On HYDROGEN: this is the big challenge, how to create hydrogen fuel without using fossil fuels or releasing carbon into the air to make it. That's why we need a Marshall Plan on hydrogen. To create the demand at the same time to create the supply in the cleanest possible way. I believe we can solve these problems if we all work together on it. The payoffs are enormous.
Here's an article.
'It presents a "chicken and egg dilemma" for the economy, says C.E. "Sandy" Thomas of H2Gen Innovations in Alexandria, Va. Fuel cells won't become affordable until they are mass-produced. Makers won't mass-produce them until hydrogen becomes more freely available.
Hydrogen makers, who now produce the gas in large plants for fertilizer and the petroleum industry, don't have an incentive to make the gas more widely available until fuel cells are around in big numbers.
The Natural Resources Defense Council calls for 2.5 million fuel-cell cars by 2020. That sounds like a lot, but it is only about 2% of the 133.6 million cars now on the road, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
More likely, Thomas and many others suggest, fuel cells will catch on with businesses, then homeowners, as generators that can be parked outside like air conditioning units before they become commonplace on highways. Unlike that used in cars, a home fuel cell won't face space and weight constraints and could work with hydrogen taken from natural gas already commonly pumped into homes.
GM hopes to finance the first fuel-cell purchases with attractive loans to get the market going.
"Definitely, fuel cells are coming in your lifetime," Fronk says. "A lot of the technology is converging to make them attractive."
Because the cost to produce individual fuel cells only starts to go down when they are produced in large numbers, Thomas says, even if hydrogen were made as cheaply as possible, it would only become competitive with gasoline in cost at about 90 cents a gallon wholesale, once typical service stations nationwide start selling the stuff to more than 1,000 vehicles.
Sadly, hydrogen doesn't come from a hole in the ground. "It's not like we can mine the stuff," says Carl Bauer of the Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va. Hydrogen exists in combination with other atoms, like oxygen in water and carbon in coal. Two main collection processes exist:
Electrolysis, or zapping water with electric current to separate hydrogen from oxygen molecules.
Reformers, or blasting fossil fuel or methanol with high-temperature steam to strip hydrogen away.
Unfortunately, to work, both are going to require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. But some day that may not be the case.
Now, chemical companies mostly create hydrogen for the fertilizer and petroleum industries and ship it as liquid in refrigerated tanks. They use large-scale reformers that combine natural gas or coal with steam to separate hydrogen from the fossil fuels. What's left over is mostly carbon, which makes carbon dioxide, the gas thought responsible for climate changes predicted for this century, when it is released into the air.
Alternately, using electrolysis on a large scale to create hydrogen may present more carbon dioxide problems. Almost all electricity nationwide is made using coal.
Asking those power plants to make more electricity to create hydrogen to power the nation's automobiles could add even more carbon dioxide to the air than gasoline-fueled cars do now.
Many fuel-cell makers now plan to use small reformer devices that convert fossil fuels, such as gasoline or natural gas, directly into hydrogen. Even if they produce carbon dioxide, fuel-cell makers say, it will be only half as much of the amount produced by less-efficient internal combustion engines.
Getting around the carbon pollution problem by "capturing" it as it emerges from smokestacks has not become economical or efficient enough to garner widespread use, says Ken Humphreys, director of climate change solutions for Battelle/Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland, Wash. He is optimistic, though, saying, "I think if we put our minds to it, we can resolve the problems related to fossil fuels in the next 20 years and develop a zero-emissions fossil-fuel plant."
In the long run, environmentalists would like to see the energy system switch to plants powered by "renewable" resources, such as solar, wind and "biomass" energy, Podesta says. Meanwhile, he says, the Natural Resources Defense Council knows that fossil fuels will be a needed bridge to fuel cells.
And a shift to workable low-emissions energy will be needed, Humphreys says. Most climate change experts now agree that global warming of a few degrees is inevitable in this century, hurting farms, reservoirs and forests and causing tremendous economic dislocation worldwide.
"The negative consequences of failing to act now will cost trillions of dollars later," Humphreys says. |
