THE VINE MARCH 25, 2009
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
"The Obama administration is shifting much of the government's focus and funding from hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to plug-in electric vehicles," observes The Detroit News. No kidding. The Bush administration, recall, had a grand plan to put $1.2 billion toward developing vehicles that could run on futuristic fuel cells, which would use mere hydrogen to generate electricity. But with the recent economic-stimulus bill, the Obama administration has stopped ramping up these efforts, instead putting more money toward battery research and funding for plug-in electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt. Is this a smart call? I think so.
Some quick context: There are a number of ways to shift away from the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine, a much-needed move if we care to avoid climate disaster, seeing as how China and India will plop nearly a billion new cars on the road in the coming decades. Fuel-economy standards can be ratcheted way up, but that'll only go so far. Biofuels have problems galore, especially corn ethanol. Transit and rail can help reduce oil dependency and curb emissions, but we're never going to junk the personal automobile completely. So that leaves electric-drive vehicles or hydrogen fuel cells as major transport alternatives. Both options require heavy infrastructure investments and R&D, so it's not clear that we can just "let the market decide." Some sort of government direction will prove critical, which means politicians may have to make some difficult decisions and trade-offs.
Some of the bigger auto companies, incidentally, have long preferred to focus on hydrogen fuel cells. It's easy to see why they're so attractive. Hydrogen-fueled vehicles could be totally clean—emitting only water and heat. And, if the hydrogen is produced with renewable energy, greenhouse-gas emissions would be virtually zero. A fuel-cell car could, theoretically, generate enough electricity for a variety of onboard uses—you could stick everything from a hair dryer to an espresso machine in your car. And, because fuel cells would take up very little space, they'd allow carmakers a lot more design flexibility (right now, manufacturers have to work around the ungainly internal combustion engine, the large radiator, the mechanical driveline, the steering column…)
But hydrogen technology still faces a ton of awe-inspiring pitfalls. The vehicles are still hugely expensive, even compared with the hardly cheap Chevy Volt. Honda is praying it can get the price of a hydrogen car down to $100,000 in a decade. Maybe. Worse, building the fueling infrastructure for hydrogen cars will be insanely pricey: The National Academy of Sciences figures it would take the United States $55 billion of public investment just to get two million hydrogen cars on the road by 2023. (And that assumes manufacturing costs for the cars tumble down.) Then there are the logistical challenges of producing and delivering all that hydrogen. As The Economist recently reported, under the most feasible near-term production methods, which involve natural gas, fuel-cell cars end up creating more emissions than some small gasoline-powered cars.
By contrast, automakers are rolling out plug-in electric vehicles right now. The cars are cheaper and can help curb greenhouse-gas emissions immediately (this is clearly true if the cars are charged using renewable power, though coal is a murkier story). Granted, plug-in electric cars still require government aid if we want to bring them to market rapidly, from battery research to infrastructure support. But they're a lot nearer at hand. Now, some hydrogen critics, such as Joe Romm, have argued that the federal government should abandon nearly all of its hydrogen efforts, save for basic research, and put the money toward more immediate options—including plug-ins. At this point, that's looking like a solid argument.
(Flickr photo credit: Kris Kumar)
--Bradford Plumer
16 comments
Biofuels would work great if we just required flex fuel engines and stopped subsidizing specific fuels/sources (like the waste emphasis on corn-based ethanol). The problem is energy density and transfer. Liquid fuels are always going to be easier to transfer than a gas like hydrogen.
Plug-in hybrids that have flex fuel engines, thus a car that can run on either electricity/ethanol/methanol/gasoline or any combination would be the ideal. That way drivers can simply choose their fuel of preference (or cheapness)
- acria multa
March 25, 2009 at 5:20pm
acria--Thanks for reminding me, I've been meaning to post on the Open Fuel Standards Act floating around the House, which would accomplish a lot of what you mention. You've mentioned methanol a lot--aren't there concerns with how toxic it is?
- Brad Plumer
March 25, 2009 at 5:28pm
Other big problem with H2 is that either you crack it from hydrocarbons--the cheapest way to produce hydrogen--in which case it generates as much CO2 as if you'd just burned the hydrocarbon, or else you make it through electrolysis of water in which case you're basically using H2 in a fuel cell as a kind of portable battery which begs the question as to whether you're better off using a different redox reaction to store your electricity and delivering power to the point of use in high tension power lines instead of gas bottles and pipelines.
- aeromonas
March 26, 2009 at 5:22am
Hmmmm... Bush/Halliburton... I mean Bush/Cheney... in concert with our automakers were touting hydrogen for years as "the" solution to our oil woes, and now it turns out that Hydrogen might after all, never be a practical solution. How could we EVER have guessed that this would prove true?!?
My only disappointment in this, really, is in the utterly unfathomable gullibility of your average Joe Plumber.
- zaiquiri
March 26, 2009 at 1:11pm
Now if Robert Reich would only inch away from helium.
- teplukhin2you
March 26, 2009 at 2:25pm
Hydrogen is totally impractical. As mentioned above it must be produced either from a hydrocarbon source, electricity or coal via gasification. Flex fuel vehicles are probably desirable. I have recently seen a presentation suggesting that the combination with the best carbon reduction capability (well to wheels) is diesel hybrid. Diesel can be up to 20% biological, preferably from animal fat, not soy.
Paradoxically, E-85 (85% corn ethanol, 15% gasoline) is the worst - far worse than straight gasoline - and this is precisely where this Administration is pushing the industry to. Nobody who knows the subject, including EIA of DOE expects cellulosic ethanol to pan out either.
- r-ennis
March 26, 2009 at 3:45pm
Also, a generally overlooked potential problem is that H2 is itself a potent greenhouse gas, and if you have a billion cars running around world refueling with it, you're going to leak a lot of that potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. It has a relatively short atmospheric half life, but the containment problem is still quite real.
- sdemuth
March 26, 2009 at 6:26pm
"preferably from animal fat, not soy. "
You can't be serious. The ecological cost of raisng feed grains to producing animal fat for fuel would dwarf the ethanol madness, and the amount of waste animal fat to be diverted isn't enough to make much impact on our fuel use.
- sdemuth
March 26, 2009 at 6:38pm
My sources say otherwise sdemuth. I am researching availability as we speak. Of course I am speaking of pure waste and all biodiesel producers are touting this methodology.
- r-ennis
March 27, 2009 at 9:12am
Plumer writes:
"Worse, building the fueling infrastructure for hydrogen cars will be insanely pricey: The National Academy of Sciences figures it would take the United States $55 billion of public investment just to get two million hydrogen cars on the road by 2023."
I wish we would all stop talking as if the price tags on ANY form of alternative energy were huge, or in this case, "insanely pricey". $55 billion, dirt cheap. Look at what we spent on Iraq, over and over again, in borrowed funds, and called, "defense supplementals". And what did we get for it.
Instead, conventional wisdom holds that we're supposed to be happy with pennies dollops of a billion here and a billion there for various, non-strategic, low-scale, non-longitudinal efforts which kind of sort of meander towards an alternative fuel system.
No. Say no. TNR, as a whole group, say "NO!" to all of that. It doesn't matter what: solar, wind, electric cars - Doesn't matter! If Congress and government had the good sense to make just one huge, strategic investment in a major national overhaul/conversion, and plunked 1/10th into it as what we flushed down the toilet in Iraq, then we would increase world peace, gain energy independence and recharge the domestic economy, all at once.
So - hydrogen smydrogen. Don't care, but PLEASE stop talking like doing something real is doing something insane. Penny-wise Pound-stupid right up to the death bed, that's insane and that's what we're doing.
- dcwood10
March 27, 2009 at 12:20pm
dcwood10--That's fair. I guess I meant "insanely pricey" compared with the cost of rolling out plug-in infrastructure. But point taken.
- Brad Plumer
March 27, 2009 at 1:19pm
r-ennis: A quick back of envelope version: average us per capita gasoline consumption is 10 bbls, or roughly 3,300 lbs. Average per capita meat consumption is 220 lb. The energy content per unit weight of animal lipids and gasonline are +/- 10%, the same.
So let's assume that for every lb of meat you eat (I'm a vegetarian), there is 0.5 lb recoverable waste lipid (I think that's extremely generous, but let's use it). Let's also be generous and assume you can refine that into fuel at 100% efficiency. Then you've got enough animal fat to replace 3% of our gasoline use. Not liquid petroleum use - which in total is close 6 times our gasonline use, but gasoline alone.
Take out the generosity in my assumptions, and it only gets worse - and I suspect, much worse.
- sdemuth
March 27, 2009 at 1:42pm
The criticism of fuel cells is merited and that of production and distribution even more so. However, the difficulties with battery technologies are just as bad. The technical community deserves to be pilloried for not 'fessing up to the problems to be overcome. The failure to deliver will simply result in a loss of credibility. There is a lot of basic research needed for both batteries and fuel cells and both need the product development activities as well. We need to be more realistic about these systems and put real resources into overcoming the problems. $750B for failing financial institutions! Where would we be with that investment in batteries or fuel cells>
- jbkerr
March 29, 2009 at 2:15am
Tyson Foods alone produces 20,000 barrels per day of animal derived fats and greases and is in joint ventures with several alternate energy companies and oil refiners. Even if not a complete answer by any stretch, the availability is not insignificant.
- r-ennis
March 30, 2009 at 2:38pm
r-ennis: I'm all for using waste as fuel, including this type of waste. My point was that it is insignificant if you're looking for anything other than incremental fillips to some larger policy that really can carry the freight. And it is insignificant. Being able to replace at best small single digit percentages of our fuel use with animal biodiesel won't justify a new infrastructure, and won't by itself justify (as this thread was discussing) a switch to flex-fuel diesel. Tyson processes over 10% of the annual animal kill in the US. So they generate 20,000 barrels a day. That's 7.3 million barrels a year at 100% efficient conversion to diesel. That's less than a 1 day supply of fuel for the US. Add in all the other producers, and with luck you've got a week - about half to 2/3 of my generous back of envelope estimate.
Of course, the good news is there is so little of it that you can mix it into the diesel stream without flex fuel engines.
- sdemuth
March 30, 2009 at 9:33pm
sdemuth, road diesel usage in the country is approximately 3.5 million barrels per day. B5, 5% biodiesel will be the target for at least the next ten years. So, we are talking about 175,000 barrels per day of biodiesel. If, say, half can be supplied by animal fat (32 million barrels per year), what's wrong with that? It can save about $2-3 billion per year in oil imports.
Animal fat price is a fraction of soy oil, which requires a subsidy of $1.00 per gallon to be economic. Developing an environmentally friendly, sustainable energy future will have many components. This is one and it will help some small producers to stay in business. Microeconomics are important also.
- r-ennis
March 31, 2009 at 11:06am