on the agenda.

The total cost of a hydrogen transition is probably a lot more than the $1.7 billion proposed by President Bush over the next five years, but is probably far less than $100 billion. It may not be much bigger than the billions of dollars that the private sector has already committed to pieces of the puzzle if the money is intelligently spent on an integrated buildings-and-vehicles transition that bootstraps its investment from its own revenue and earns an attractive return at each stage. And evidence is emerging that this future will be more profitable, not only for customers and the earth, but even for oil companies.

This article is a condensed version of “Twenty Hydrogen Myths,” a detailed paper correcting many errors recently published about hydrogen. Read the full article.

FROM Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.