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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
President Bush says hydrogen fuel-cell cars guarantee a pollution-free future. But there's a catch: Where's all the hydrogen going to come from?
Feb 25, 2003 | On Oct. 30, 2002, a hydrogen fueling station opened in Richmond, Calif., with the kind of local fanfare typically reserved for the groundbreaking of a new civic institution, like a public library or a Wal-Mart.
The mayor of Richmond, Irma Anderson, was on hand to fill up a Ford fuel-cell prototype, while Rep. George Miller pumped hydrogen into a Hyundai SUV. The goal: to show that anyone -- even a member of the U.S. House of Representatives -- can gas up one of these newfangled fuel-cell vehicles.
Hydrogen fuel-cell cars have long been popular with environmentalists eager to escape fossil fuel nastiness, and earlier this year President Bush boosted hydrogen's public profile when he lent the cause his bully pulpit and promised federal budgetary support to these "pollution free" cars. Cars that run on electricity generated from hydrogen fuel are a dream that easily draws bipartisan support: a futuristic, technocratic cure for the country's overdependence on foreign oil and environmental problems.
It's not a dream that will be realized tomorrow or even next year, however. A host of serious technological hurdles must be overcome before gasoline is obsolete. There are the questions of how hydrogen will be stored and distributed on a large scale. And then there's the problem that hydrogen isn't necessarily the environmental panacea that its advocates proclaim it to be. Hydrogen doesn't occur in a natural state, like coal or oil or natural gas -- it must be produced by a process that itself consumes energy, with inevitable consequences for the environment.
Take the Richmond station, which generates hydrogen fuel by electrolysis, a process that separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. Using technology from Canada-based Stuart Energy, the separation process is powered by electricity. The catch: The electricity comes off the grid.
"You can connect to the grid, or you can connect to renewable sources like wind and solar," says Wanda Cutler, a spokeswoman for Stuart Energy. "The grid is very clean, and you don't necessarily have to make your hydrogen during peak periods."
The grid is very clean? In the United States more than 50 percent of power plants are coal-fired, while renewable sources, like wind, account for less than 2 percent of electrical energy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"If you take the electricity from the current energy mix in the U.S., then in fact it doubles the CO2 [produced] per mile," says John Turner, a principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
Translation: Driving a hydrogen-powered car juiced with fuel generated by electrolysis could actually be worse for global warming than sticking with gasoline.
"Electrolysis totally defeats the purpose in terms of greenhouse gas emissions," says Sandy Thomas, the president of H2Gen Innovations in Alexandria, Va., a start-up with a prototype for a competing hydrogen-generation system that converts natural gas into hydrogen at the gas station. Even if future hydrogen were solely generated from natural gas, as is currently the case for most hydrogen production, it still wouldn't be pollution free.
So what's the answer? For environmentalists, the only way to go is to make sure the electricity to separate the hydrogen is generated from renewable energy sources, like wind, solar, hydroelectric or geothermal energy.
"If we're going to a hydrogen economy, we must simultaneously move toward renewable electricity," says Turner, who conducts research on photoelectrolysis to make solar power more efficient.
But President Bush, despite his enthusiasm for clean cars, has apparently not figured out this part. In the same federal budget where Bush asked for more money for his hydrogen initiative, he cut funding for some renewable-energy alternatives, like wind, while increasing spending for nuclear energy. In fact, the Nuclear Energy Institute, a pro-nuke trade group, hailed Bush's commitment to hydrogen with this headline on its Web site: "President Bush Calls for Use of Nuclear Energy to Power U.S. Hydrogen Economy."
Nuclear energy isn't exactly pollution free. Of the many challenges involved in bringing cars that run on hydrogen to market -- fuel infrastructure, automotive technology, cost, safety -- this may be the biggest hurdle to the cars' having a real-world impact: Where will the hydrogen come from?
