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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (5191)	11/26/2006 3:16:42 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24224

Intrigue over hydrogen as auto fuel? It’s not the science fiction you may think By Ben Bova Sunday, November 26, 2006 Be careful drinking your next glass of water. You’ll be swallowing what might well be the stuff that fuels our civilization in the near future. It’s not the water, exactly. It’s the hydrogen in the water. Powerful stuff, hydrogen. It could be the fuel that ultimately replaces petroleum, natural gas and coal. I’ve been thinking about hydrogen fuel since the early 1960s, and now I’ve written a novel about what might happen when we get to the point where hydrogen can be used to power your automobile. The novel is titled “The Green Trap.” It’s not science fiction. It’s set solidly in the here-and-now. It’s a thriller, with plenty of mystery, suspense, romance and skullduggery. The basic premise of the novel is this: if somebody came up with a way to make hydrogen fuel cheaply and efficiently, the oil industry would try its damnedest to suppress the discovery. Does that sound cynical? Perhaps it is. But let’s look at the facts. Back in the 1970s, when the ultraconservative mullahs led by the Ayatollah Komeini overthrew the Shah of Iran, we tumbled into an “energy crisis.” Prices for gasoline skyrocketed and there were gasoline shortages all across the land. Politicians and pundits loudly declaimed that the United States must become “energy independent.” Washington offered tax breaks and other incentives for alternative forms of producing energy. My innovative wife and I put solar panels on our home in Connecticut and generated our own domestic hot water, even in the middle of snowy winters. But oil prices went down after a while and the government’s enthusiasm for alternative fuels melted away. Anyone with a brain in his head knew thirty-some years ago that we needed to get away from our growing dependence on imported petroleum. But we kept importing more and more of it, until today more than a third of our fuel comes from overseas — mostly the Middle East. Not only do these imports entangle us in the bloody politics of the Mideast, burning petroleum and other fossil fuels (natural gas, coal) pours carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it traps heat and contributes strongly to global warming. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, so do global temperatures. Using hydrogen as the fuel for our cars and airplanes and other transport vehicles makes a considerable amount of sense. Burning hydrogen does not produce CO2, it produces water vapor. You can drink the stuff coming out of the exhaust pipe of a hydrogen-fueled car! Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, but since the hydrogen would be coming from water in the first place, the net amount of water vapor put into the atmosphere wouldn’t be changed by much. So why hasn’t somebody developed an efficient way to produce hydrogen fuels to replace gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels in the thirty-some years since the first “energy crisis?” Here’s what the Chevron Oil Company has to say about hydrogen, in their advertisement in the December 2006 issue of Scientific American magazine: Today, hydrogen is four times more expensive to produce than gasoline., and a single hydrogen-powered car costs almost a million dollars to build. But hydrogen promises to be a clean source of transportation fuel one day. So Chevron and its partners are pursuing cutting-edge technology that produces hydrogen on-site, on-demand. Two demonstration energy stations have already been built, with more on the way. A million dollars to build a hydrogen car? Bushwah! Innovators back in the 1970s converted ordinary autos to hydrogen fuel. It’s no big deal. Producing hydrogen is a problem, though. It takes more energy to get the hydrogen than the stuff will give you back in the form of fuel. For example, you can bake it out of hydrocarbons such as coal, but the process produces lots of greenhouse-enhancing carbon dioxide. Another way of producing hydrogen is to electrolyze water: an electrical current splits the H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen gases. To produce enough hydrogen to power the nation’s transportation vehicles would require an enormous number of multi-megawatt electrical power plants, running full time. Most likely the power plants would have to be nuclear, since nukes do not emit greenhouse gases. But nature has been cracking apart the water molecule cleanly, quietly and efficiently for billions of years. Using chlorophyll, green plants break H2O into hydrogen and oxygen every day, all around the world. They use the hydrogen to build hydrocarbon foodstuffs for themselves and release the oxygen as a waste product. In my novel, The Green Trap, a clever scientist figures out how to use nature’s chlorophyll trick to produce hydrogen fuel on an industrial scale. And he’s murdered, his data stolen. His brother tries to track down the murderers, which leads him into a whirlwind of intrigue, industrial espionage, and passionate romance. Once you’ve produced hydrogen you’ve got to get it to the individual autos and airplanes, etc., that would use it for fuel. Hydrogen is slippery stuff. It leaks through ordinary pipes and seals. However, NASA has learned how to deal with those problems. The main engines of the space shuttle burn liquefied hydrogen; liquid hydrogen has been used as the most efficient rocket fuel ever for some forty years. Now, suppose that instead of piping hydrogen cross-country you could produce it inside your car? Fill your fuel tank with water and split the H2O the way nature does, cleanly and quietly. That’s a possibility I raise in my novel. If someone came up with an efficient way to produce hydrogen fuels, would the oil industry try to suppress the invention? Put the question another way: why, in the past thirty years, hasn’t someone come up with an efficient way to produce hydrogen fuel? These are questions raised in The Green Trap. It’s not science fiction. It’s an historical novel that hasn’t happened — yet. --- THE GREEN TRAP is the 113th book published by Ben Bova, a Naples resident. Dr. Bova’s web site address is www.benbova.com. naplesnews.com