What Happened to Hydrogen?

It cost me $85 to fill up my car today—EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS! It’s been heading that way for some time. Listening to the news you’ll hear oil company executives deny that there is any corollary with their record profits and you will hear some politicians even deny that the war in Iraq and the greater instability in the Middle East have anything to do with it, none of which passes the smell test.

It has always amazed me that the most vigorously touted technologies for going green are the least viable for all practical purposes. It is as if there was someone leading us on a wild goose chase pursuing a "perfect" plug-in electric car or a cheap bio-fuel to surplant gasoline. It is as if there is a concerted effort to only promote the technologies that are ill-equipped to truly supplant fossil-fuels for combustion.

As we’ve already begun to see, ethanol would strangle agriculture. Even now there is a well rehearsed line from the right denouncing “burning food for fuel.” Other biofuels have similar problems or would produce pollution as bad as burning gasoline.

Electric vehicles are a crock! All experts agree that only the smallest vehicles are feasible for plug-ins or even fuel cells in the foreseeable future. Electric engines are really weak on performance, and yes that includes hydrogen fuel cell cars. Although many would point to the Tesla, let’s keep it real. It’s an extremely expensive, extremely small, and extremely lightweight vehicle. The Tesla is no family sedan!

Hybrids are a fake-out as well, especially the hybrid SUVs, which only get slightly better fuel economy than conventional SUVs. Doubling or even tripling gas mileage doesn’t solve global warming and it certainly doesn’t end the dependency on oil. If anything, hybrids extend the dependence on petroleum.

Everything from lawn mowers to commercial trucks run using internal combustion engines that burn some kind of hydrocarbon fuel. The entire automotive industry and infrastructure is based on this reality. The most efficient and effective solution would be to put something else in the fuel tanks of our existing and emerging transportation fleet. There are some out there pushing for a transition to natural gas and, to be fair, trucks, buses, or any other conventional vehicle could be adapted to run on natural gas, which is mainly methane (CH4) as opposed to gasoline (C8H18). Just looking at the chemistry you see that hydrocarbons are hydrocarbons. The difference is mainly in the size of the molecule. Before I lose you in the science, the problem of carbon is still there. It may be better than gasoline with 4 hydrogen atoms to each carbon atom but it is not good enough to really address climate change. So I have to ask: what about just hydrogen?

You know, the “hydro” without the “carbon.” Hydrogen is only the most abundant element in the universe. It’s the “H” in H2O. It’s the stuff that we launch rockets with. It’s the stuff that when burned produces water as waste - no carbon. Most significantly, it has the most powerful impulse in combustion of any element, which means that it has the potential of being the most efficient fuel of all internal combustion fuels.

It amazes me that with all of the talk of alternative fuels that there is so little talk of hydrogen outside of fuel cell technology, a technology for producing electricity and that doesn’t produce nearly the power of hydrogen combustion. (Incidentally, NASA has been using hydrogen fuel cells for more than 40 years, so this technology is far from new.) BMW has produced its Hydrogen 7, a 7-series sedan that runs on hydrogen and maintains driving performance that is comparable to the gasoline-powered version. California has been quietly moving forward with its Hydrogen Highway to create an infrastructure for hydrogen-powered vehicles. This information is out there if you look for it, but it is surprising that given the mainstream media attention to the overall themes of “gas prices” and “going green” initiatives, that there is hardly any attention to the most obvious and immediately viable alternative transportation fuel—hydrogen.

That’s not to say that hydrogen is a completely without its problems. It may be the most abundant element in the universe, but it is virtually never found in its bare state. Because it is the simplest element, it bonds with other elements like carbon and has to be extracted from larger compounds. Also because it is the smallest and simplest element, it reacts with nearly everything, making storage and transport difficult. And, right now, since its production is very limited with its main use still being scientific research, the current unit cost to purchase hydrogen is high. This problem, however, would be quickly remedied by mass production.

Instead of searching the world for an underground reservoir, drilling, and refining, ready to burn hydrogen can be produced from water by a process called electrolysis. This is a process of passing an electric current through water to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and the electricity to do this could just as well come from wind power or solar.

The thing is that the problems with hydrogen can all be solved with effort. Where is the effort? Isn’t the idea that our entire global energy infrastructure could be leveraged off of the most abundant element in the universe is worth the effort? Where is the media attention to create the political will to put forth the effort?

Oh yeah, politics. I almost forgot that we live in the real world and politics is at the heart of any real solution. There are massive economies based entirely on petroleum. Some would say that the entire global economy is based on it. People die every day for reasons, in one way or another, related to oil. So, I have to believe that there are people who would be willing to kill to prevent the obsolescence of gasoline.

Is there no coalition powerful enough to counter this and make it happen anyway? You would think so with all of the groups clamoring for energy independence or an end to pollution. Then again maybe that is the problem—too many conflicting efforts supposedly attempting to do the same thing.

First, you have the purists out there, you know the ones who can find a million uses for hemp, who are often at odds with the practical realities that people don’t want to drive slower, use less power, or live in smaller homes. These are people who believe that you must replace gasoline with nothing less than a perfect solution. If that means everyone must drive small electric cars limited to a hundred mile range between charges, people should just suck it up, never mind the families with enough kids and pets to fill a Suburban. These ascetics have been easily swayed by the critics and have thus been slow to embrace hydrogen combustion.

Then you have contrarian scientists. You know, these are the ones hired to say that smoking is good for you and global warming is a myth. There are some out there programming people with the line that hydrogen is not a source of energy, but only an energy carrier, which is silly because all matter is such. Before using that line, people should brush up on their Conservation Theory and the relativity of mass to energy. All matter has potential energy whether or not we've discovered the technology to release it, but I digress.

There are a plethora of reasons to replace petroleum fuels and the most immediate carbon-free threat to gasoline is hydrogen. Why is it a secret that BMW has cars that drive on it, Airbus has a plane that flies on it, and California has fuel stations that pump it? If this is news to you, it’s news for many others. It’s time that these facts make the news.

Enter oilman T. Boone Pickens and his plan. This may just be the turn to make the dream of a hydrogen economy a reality. The Pickens Plan, like the rest, does not include hydrogen, but he wants us to switch our transportation fuel from gasoline to natural gas. The notion of converting to a natural gas-based transportation system would lay the groundwork for the transition to pure hydrogen combustion as the alternative to gasoline. There are a lot more headaches in converting from gasoline to gas than from one gas to another. There is a good chance that converting a car from natural gas to hydrogen could be a shop procedure. In the meantime, someone needs to push a plan to install electrolyzers at fuel stations across the country to make the hydrogen on site. Prices would drop and the oil companies would have to focus on plastics.

Hydrogen is the only readily available resource that could completely replace gasoline and do so without compromising power and performance. The car companies could adapt to this now. The way the engines of today work would remain fundamentally unchanged. Cars, SUVs, trucks, and all would still be in play.

Of course, if we really did this, it would eventually put most of the oil companies out of business and collapse the economies of certain OPEC nations, which, I beieve, is the actual reason why we never hear this through mainstream channels.

Michael C. Hill
Editor-in-Chief of The Nuuz