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The Hydrogen Economy

Why hydrogen? Because hydrogen is a clean universal fuel that can be used to power cars, trucks, planes, trains, buses, boats and ships. Hydrogen can heat homes and commercial buildings, and generate electricity. Hydrogen can replace all forms of fossil fuels. A nation that has converted all of its power systems to run on hydrogen will no longer be dependent on oil because hydrogen can be extracted from water. Water molecules can be separated into pure hydrogen and oxygen through the process of Electrolysis—using electricity as the source of energy to drive the reaction. The electricity can be produced from many different sources of energy such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal as well as fossil and nuclear. A nation powered by hydrogen will be free to choose from many sources of energy, all of which will produce the one universal fuel: Hydrogen.

In addition to its fuel cell initiative, Ford Motor Company has developed new hydrogen powered internal combustion engines (ICE) that perform as well as gasoline engines. The new engines will allow Ford to take advantage of existing automobile technology for mass production. The Ford Model U concept car (shown right) is powered by the new Ford hydrogen ICE.

Ford's new tri-fuel engine

The Ford F-250 Super Chief pickup takes truck leadership to a new level – as the world's first vehicle with Tri-Flex fueling, enabling the supercharged V-10 to run for 500 miles between fill-ups on hydrogen, E85 ethanol or gasoline. The transition from hydrogen fuel power to either E85 or gasoline is handled seamlessly through a dashboard-mounted switch and can occur while the vehicle is in operation. Transition from either E85 or gasoline to hydrogen requires that the vehicle be at idle to allow for proper engagement of the supercharger, which only operates when the vehicle is powered by hydrogen. Hydrogen is the ultimate clean fuel of the future. It is not only the cleanest fuel, it is the most abundant element on Earth. And, E85 ethanol is a domestic, renewable, greenhouse gas-friendly fuel.

Links:
Hydrogen Vehicles
Driving the fuel-cell cars of tomorrow
Behind the Wheel - Honda FCX Concept — Consumer Reports drove the FCX Concept fuel-cell vehicle in Washington, D.C., at a Honda event attended by about 25 other journalists.
Daimler and Ford Like Fuel Cells So Much, They Bought the Company
Setting a World Driving Record with Hydrogen — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Cost of American Energy Independence — Yes we can do it now.

Pure hydrogen gas does not exist as a natural resource like oil. You cannot drill for hydrogen or discover it anywhere as a pure gas. Hydrogen must be extracted from some other natural resource like water, methane, biomass, coal or oil. In order to extract hydrogen from these natural resources energy must be spent. For this reason, Hydrogen is considered a carrier of energy like electricity, or a store for energy like a battery, rather than a source of energy like oil.

Therefore, an important question remains unanswered: Will the hydrogen gas that powers the new hydrogen ICE and fuel cell cars be made from imported fossil fuels or from America’s own natural resources? Hydrogen produced in America, from America's natural resources, would free the U.S.A. from dependence on foreign oil.

Hydrogen is superior to gasoline because hydrogen can be extracted from many different natural resources. Gasoline is superior to hydrogen because gasoline is easier to store, transport and handle.

Filling a fuel tank with hydrogen is not as easy as filling a tank with gasoline. The energy density (amount of energy for a given volume) of liquid hydrocarbons such as gasoline or diesel is much greater than the energy density of either compressed or liquid hydrogen. Storage of hydrogen gas is believed to be one of the most difficult challenges facing the hydrogen economy.

The problem is the difference in Energy Density between hydrogen and gasoline. It takes 2.2 pounds of hydrogen to equal the energy in one gallon of gasoline. Hydrogen is a gas, not a liquid like gasoline. Getting 2.2 pounds of hydrogen into a one gallon container is a very serious challenge. Many of the world’s best scientists are working to solve the problem.

Lincoln Composites, has developed a storage tank that may solve the problem by holding compressed hydrogen at 10,000 PSI. (See also, Dynetek)

Many techniques are being explored:

• Carbon nanotubes may hold the answer. Scientists are researching the possibility of storing and transporting hydrogen inside of porous metal powders: Carbon Nanotubes would work like a sponge to store hydrogen gas.
• New magnesium alloys can also absorb hydrogen like a sponge, store it safely for long periods and release it on demand when either the pressure or temperature is varied.
• Tiny glass micro spheres smaller than a grain of sand may sove the problem: Researchers envision tiny spheres storing hydrogen gas in cars.
• A revolutionary method of using concentrated solar energy for producing hydrogen in a clean, safe and inexpensive way was developed by a cooperation of scientists from Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and France. This new method, based on the production of pure zinc, may enable an easier and quicker move to a hydrogen-based economy. ZINC POWDER WILL DRIVE YOUR HYDROGEN CAR
• Crystals may be the ultimate answer. Scientists have created a chemical structure that has the largest internal surface area ever observed in a porous metal-organic material. Researchers at Michigan and Arizona State University have created a new porous crystal with an estimated surface area of 4500 meters squared per gram. The crystal can bind large quantities of hydrogen gas and may have potential for use as a hydrogen storage tank in transportation vehicles. See: “Crystal sponge” a hydrogen breakthrough?
• Another company, Millennium Cell, has developed a hydrogen Borax liquid fuel called Hydrogen on Demand™, a very promising techology.
• Chemical Hydrogen Storage offers great potential.

Summary of Hydrogen Storage Challenges

NREL Scientists Take On Hydrogen Storage: "The real challenge of hydrogen storage is finding a way to store enough of it to make it worthwhile—enough to fuel a vehicle for its required driving range, within the constraints of weight, volume, efficiency, and cost."

Transporting hydrogen from where it is made to where it will be consumed is also a challenge. Another challenge is public safety when handling hydrogen. Visualize yourself filling your tank with hydrogen; what do you see? Is it compressed to 10,000 PSI? Or is it liquid at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit? Would you want to handle that?

The H prize — The Hydrogen prize is modeled after the X Prize, which spurred the first privately funded suborbital human spaceflight. The goal of the “H” prize is to develop the most non-governmental way to break through to a hydrogen economy. “We want to harness the power of American ‘can do’ spirit and innate human competitive drive. A hydrogen economy can be closer than we think if we inspire some innovation. We in government need to show a commitment similar to President Kennedy’s commitment to the moon launch and a threat awareness similar to the awareness that drove the Manhattan project,” said U.S. House Science Research Subcommittee former Chairman Bob Inglis (R-SC).

• Technological advancements – Four $1 million prizes awarded annually in the categories of hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization.
• Prototypes – One $4 million prize awarded every other year for the creation of a working hydrogen vehicle prototype.
• Transformation technologies – A maximum $100 million prize -- $10 million in cash and up to $90 million in matching funds for private capital -- would be awarded for changes in hydrogen technologies that meet or exceed objective criteria in production and distribution to the consumer.

“Suddenly, the whole nation is focused on gas prices and our ‘addiction to oil’ and the Congress is in a panic trying to figure out how to respond,” said former Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). “Our options in the immediate future are limited, but our options in the mid-term and long-term are not.
“The hydrogen economy holds out great promise but it also presents great hurdles. We are pretty far away from knowing how to create, store, distribute and use hydrogen cleanly and efficiently. We need to devote all the ingenuity we can muster to attack this problem. That’s why I was so pleased when Chairman Inglis introduced H.R. 5143 – an innovative approach to encouraging innovative research. The bill is carefully crafted both to encourage ongoing work that can lead to incremental improvements in hydrogen technology, and to draw more scientists and engineers into trying to remove the highest hurdles on the hydrogen highway.”

BP, GM see hydrogen in their future — Companies agree that renewable energy is the future fuel of choice, but pursue a variety of options in the meantime.

Cheap Hydrogen Fuel — GE says its new machine could make the hydrogen economy affordable, by slashing the cost of water-splitting technology.

A Big Moment for GE’s Electrolyzer Team — Electrolyzers have been around for a while: the problem is that they are very expensive to build. Between the energy cost and the cost to buy the equipment you end up having to pay 3-4 times as much for the hydrogen than an equivalent amount of gasoline. So how do we make hydrogen cheaper? Raising the efficiency is good, but even at 100% efficiency it still would cost too much because of the equipment. So we make the electrolyzer cost less.

GM developing home hydrogen refueling device — By Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY “General Motors is building a prototype for a home hydrogen refueling unit in hope of selling fuel-cell cars by 2011. The unit, which would make hydrogen using either electricity or sunlight, would help sidestep one of the most vexing problems surrounding the creation of the pollution-free, alternative-power cars: how to persuade oil companies to invest in expensive new hydrogen stations that would compete with their core product, gasoline. The automaker's goal is an affordable, compact unit that would allow customers to fill their cars overnight in their own garages, says GM spokesman Scott Fosgard.”

Driving GM's New Hydrogen Car — By John Voelcker, The radical thing about Chevy's hydrogen concept car is how normal it feels to drive.

Research at Boston University —Magnesium hydride slurry, a liquid in which hydrogen gas can be temporarily “locked up.” The advantage, is that hydrogen gas can be stored in a slurry at standard temperature and atmospheric conditions, then released merely by adding water.

The many challenges facing the hydrogen economy, along with many proposed solutions, are presented and explained by Physicist Armory Lovins in Twenty Hydrogen Myths, a 50 page PDF document that can be downloaded from the Rocky Mountain Institute web site.

Amory Lovins's Hydrogen Primer is a highly condensed version of "Twenty Hydrogen Myths".

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYDROGEN — Wild promises abound, but can the simplest element in the universe really power our homes, fuel our cars and reduce our contribution to global warming? The November, 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics crunches the numbers on the real hydrogen economy.  BY Jeff Wise

Opposing views:

A rebuttal to Armory Lovins Twenty Hydrogen Myths-
         I agree that hydrogen looks good on the surface. Unfortunately, once you delve deeper than that, it begins to make absolutely no sense. The energy that you get from burning a hydrocarbon fuel comes from the hydrogen in the fuel - so, several decades ago, engineers started thinking "why not just separate out the hydrogen, so you wouldn't have to carry around all those carbons". That approach makes a lot of sense for rockets - where the most important thing is minimizing the mass. NASA can handle extremely expensive and inefficient-to-produce forms of fuel, since they have a huge budget. Minimizing mass is most important to them (for rockets, it's the mass that's most important - it doesn't matter if the fuel has a very low energy density so you need an enormous fuel tank, as long as the energy per unit mass can be kept low). Plus, the additional danger isn't all that important, since rockets are very dangerous to begin with. The problem is, that approach (wanting to not carry the carbons with the fuel) is utterly useless with automobiles. You have to use a lot of energy (and money) to extract the hydrogen from the fuel feedstock (whether biomass, fossil fuel, or water), and end up with a very undesirable fuel for automobiles - a very hard to contain gas with extremely low energy density. So, you have to compress or liquify it to get a reasonable energy density (or store it in a solid form, which ends up being considerably less efficient than even liquifying it).
         What the hydrogen proponents like Amory Lovins ignore is that compressed or liquified hydrogen is orders of magnitude more dangerous than uncompressed hydrogen. In Lovins' "20 myths about hydrogen", in #2 he claims that hydrogen is perfectly safe due to it being lighter than air, dispersing rapidly, and (the utterly false claim) that it requires a container of oblong shape to detonate. The first two are true of uncompressed hydrogen - it IS lighter than air, and disperses rapidly. The problem is, compressed or liquified hydrogen is not lighter than air, and does not disperse rapidly. With compressed hydrogen, a leak escapes with enough velocity that the static electricity is almost always enough to ignite the fuel, and it can not be extinguished (you can douse the leak with water continually, but the hydrogen will just continually reignite due to static electricity. And in fact, in the accidents involving hydrogen tankers that sprung leaks at valves, fire departments always had to continually douse the tanker all over with water until the hydrogen burned itself off (sometimes taking a full day to do so in a tanker), to prevent the tank from heating up enough to explode - which could level city blocks due to the stored mechanical energy in the highly compressed gas, not even counting the hydrogen igniting/detonating. Liquid hydrogen can be just as dangerous - do a search on Google for "BLEVE" - Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion.
         The main underlying problem with the hydrogen economy is that those carbons in the feedstock that you separate the hydrogen from serve some very useful purposes. They allow the fuel to have a much higher volumetric energy density (which is what matters for automobiles - not the mass energy density, which only matters for rockets), and depending on the type, can give it a very low volatility, high flash point, and simply make it far safer and more practical. So, why expend all that energy (and money) separating the hydrogen from those carbons, just to end up with a less desirable fuel? Consider this - for the most part, hydrogen is produced by extracting it from something else that could be turned into a liquid fuel far more easily (i.e. biomass, petroleum, coal, etc.) or from natural gas.
Michael S. Briggs
UNH Physics Department

A growing number of scientists are warning that valuable time and money is being wasted on hydrogen research-
The Hydrogen Hoax By Robert Zubrin, Ph.D.
The Hydrogen "Illusion" By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
Fuel Cell Efficiency: A Reality Check by Physicist Dominic Crea.
The Physics of the Hydrogen Economy By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
Renewables, Not Hydrogen, Is The Answer By David Doty, Ph.D.
Hydrogen vehicle won't be viable soon, MIT study says
The Future of the Hydrogen Economy: Bright or Bleak?
 —By Ulf Bossel, Baldur Eliasson and Gordon Taylor
    (Downloads a 39 page (240 KB) Adobe PDF document.)
The World Needs a Sustainable Energy Economy, not a Hydrogen Economy By Ulf Bossel, Ph.D.
Reviewing the Hydrogen Fuel and FreedomCAR Initiatives By Dr. Joseph Romm
 —Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy and
    Author, The Hype about Hydrogen (Island Press, March 2004)
    (Downloads a 10 page (60 KB) Adobe PDF document.)

A Better Way to Get From Here to There: A Commentary on the Hydrogen Economy and a Proposal for an Alternative Strategy

Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars are being road tested, but probably won't be affordable for most drivers for at least ten years-
The challenges to reach a hydrogen economy, however, are enormous, considering today’s state of knowledge and technical capabilities. The hydrogen economy consists of many physical and chemical processes linked in an interdependent network that connects production, distribution, storage, and use. Hydrogen in its various forms flows throughout the network, linking primary sources like hydrocarbons or seawater to storage media like alanates to end-use functions like fuel cells. Many of the processes in the network have been demonstrated in laboratory or prototype tests at some level, but nearly all of these processes remain to be proved in competitive environments against existing technology for cost, performance, and reliability.

The gap between present-day technology and commercial viability is vast. To be economically competitive with the present fossil fuel economy, the cost of fuel cells must be lowered by a factor of 10 or more, the cost of producing hydrogen by a factor of 4, and the performance and reliability of hydrogen technology for transportation and other uses must be improved dramatically (Abraham 2003). This gap cannot be bridged by incremental advances of the present state of the art. Bridging the gap requires not only creative engineering, but also revolutionary conceptual breakthroughs in understanding and controlling the physical and chemical processes that govern the interaction of hydrogen with materials. Such breakthroughs can only come from comprehensive basic research focused on the behavior of hydrogen at the atomic level, exploiting the remarkable recent advances in materials synthesis capabilities, forefront characterization tools, and creative theory and modeling. The best scientists from universities and national laboratories and the best engineers and scientists from industry must work in interdisciplinary groups to find breakthrough solutions to the fundamental problems of hydrogen production, storage, and use.

The formulation of such a basic research program must be coordinated with the needs of applied research and development and have coupled experimental and theoretical components for maximum impact. The hope is that these discoveries and related conceptual breakthroughs from basic research will provide a foundation for the innovative design of materials and processes that will produce qualitative improvements in the performance, cost, and reliability of the production, storage, and use of hydrogen so that an economically competitive hydrogen economy can eventually be realized.

As we ponder the benefits of a hydrogen economy, we also must consider other factors. The time scale required to develop the technology and the infrastructure needed to produce the amount of hydrogen required for a hydrogen economy is significant. In recognition of this long-term focus, we must consider complementary routes for achieving significant energy savings and environmental benefits in the near term, such as internal combustion/electric hybrid vehicles.
-Excerpt from Basic Research Needs for the Hydrogen Economy
A 178 page report from Argonne National Laboratory, funded by the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The report is a 7.5 MB Adobe PDF document.

Alternative Zero Emission fuels:
Hydrogen Peroxide and Sugar
— The carbon in the sugar is renewable, therefore "climate neutral" because the CO2 would be recycled from the atmosphere when new biomass is grown to supply more sugar.

Boron: A Better Energy Carrier than Hydrogen — by Graham Cowan

— Zinc Air Fuel Cell Technology
— eVionyx metal fuel Technology
— Running on Iron Metal nanoparticles show promise as future fuels.
— Hydrogen Power Inc. patented technology called Hydrogen Now™ which is based on a simple reaction of aluminum and water. The aluminum “splits” the water freeing the hydrogen and creating a benign byproduct of aluminum hydroxide (non-toxic, non-caustic, and recyclable).
— Aluminum in your car tank Purdue professor claims hydrogen breakthrough: A Purdue University engineer and National Medal of Technology winner says he's ready and able to start a revolution in clean energy. Professor Jerry Woodall and students have invented a way to use an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water — a process that could replace gasoline as well as its pollutants and emissions tied to global warming.

Hydrogen References:
Hydrogen Cars
Why Hydrogen?
Hydrogen Basics
Fool for fuel cells
DOE Hydrogen info
California Hydrogen Highways
Army signs up for hydrogen hybrid
Building a Hydrogen Transportation System
Hydrogen can be element of automotive revolution
ECD-Ovonics Tests Solid Storage Technology in Toyota Prius Hybrid
U.S. State Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Policy and Demonstration Database
FORD CELEBRATES PRODUCTION OF HYDROGEN-POWERED FOCUS FUEL CELL VEHICLE

Hydrogen web sites:
H Prize News
Think Hydrogen
Safe Hydrogen
www.virent.com
www.fuelcells.org
www.fuelcelltoday.com
www.hydrogen.energy.gov
www.hydrogenforecast.com
www.hydrogenconference.org
www.hydrogenassociation.org
California Zero Emission Vehicle Program

Recommended reading:
Our Energy Challenge by Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard E. Smalley
Zero Interest Financing —Investment Capital for American Energy Independence Projects

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