The Myth of Hydrogen as Fuel

Honda has introduced its new wunderkar, a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric vehicle that is going to save the planet. What could be more perfect? It uses the most abundant element in the universe as its fuel and emits only heat and water as exhaust. Of course Honda is not the first to tout this new technology; GM, Ford and BMW all have similar projects underway, and the cars look very slick, the answer to all of our prayers.

There's just one problem. It will never work because of the basic properties of its fuel.

For those who may have skipped high school chemistry, and that seems to be everybody on the hydrogen bandwagon, Hydrogen as an energy source has one major, and a whole lot of smaller problems, that no one really wants to talk about. It is true that hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. But as any elementary chemistry student can tell us, we can't just dig a hole in the ground and have hydrogen come out. Hydrogen has to be liberated from whatever substance is holding it.

Of course good old H2O holds the key; we're talking about water and the Earth is two thirds covered with the stuff. Our energy problems are solved! Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; what could be simpler? Many of us have done the experiment where we make hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But hydrogen is a very simple atom, one proton, and one electron and it binds very tightly with other atoms into molecules. To break those bonds requires tremendous amounts of energy. Liberation of hydrogen through electrolysis is the most inefficient way to produce the gas. In his landmark article for The Proceedings of the IEEE; October, 2006, Ulf Bossel, Contributor to the Annual European Fuel Cell Conference, lays out the basic problem of using hydrogen as fuel. In his introduction he uses the example of airliners flying from Frankfurt, Germany on a daily basis:

"...About 50 jumbo jets leave Frankfurt Airport every day, each loaded with 130 tons of kerosene. If replaced on a 1 : 1 energy base by 50 tons of liquid hydrogen, the daily needs would be 2500 tons or 36 000 m3 of the cryogenic liquid, enough to fill 18 Olympic-size swimming pools. Every day 22 500 tons of water would have to be electrolyzed. The continuous output of eight 1-GW power plants would be required for electrolysis, liquefaction, and transport of hydrogen. If all 550 planes leaving the airport were converted to hydrogen, the entire water consumption of Frankfurt (650 000 inhabitants) and the output of 25 full-size power plants would be needed to meet the hydrogen demand of airplanes leaving just one airport in Germany."

Generating that electricity using conventional means is going to create a lot of pollution. In a report prepared for Senator Patrick Leahy by the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, the Cumberland #2 Power Plant in Tennessee generates 9MW of electricity per hour. That equates to 216MW per day. To generate this power the plant produces just over 9,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. To meet the energy need in the example above it would take 125 of these plants producing a whopping 108,000,000,000 tons of CO2 each year, all of which would have to be captured and sequestered. If the byproducts are released into the air that's a lot more pollution than would be created by just burning kerosene in all of those airplanes.

There are those who believe that the necessary electricity can be generated using wind or solar energy. The Energy Information Administration reports that in 2007 the United States produced 606MW hours of solar electricity. Again returning to our airport example this would have to be scaled up by a factor of over twenty just to meet the needs of one airport. Solar energy relies on light to generate power and unfortunately the light is not always steady. To generate hydrogen the power supply has to be "high quality" power. That means steady and continuous, something that any source of power subject to the vagaries of the weather is not and will never be. As shown above 100 times the solar generation we have now would not even produce a tiny fraction of the hydrogen we will need. Wind power fares somewhat better in this equation. The Frankfurt Airport could be supplied by simply increasing our current wind generation capacity by a factor of just less than ten.

There is another way to create all that hydrogen. It can be liberated from hydrocarbons relatively easily, that's how Professor Lowe filled his balloons during the Civil War and is the way it is done now for industrial uses. The hydrocarbon used is commonly good old crude oil. Methane gas which is produced as a byproduct of the refining process is captured and broken down into its constituent parts, one of which is hydrogen. But this is not a clean process. The reduction process releases sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide among other pollutants in large amounts and these wastes would need to be captured and sequestered, a very energy intensive process. This begs the question, since methane is a much more efficient carrier of energy than hydrogen is anyway, why go through the trouble of breaking it down in the first place?

The only way to produce hydrogen cleanly on the scale needed to fuel the largest economy in the world is through the use of nuclear power. Our current nuclear generation capacity provided just under 900 GW Hours or energy in 2007 enough to support about 30 airports of the size we are talking about. But then there are 19,000 airports in the U.S., ten of which are bigger than Frankfurt, three being twice as big. Aviation represents only a small portion of our overall energy needs, there are still millions of cars, trucks, and boats that need to be fueled. And then of course there is still the pesky problem of getting rid of all that spent nuclear fuel. I can see all those people driving their environmentally friendly, hydrogen powered cars to the protest rallies to stop the spent fuel from being transported through their towns now.

Producing the hydrogen is only the beginning. Once it is made it has to be transported to where it will be used. Here is another problem. In a 2006 Department of Energy report on the feasibility or Hydrogen as an energy source it was noted that not one part of our current energy infrastructure will work to transport or even contain hydrogen. Anyone who has ever had a helium balloon has seen how it gradually deflates over time. The common sense thought is that the children were playing with it and it sprung a leak. The reality is that the helium atoms are small enough to escape through the spaces between the molecules that make up the latex in the balloon. Hydrogen atoms are even smaller and harder to keep from escaping. According to the Department of Energy there are approximately 700 miles of pipeline in the U.S. capable of handling hydrogen, as opposed to over 1 million miles of natural gas pipeline. To transport hydrogen through pipelines will require a massive construction project. To transport oil, gasoline or even natural gas, two pipes can be joined with simple bolted flanges or welded by any reasonably skilled welder. With hydrogen every flange has to be assembled to a similar standard used for man-rated spacecraft. Every weld has to be done to a similar standard; every valve, every gauge, every pump has to be constructed, installed and maintained to this level of detail. The same applies to every fueling station in the country and every joint in every fuel system component in millions of cars. The cost will be huge, and on the needed scale, the standard may well be impossible to achieve. Even if it is achieved, as explained in Mr. Bossel's article, as much as 25% of the hydrogen put into the system will be lost due to "boil off" and leakage.

Even if the production and transportation problems are solved there is the question of safety. Keep in mind that gasoline is highly flammable, but it is a liquid that is easily contained. Gaseous hydrogen is highly explosive and very difficult to contain. The best current technology available for automobiles is the high pressure containment vessel under development at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This vessel contains an extremely flammable gas (hydrogen) under pressure at 3600psi. In a collision this storage vessel could become a deadly, explosive missile. This is not something that anyone is going to want in their garage. One way to mitigate this problem is to suspend the hydrogen in a metallic solid, which reduces the explosion danger, but energy has to be expended to get the hydrogen into that medium and then expended again to get it out. In an energy source that we expended tremendous amounts of energy to create and already lost nearly a quarter of just getting it to market, expending more energy just to make it usable is not economically viable.

Can the average driver handle hydrogen safely? It is hard to realize that gasoline is actually a very safe fuel. Liquid gasoline does not burn. The vapors will burn, but only under the proper fuel-air mixture conditions. This is why we can take a nozzle from a pump that anyone can learn to operate in a few seconds, put it in our gas inlet, and pump fuel without blowing ourselves up. Hydrogen explodes with very little provocation at a wide range of concentrations and temperatures. At room temperatures the static electricity from running your hand through your hair can cause it to ignite. This can be overcome through the use of liquid hydrogen, but that has another set of problems; can the average person safely handle a cryogenic liquid? How can the drivers, passengers and bystanders be protected from this super-cold liquid in a crash? Even if these questions can be answered there is still the problem of the energy equation. Liquid hydrogen will take more energy in its manufacture, transportation and storage than we will get from it as an energy source.

I tend to agree that we cannot drill our way out of the current energy crunch; but we can't conserve our way out of it either. In their 2004 report to Congress, A Hydrogen Economy and Fuel Cells: An Overview, Brent D. Yacobucci and Aimee E. Curtright asked if the government should be "...picking winners..." in what should be a decision made by the marketplace. Although they didn't answer their own question it has been answered for us as it has come to pass in the mandated increased use of bio-fuels derived from corn. The consequence that the Congress never imagined has come to pass, in the form of rising food prices, and an increase in hunger throughout the world because of those high prices. Emissions haven't been reduced because distilling all of that corn into ethanol is done using energy sources that pollute, and the lower energy volume of ethanol blended gasoline means more gasoline gets burned to go the same distance. Other sources of ethanol need to be found because there is something immoral about the industrialized countries competing with the emerging countries for food so we can put it in our gas tanks. There is a place for solar, for wind, geothermal, nuclear, conventional energy and even hydrogen in our energy infrastructure. But the marketplace must be left to freely develop the sources that make the most economic sense. If government gets involved it is most assured that they will choose wrongly and we will pay the consequences. New technologies will ultimately resolve our energy problems, but we have to face the fact that this will be an oil fueled economy for the foreseeable future.