So, here I am in the second round of my analysis of energy and transportation issues, and I'm out to toss spears at sacred cows. What I have to say to you today is:
hydrogen fuel cells are a boondoggle.
I know, I know. They're beloved of many folks in many parts of the environmental movement. Hydrogen cars put out almost nothing but water vapor as exhaust. The idea of clean, nearly silent, fuel cell cars has been held up as the way we will finally get loose from the noose of oil and the blow back the clouds of hydrocarbon smog. If we can't have our flying cars, at least we can have our sleek n' spiffy hydro burners, dammit!
Only... no, you can't. Or you can, but you won't. Because hydrogen has been set up to distract you -- it's the shiny sparkly bauble being dangled in the distance to make you ignore the fact that fuel consumption is headed for pre-oil crises averages. Hydrogen has problems.
And it's distracting us from real solutions that are right under our noses...
It's not that hydrogen can't work. Witness the latest from
Hyundai. It's a vehicle that is right at being acceptable for the population. 186 mile range. 77 mph top speed. That's not quite good enough to be put on the US market as a mainstream vehicle, but it's close. And DaimlerChrysler is up to
100 fuel cell vehicles on the road, so you know we must be getting close. Close? Heck we're there. Boutique car company
Zap has said they'll offer a hydrogen powered car to the public before the end of the year. Really, to get hydrogen out there we need to make some significant engineering advances in storage, fuel cell chemistry, materials science, and conversion - but none of these advances is unthinkable or unreasonable. In fact, I'm convinced all will happen in the next ten years.
So why in the name of Amory Lovins and all that's holy do I think we ought to get off the hydrogen train? Because staking our transportation future on hydrogen is like putting our energy needs in the fusion basket. It might come to pass, and it might be great. But it's not going to happen any time soon, and it's not going to happen without tremendous expense. Both of which are reasons why it might not happen at all, since companies are fairly shy about making huge investments that may never pay off.
Here's the laundry list of hydrogen nay saying:
1) Pettiness first: we shouldn't support hydrogen fuel cells because this technology belongs to the Republicans. It was Bush that put $1.2 billion for hydrogen fuel cell research into the state of the union address, and everything that happens in this area comes with a little bit of Republican gloat factor. In truth, as I said before, the biggest reason for Bush to make a hydrogen push is to keep us from attacking the oil consumption problem in ways that are a real threat to his pals in the oil patch. Which hydrogen isn't. But people have already made that mental connection: hydrogen = Bush.
Now, I'm not quite in the cutting off my fuel supply to spite my engine mode. If Bush was pro-food, I wouldn't go on a hunger strike, and I know that Clinton also gave support to hydrogen technology. There are many good people who support hydrogen, and many good reasons to do so. But realize two points: Bush made the speech so the Republicans would gain association with a flashy tech that's seen as pro-environment, and they picked hydrogen because any threat to their oil dollars is decades in the future. In fact, they picked hydrogen because the fossil fuel industry stands to win. Twice.
2) The more important reasons (and yes, I'm lumping more than one under a single number) are technological ones. Even if we solve the problems in making a hydrogen car that can live up to the expectations of the American consumer, that doesn't mean we've made a car that's practical. First and foremost, there's the infrastructure problem. Hydrogen powered cars face the classic chicken and egg problem: no one will buy a hydrogen powered car because there are no hydrogen fueling stations, and no one will build a hydrogen fuelling station because there are no hydrogen powered cars.
The obvious solution to this problem is to put in a subsidy. Not on the car end -- would you buy a car, no matter how cheap, if you couldn't buy gas? Nope, the way the Republicans will seek to solve this problem is through subsidies to the owners of gas stations. Coincidentally, the great majority of these stations are owned by oil companies. So the Republican plan will include a big chunk of change - and I mean a big chunk - set aside to "help service providers make this vital change." Count on it. Putting in hydrogen as a fuel source will mean billions in direct support to the oil companies, who will then be right back in the position of having monopoly control over what we use in our motor vehicles. You want your Exxon hydrogen, or your Chevron hydrogen? Take your pick.
Beyond the how-do-I-get-it-in-my-car problem is the how-do-we-make-it problem. We all know hydrogen isn't "pollution free," despite the fact that Bush uses this term every time he talks about his plan. Hydrogen production takes energy, and that energy causes pollution. It's possible to make hydrogen from direct electrolysis of water, but that process is, for the moment at least, too inefficient. Instead, most all hydrogen produced today comes from conversion of fossil fuels. How much of Bush's plan involves getting us out of the fossil fuel to hydrogen pattern? Why, none, of course. In fact, the government's "roadmap to a hydrogen future" involves more of the same
Mike Nicklas, chair of the American Solar Energy Society, was one of 224 energy experts invited by the Department of Energy to develop the government's Roadmap last spring. The sessions, environmentalists quickly discovered, were dominated by representatives from the oil, coal, and nuclear industries. "All the emphasis was on how the process would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Nicklas, who sat on a committee chaired by an executive from ChevronTexaco. "The whole meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables." The plan does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power generated by the sun or the wind, concluding that such technologies "need further development for hydrogen production to be more cost competitive."
But wait! The president's plan eventually added $17 million in research on renewables. Oh, and he cut $86 million in renewables research from elsewhere.
Those that support hydrogen do so with a big dose of "we'll figure that out," but right now, hydrogen production still has problems.
1) Hydrogen is a very "leaky" gas (due to its small molecular size and volatility) that could emit from cars and hydrogen plants into the atmosphere. This could set off chemical transformations that generate greenhouse gases contributing to atmospheric warming; 2) The extraction of hydrogen for cars from methane, which is currently the richest available source of hydrogen, will generate carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas; and 3) Hydrogen can also be extracted from ordinary water via a process called electrolysis. However, using a technology called mass electrolysis of water will require intense sources of energy.
Right now, we're at this point: storage is still iffy, fuel cells are still expensive (usually $100K plus), and the environmental benefits of using hydrogen are hard to quantify. And, no matter what Ahh-noold is driving this week, we're at least two decades away from putting significant numbers of hydrogen vehicles on the streets.
Hydrogen gives the oil companies two decades to do as they please, will reward them with a fat check and a continuing lock on the fuel supply. Oil companies love hydrogen.
3) We can do better. We can drive farther, we can drive faster, we can get the cars on the road almost immediately, we can use less energy, and we can cause less pollution. How? By burning gasoline in our cars.
Okay, I'll pause now to let you wipe the "what!" spit off your monitor and get past the first round of cussing me. Yes, I really said that - we keep burning gasoline in our cars. For decades to come. Maybe right up till 2100. Right until the time we finally get that genuine Mr. Fusion to power the thing (though really, that only handles the flying system).
Stop poking me with those ten foot poles!
What I'm proposing here isn't that Democrats just drive around in SUVs and throw rocks at the hydrogen house. I want us to get behind - and behind the wheel of - an alternative idea: the plug-in hybrid.
You already know about hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). Honda sells three models, Ford has their Escape hybrid SUV, and Toyota has the keenest car currently available to those of us that can't afford an Enzo, the Prius. If you haven't gone down to your local dealer and taken a test drive in one of these things, get your coat on and go. It's a kick - especially the Ford or Toyota models, where slow driving can happen in silent all-electric mode and any driving is rewarded by so much feedback on what's happening under the hood that you hate to take your eyes off the display to look at anything else, like the road.
The HEVs we know today are examples of two categories: "light" hybrids, like the Hondas and "heavy" hybrids like the Ford and Toyota. Light hybrids are vehicles in which a normal gas-powered engine runs all the time, with a small electric motor kicking in when some extra torque is needed. This lets the system get by with a smaller gas engine, since you really only need those extra horses in acceleration. The heavy hybrid has a system that allows the vehicle to run on only electric, gas and electric, or only gas, depending on the situation. Yes, "heavy hybrid" is a stupid term. I didn't make it up.
But there's another class of hybrids that could be cruising our highways, one that takes the advantages of the benefits hybrids can bring, but goes on to give us all the imagined benefits of hydrogen: the plug-in hybrid (PHEV). A plug-in hybrid also has an electric motor (or motors) and a gas engine, only the size of the engines has been reversed. Under the hood of a PHEV, an electricity does the work of driving the wheels. The gas engine has one job - keep the batteries charged. That set up would be no better than a heavy hybrid, except for another feature of the PHEV: lots of battery capacity.
In current hybrids, there is enough battery power to provide a buffer for the electric motor, but really not much more. Any charge to the batteries comes from a generator powered by the electric engine and from energy recaptured when the vehicle slows. A plug-in hybrid carries a rack of high capacity batteries (some form of lithium polymer or metal hydride is the general rule), giving it a range of around 100 miles when running on battery power alone. This means that you can do something with your plug-in hybrid that you can't do with your Prius (no mater how much I lust after the later) - you can plug it in. Charge your PHEV overnight, and you're ready for 50-100 miles of zippy, quiet driving on an all electric system.
But what a minute you say. 100 miles is peanuts. 50 miles even worse. After all, General Motors EV-1 electric car had a range of 50 to 90 miles, ran on plain old lead-acid batteries, and was so poorly received that GM had to pull the plug(pun intended) after just a couple of years. And the astute reader will notice that I dissed the Hyundia hydrogen car when it could go twice this distance. First, it should be noted that there are a lot of theories about why GM pulled the EV-1 fleet. In many cases, they had to pry these cars away from drivers (GM never sold the cars, they only leased them), and they went through a lot of trouble to see that the EV-1s on the road, got turned to scrap. Plenty of theories on the subject from pissed-off former EV-1 drivers and those who think GM wanted to quash a promising vehicle. But really, when it comes to the PHEV, all that's beside the point. Just because the PHEV is limited to EV-1ish range on the batteries, doesn't mean that's the limit of the car. A PHEV can go 200, 300... heck, 600 miles or more without stopping - because it has gas engine to keep the power flowing.
Think of it this way: for 100 miles, the PHEV has all the advantages of a pure electric vehicle, after that it cruises like a Toyota Prius. Want one yet?
Producing a PHEV is not rocket science. A lot of it goes to work that was done at UC Davis in the early nineties. GM, both hero and villain of the EV-1 story, even helped to fund this early research. The team at Davis, under Andy Frank, has cooked up seven PHEV-60s (the number after the PHEV indicates how long the vehicle can go in "electric only" mode, so a PHEV has a 60 mile range on electric). They've made 6-passenger sedans, SUVs, and couple of two-seater sports cars that get 80 mpg even after the batteries are wrung out. Most of these were made from ordinary vehicles already on the road, like a Ford Taurus, so they don't involve shells made from carbon-fiber honeycombs or recycled Soviet titanium submarines. Frank estimates that these vehicles could be in production right now with a price about 10% higher than gasoline only /vehicles.
There are PHEV vehicles coming out in Europe from DaimlerChrysler, and from small manufacturers. Students in the U.S. are creating them from stacks of leftover notebook batteries. Even non-profit groups are working on ways to PHEV-ize existing cars. The advantages of the PHEV are obvious:
- it's an extension of things we already know how to do, with no breakthroughs in material science required
- for the daily commute (even idiots facing a nearly 60 mile round trip, like me), it could turn all of us into electric vehicle drivers
- gas consumption in one of the vehicles could really be on the order of something like 200+ mpg, even figuring in the occasional long trip. Instead, they're juiced up from an outlet -- usually at night, when the grid has excess, cheap electricity.
Don't overlook the idea that a PHEV is already more EV than any hybrid on the road today. It's an electric vehicle with a supplementary power plant. It puts us way down the road to pure electric vehicles that could run from wind, water, solar, or anything else.
So that's it. That's the pitch. Democrats, top to bottom, should realize that hydrogen is a dream still decades away. Instead, we should support the development of more hybrid vehicles; regular hybrids for sure, but especially the plug-in hybrid. We should make sure that this technology is ours. People should think of Democratic leaders when they think of PHEVs. Democratic lawmakers propose funding that presses this idea forward. Democratic leaders should be on the news, shaking hands with PHEV makers and talking up how we should be pouring money into this area so American car makers can avoid being swept away when this technology comes pouring in from overseas - which it will.
Right now, I can tell some of you are still hovering over the "-4: super troll and professional hypocrite" rating. After all, don't PHEVs just move the pollution around? Aren't they doing just what I accused hydrogen of doing? Yes, absolutely.
Only PHEVs are doing it now, not twenty years from now. We can push PHEVs forward, and in 2020, most of the cars on the road will be silently, cleanly cruising to work while we figure out how to get more renewables into the energy grid. Or, we can support hydrogen and in 2020 most of the cars on the road will still be running flat out on gasoline, hydrogen cars will just be trickling into the market, the government will be pushing for huge subsidies so Exxon can start selling you hydrogen, most of that hydrogen will be coming from fossil fuels, and we'll be looking for ways to get more renewables on the grid. I'm going for door #1.
Two last notes: if anyone knows where I can find the article about the kid who hybridized his own vehicle with lithium notebook batteries, let me know, 'cause darn it, I lost it, and it was cool.
And if you are in that range where you can afford an Enzo, as an insanely rich, yet progressive dkos reader, shouldn't you really be considering a Venturi Fetish?