TMLutas writes about ending the oil age and retail hydrogen, but my understanding of the "hydrogen economy" is that the range provided by a reasonably sized and priced hydrogen combustion engine is absolutely pathetic.
The hydrogen Cobra specs include a top speed of 140 mph and 0-60 mph in four seconds. The downside: the hydrogen tank's range is around 80 miles.No one is going to buy a $150,000 car that needs to be refueled every 80 miles, even if anyone ever gets around to building hydrogen fueling stations. What about fuel cell cars?
Anuvu, a fuel cell developer in Sacramento, Calif., says it's almost ready to sell Nissan Frontier pickups and large cargo vans that run on fuel cells and hydrogen.Hm, cargo vans that can't transport cargo on freeways... I think I'll pass. Oh, and they're $150,000 also.The Frontier's specs include 0-60 mph in 10 seconds and a top speed of 80 mph. At speeds above 45 mph, the battery drains faster than the fuel cell can recharge it, which reduces its 250-mile city range to just 60 miles on the highway.
Anyway, the technology may improve (although there are physical limits to how much hydrogen can be safely compressed and to how much energy can be extracted) but is there a point? After all, hydrogen can't be pumped out of the ground; unlike fossil fuels, it takes more energy to refine and package a kilo of hydrogen gas than the gas itself contains. Where does that energy come from? Mostly coal, oil, and gas. So all we're really talking about is converting one energy form to another, and losing some in the process due to inefficiencies.
The only good thing about hydrogen cars is that they cause less pollution where they're used than do gasoline cars. Of course, since it takes fossil fuel energy to create the hydrogen, the pollution still exists, just somewhere else (wherever the power plant is).
This is all based on my current understanding of the technology, and I'd be happy to be instructed differently if I'm mistaken. Here's info on the President's Hydrogen Initiative. Here's more on The Hydrogen Economy.
Part of the reason for the hydrogen ecomony is that it doesn't _only_ take fossil fuels to produce it. You could make it with wind power, solar, or trash heaps. Lots of stuff produces heat/energy in sufficient amount that could be used to produce Hydrogen.
I'm actually quite surprized by you. Shouldn't moving to a hydrogen economy be the number one component of our national security plan? As long as we are dependant upon the caprices of third world dictators, can we really be considered safe?
Hydrogen tanks are just getting to the point where they're being certified as being strong enough to hold 300 miles worth of hydrogen (which is about what you get in most conventional ICE vehicles).
For 2004, fuel cell vehicles are being put on the road for specialized functions like local vans delivering mail or local delivery trucks. It's not surprising that when you take them out of the scenario these specialized vehicles are built for, they suck wind at doing something else. Don't enter your stock Grand Am at the Daytona 500 either.
Every year, the cells are getting better at delivering power from a given amount of hydrogen, the tanks are gaining more storage capacity in the same volume, and now it's time to start rolling out retail hydrogen pumps, which is what I was reporting on. The best guess (according to GM) is that it'll be 2009-2010 before they get to the point where you go to a dealer and get a mass market FC car to replace your 6 cylinder ICE sedan at a reasonable price. Until then, it's all bleeding edge technology and hold onto your wallet sticker shock.
Hydrogen can be generated in many pathways, some of which require energy from polluting sources (petroleum steam reformation is one example) some not (you can use a solar sell to dissociate water into its component parts). Because of the many different ways to create sufficiently pure hydrogen for fuel cell use, you can't really make broad statements that are true of all the different pathways. It's also likely that the world won't settle on one single pathway as being best over the long haul.
Various pathways are going to have a local advantage because of available local sources of feedstock. This has both an economic benefit (less transport of energy can lower overall costs and increase efficiency) and an environmental advantage (turning what is now garbage that has to be disposed of by burning or landfill into hydrogen feedstock).
Agricultural areas are likely to get hydrogen from the stalks, husks, and seed shells of grain plants. Cities are likely to tap into their garbage mounds for methane. Animal offal will provide hydrogen in and around ranching areas and windy areas will likely use hydrogen fuel cells to capture the benefits of wind better than lead acid batteries and release them into the grid when there's no wind (or just pipeline it elsewhere for vehicle sales if the wind's always blowing).
ICE has had a relatively long technology run, over a century. Switching over to a new fuel, a new engine technology, a new energy infrastructure, is a huge series of tasks. When it comes (and it's already here in some very specialized applications) it'll change the world in some very good ways. Such a large shift deserves us all keeping an eye on it.
T: You don't understand how the oil economy works. The corrupt third-worlders will be the last ones to shut down their operations because they're the lowest-cost producers of oil. In a global market there's no way to cut off their revenue without cutting off all oil consumption.
TML: As SDB has written before, all those sources of energy except fossil fuels are useless because they don't generate enough energy to contribute significantly. Burning garbage? Corn husks? You can't get gigawatts of power from them, no way.
A common theme I hear with the hydrogen economy is you can create hydrogen out of biomass i.e methane. Instead of using tons of energy to convert the methane into something else like hydrogen, wouldn't it make much more sense just to do a simple conversion to the millions of ICE's out there to burn the methane. It isn't too much different then natural gas. In places like India, they have had methane digesters for quite some time. It seems to work well with exsisting engine techonology.
While perhaps not quite as green on the surface and maybe not as high tech as a fuel cells, a conventional ICE running on methane would have a much better power to the amount of wieght ratio, and a much better range. Plus it cost a fraction of the cost to put a methane powered vehical on the road vs. a hydrogen fuel cell. No multi-billion dollar reseach needed, all the necessary parts for a methane conversion can be had off the shelf at very reasonable price.
Also it would be far simpler to implement a methane distribution system then to come up with an entirely more complicated system for hydrogen distribution. Methane can be transported just like propane and natural gas. No special provisions needed.
I think the current facination with fuel cells is much like how people thought of atomic energy in the 1950s. There actually was a few concept cars on the drawing board at that time were to be powered by a nuclear reactor. But it was very impractical and nothing ever became of any of the concepts. And this I think is what will happen to fuel cells.
Most of the American public seems to be wearing the Hydrogen blinders and seem to forget about all the other much more plausible solutions.