Just say no, to hydrogen

If we're serious about stopping global warming, hybrid cars make a lot more sense than a hydrogen future, says Joseph Romm, a former Clinton administration energy official.

Apr 29, 2004 | On April 20, California's Hummer-driving governor showed his commitment to cleaner air by signing an executive order announcing that a "hydrogen highway" of fueling stations for fuel-cell cars will be created in the state by the year 2010. "Californians invent the future, and we are about to do it again," Schwarzenegger said in a statement, although the cash-strapped state did not actually commit any funds to the plan.

It's not the first time a politician has endorsed the hydrogen future. Since President Bush touted hydrogen in his State of the Union address last year, the gas has exploded onto the public policy stage as a kind of technological triple play. Moving to hydrogen is supposed to help reduce dependence on foreign oil, air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Bush originally pledged $1.2 billion in federal funds for hydrogen research, $350 million of which was awarded in grants announced on Tuesday by the Department of Energy. The goal: Put hydrogen cars on the road by 2015.

The grants coincided with this week's 15th annual gathering of the National Hydrogen Association, in Hollywood, where attendees are promised test drives of vehicles fueled with hydrogen made by DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and Toyota. The Hollywood hydrogen show is even premiering its own film, an hour-long documentary called "The Hydrogen Age." If "The Graduate" were remade today, Dustin Hoffman's character would be told to go into hydrogen.

Joseph J. Romm is one clean-energy guru who isn't ready to join the party and get high on hydrogen with policymakers and automakers and the energy industry. During the Clinton administration, Romm was the chief official in the Department of Energy in charge of conservation and alternative fuels. He's now the author of a new book, "The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate."

As a consultant, Romm has advised companies such as IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Texaco on how to save energy, cut pollution, and use fuel cells. But he fears that the hyperbolic promotion of hydrogen fuel-cell cars as the answer to our energy woes is a scientific and technological wild goose chase, engaged in at our peril while the global-warming clock rapidly runs down.

Romm, who drives a Toyota Prius, spoke to Salon on the phone from Washington about why the hype about hydrogen as a kind of magical elixir -- symbolized by the water vapor coming out of a tailpipe -- may well hinder the fight to stop global warming.

How could hydrogen fuel-cell cars actually end up creating more greenhouse-gas emissions than the gas cars that they'd replace?

The hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Hydrogen is just an energy carrier. You don't drill for hydrogen, like you can for oil or coal or natural gas. And in fact, 95 percent of hydrogen in this country comes from natural gas.

So you have two problems with fuel-cell cars. One is, What is the source of the hydrogen? Most likely, for the next several decades most hydrogen is going to come from fossil fuels.

And problem No. 2 is, if you don't make hydrogen on-site, you have to deliver it. Hydrogen is a very diffuse gas, and so it's not easy to deliver. It takes a lot of energy to deliver it. And most hydrogen today is delivered in diesel trucks.

It turns out hydrogen just takes a lot of energy to make, and it takes a lot of energy to deliver. And there is no guarantee that hydrogen is actually going to be used in fuel-cell cars. Because fuel cells are just so tough to make, and currently so expensive, a lot of people say: "Oh, well in the meantime let's put out hydrogen internal-combustion engine cars."

People view hydrogen as this kind of as this kind of pollution-free elixir. That all you have to do is put hydrogen in something, and it's no longer an environmental problem, which is just absurd. In fact, if you take hydrogen from fossil fuels and run them in an inefficient internal-combustion engine vehicle, you end up with a vehicle that just generates a great deal of pollution.

People need to get out of their heads [the idea] that there is something that is inherently good for the environment about hydrogen. If you run it through a fuel cell, you have zero tailpipe emissions. We all would like zero tailpipe emissions. If you burn it, however, you don't get zero tailpipe emission, in fact. You get a lot of nitrogen oxide, because it tends to burn at a high temperature.

To have a pollution-free car, you need an engine that, when it turns hydrogen into energy, does so in a pollution-free fashion. That's a fuel cell. That gets you a car that doesn't emit pollution right at the source of the car, the tailpipe. But global warming doesn't care where the emissions are emitted. That's why for those of us who care about global warming, the question of central importance is, where does hydrogen come from?

My great fear is that people hold out the promise of fuel-cell cars but then deliver you internal-combustion engine cars running on hydrogen. And then they promise you renewable hydrogen as sort of the long-term goal, but they don't tell you that that's so expensive that other than a few demonstration facilities, you're not going to get renewable hydrogen.

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