Black Hydrogen
Adamant Blog
The Green's Black Secret
As summer sizzles on , pundits are warming to Al Gore's popcorn film debut. One of the things that make An Inconvenient Truth a scary movie is that in its certitude it ignores our past, present and future dependence on the greatest of native American fuel sources. Al may dream of fields of switch grass as biofuel frenzy spreads like kudzu on K Sreet, but coal remains the mainstay of America's power supply. We export the stuff, and possess reserves reckoned in centuries.
American parents may remember coal outcropping in childhood memory, but few post-modern children would recognize a lump of the stuff if it fell out of a Christmas stocking. Coal is more on Europe's mind because the high cost of carbon permits makes then realize that more than CO2 is rising from their chimneys -It might be a tax rebate going up in smoke.
When natural gas is the fuel, the plumes they see on frosty mornings contain mostly water vapor. But even when coal is burned, the exhaust can be less than half CO2. For while Greens view hydrogen in natural gas as an environmental gold standard, there's hydrogen in coal as well. But how much? Enough to matter in terms of potentially saving America's skies from a superfluous extra billion tons of CO2 emission each year.Oil and gas reserves are dwindling, but coal remains so abundant that it costs nine times less per unit of contained energy than natural gas.
Little wonder Green Europe continues to consume it even though a Euro-permit to burn an extra truckload of coal costs as much as an ounce of gold. Elementary economics as well as environmental commonsense would suggest that saving CO2 emissions by burning more hydrogen and less carbon would earn a hefty rebate. Not so- the polemic equation of coal and carbon by America's Greens has blinded them to chemical reality -coal is never pure carbon. It's not even a mineral with a fixed chemical formula.
Coal is just a shorthand term for a spectrum of rocks rich in organic compounds, some relatively rich in hydrogen. Since America burns far more coal than natural gas, understanding what coal is made of is critical to understanding its impact on climate. The high carbon 'hard coal', called anthracite (anthrax is Greek for coal) is now rare as the steam locomotives it once fueled. Far commoner globally is bituminous coal. Biblical "bitumen is nowadays called asphalt, and the asphalt of Trinidad, the viscous oil of Venezuela, and North American coals rich in bitumen all belong to the same chemical continuum.
All coals contain hydrocarbons, and some coals contain far more hydrogen than others. America has these in abundance, and their hydrogen content already contributes considerably to generating the bulk of this nation's electrical power. Yet in our chemically illiterate society few recall the elementary fact that carbon atoms are twelve times heavier than those of hydrogen.
Atoms matter- CO2 emissions cannot be gauged by fuel weight alone because fuels burn one atom at a time, and a ton of hydrogen contains twelve times as many atoms as one of carbon, so common coals containing over 4% hydrogen by weight are roughly half as rich in hydrogen as liquid benzene or acetylene welding gas. Switching a power plant from low to high hydrogen coal can achieve a reduction in CO2 emissions of up to 15%. Were that the case nation wide, it would spare the world as much CO2 emission as raising America's automotive gas mileage by quite a few miles per gallon.
This scientific paradox is one neither coal lobbyists or "Green "natural gas spokesmen chose to publicize, but If as many environmentalists gave serious thought to coal as casually demonize it today , they might end up demanding increased mining of reserves high in hydrogen tomorrow. So far they haven't even informed themselves as to the possibilities- despite billions so far spent on 'alternative' energy, no one has assembled a data base ranking solid fuel deposits- there are thousands, by how much hydrogen contributes to the energy they yield. Why are ardent Greens anxious to keep the media, and the public ,in the dark about black hydrogen?
It may pain environmentalists to acknowledge that good coal is abundant enough to drive the bad out of circulation , but in the political here and now, their denial risks denying the developing word the only fossil fuel many nations can afford if they are to pursue energy conservation as well . Greens who care more about economic reality than scoring debating points may find the carrot of hydrogen rebates a more useful policy lever than the big stick of carbon taxes.
The author has written on science technology and energy policy in Nature, Physics Today and Forbes. Copyright 2006 Russell Seitz
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