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Almost three-fourths of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is shut down because of Hurricane Rita. As news anchors and talking heads have said endlessly, the Texas Gulf coast supplies an enormous amout of the country’s entire refining capacity which is seriously threatened by Rita’s flooding, winds and rainfall - more than 27 percent of refining capacity lies within Rita’s potential pathways.
So, says news reports, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline could well rise, and rapidly, to $5. Today almost every gas station I passed was selling at $2.79; my wife saw 93 occtane selling for $2.91 - and that station was packed, said she. (During Katrina’s price rise I never paid more than $2.99 through judicious timing, even though regular around here spiked almost everywhere to $3.29 or more.)
So, having put new shoes on my car this morning, where while waiting I read the 9-05 edition of “Car and Driver,” I thought it timely to call you attention to two op-eds in the mag, one from this month and one from October.
First, September’s piece by Brock Yates on whether hybrid drivetrains are a panacea. Short answer: no. Walking through the economic realities of hybrids, Yates concludes,
Until hybrids become economically feasible in terms of cost, reliability, and valid fuel savings and make real sense regarding performance and disposability, we’re going to be driving conventional internal-combustion-powered vehicles—either gas or diesel —until rogue asteroids clean us all out.
There is also the unaddressed environmental issue. Hbrid batteries “are in fact self-contained toxic waste dumps” for which there is no regimen for disposal in large quantities, say the millions per year that true mass consumption would yield. Furthermore, says Yates, “a number of EMT and fire crews have announced that they will refuse to rescue victims trapped in such vehicles, openly fearing electrocution or fatal acid burns.”
But what about hydrogen cars? They would burn hydrogen and oxygen and emit water. How cool would that be, eh? But writer Patrick Bedard says that if by a trick of science autos had been invented using hydrogen-oxygen motors, so that everyone was driving them now,
… President’s FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be “the moral equivalent of war,” to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.
The reason is that the amount of energy required to produce a kilogram of hydrogen is simply enormous, many multiples more than the energy recovered by using the hydrogen as a fuel. Where would all that energy come from?
Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called “steam reforming,” is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he [Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University] says, “than if the natural gas were simply burned” in the generating plant.
Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our [natural] gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002’s usage. And don’t forget the carbon emissions.
Electrolysis to produce the element carries its own toll so that the energy required to produce a kilo of hydrogen for an auto’s use is several multiple of the energy a hydrogen kilo yields in the motor.
Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal [to generate electricity for electrolysis] gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.
Hydrogen as an auto fuel turns out to be terribly inefficient.
Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW’s hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California’s greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW’s official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.
No answer, of course, is the anwer.
Like it or not, we’re stuck with internal-combustion engines for a long time to come.
Comments policy
An online news and commentary magazine concentrating on foreign policy, military affairs and religious matters.
Editor:
Donald Sensing
Columnists:
John Krenson
Daniel Jackson
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September 23rd, 2005 at 8:08 am
There’s also the social element: a country that’s unwilling to invest in oil drilling in ANWR, refineries in places other than Texas and Louisiana (or to build new ones anywhere in the past two decades), or wind farms off of Massachussets, isn’t going to magically be able to produce extra hydrogen in the immediate future.
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:22 am
Glad someone is pointing out the problems. You might be interested in this announcement I received from Charles Howell.
Stan
What: Clean Cities 1 Billion Gallon Celebration
(one billion gallons of petroleum displaced with alt fuels)
When: Friday, October 14, 2005 10:00 a.m.
Where: Centennial Park, Nashville (grass & parking area beside Parthenon)
Who: Anyone Interested in Alternatives to Petroleum
Who Else: Media, Elected Officials, Corporations and Other Organizations.
There will be a display of Alternative Fuel and Hybrid Vehicles for viewing and Q&A.
The Press Conference will end at 11:15 a.m. but the vehicles will stay into the afternoon.
Email or call: Dave Pelton (615) 253-1952 or Cyndi Spinden (615) 221-1000 for more information
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:23 am
Hydrogen isn’t a fuel, it’s a highly space and weight efficient battery. The benefit of hydrogen is that it makes cards independent of the power source, so if we were ever to drown enough environmentalists in the sea that we could go nuclear (like much of europe), the infrastructure for cars wouldn’t have to be re-tooled a third time; anything that can produce power can produce hydrogen.
Plus there are some benefits like you can do hydrogen production from windmills which, while Den Beste ably pointed out aren’t all that great for the power grid because you never know when they’ll run, can power an interruptible process just fine.
I’m very curious about that rescue-crews-abandon-hybrid-owners aspect, though. How wide-spread is that? It’s something that if true should be very widely known, I would think.
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:51 am
Trackback via comment:
Mr. Sensing is talking about one of my pet peeves with the alternative energy promoters: in general, they seem to have neglected the most fundamental problems with whatever energy source they’re promoting — and I can’t think of a better example of this than the promoters of hydrogen vehicles. The hydrogen-powered cars are a great example, as Mr. Sensing points out. Where’s all that hydrogen going to come from?
September 23rd, 2005 at 9:41 am
Everything Yates says about hybrids are true. But, he assumes that nothing changes, that no improvements will be made to them. The early internal combustion engines were incredibly inefficient, dirty, noisy, dangerous, expensive and unreliable. But over time, as they became better understood and engineered, they became none of these things. With the proper incentives, and I think $5/gallon is a pretty good one, the current shortcomings with hybrids can be overcome as well.
September 23rd, 2005 at 11:36 am
Yes, major automakers DO have hydrogen car programs. But I’ve long suspected that the motivation was only indirectly commercial. The motivation is to show concern for a particular issue favored by those who lean to the green.
Showing concern is a way to limit criticism from those who are dismissive of the technological or economic realities. This “good will”, or the absence of palpable “bad will”, is what creates a commercial benefit, rather than the hydrogen car program itself.
That’s my opinion anyway.
—Tom Nally, Houston
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:02 pm
I’ve long thought that hydrogen only made sense with a large investment in nuclear power to generate it.
The most promising technology at the moment is probably algae-based biodiesel production. (Preferred over land-based because then we don’t have to farm 90% of the US’s arable land for fuel…)
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:16 pm
I think you’re not being fair to hydrogen fuel cells. While the hydrogen itself is more expensive, the fuel cells are more efficient than internal combustion (IC) engines. IC is a subclass of carnot heat engines which means you get about 20%-25% maximum efficiency. At temperatures fuel cells are likely to operate at in individual vehicles, you get around 80% for that part of the cycle. A fair comparison is from the well-head to the wheels of the individual vehicle. Hydrogen starts out less efficient but catches up at the end to be a few percent more efficient for the total cycle.
A further benefit is that hydrogen is very multi-fuel friendly and would reduce the cost of adding capacity to energy production because no matter what you came up with, once you convert to hydrogen, you’ve got the rest of your infrastructure pre-built. Transporting gaseous hydrogen is hard but transporting it in all manner of hydrides isn’t that hard. A company in the Netherlands has just announced it’s hit the DoE’s *2015* goals for individual vehicle fuel tank storage this year using the solid storage approach.
Right now, wind is crippled when our cars run on gas because translating wind to gasoline is a very difficult thing. Translating wind to hydrogen is relatively easy by comparison so adding windmills can reduce the price of transportation fuel. This also helps reduce one of the biggest failings of alternative energy, their irregular nature. Wind power is just the best example. It’s good, but it’s irregular and that makes it a pain for putting directly on the electrical grid. You get more wind than you’re scheduled for and you have to tell fossil fuel plants to tone things down a bit to make room for the extra wind production or you simply waste the power. If instead, all that wasted power were to go into hydrogen production, you’d get a positive result even if the process doesn’t start out very efficient.
Alternate hydrogen creation pathways are coming, from landfill and wastewater procedure changes to maximize instead of minimizing hydrogen and methane creation to entirely new processes like bio-hydrogen. Nobody really knows where it’s going to end up but it pays not to either be too optimistic and proclaim the hydrogen age is upon us nor to say that we’re going to stick with IC forever. This article charges in the too pessimistic direction.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:28 pm
I’ve long wondered at the gullibility of people who thought that hydrogen was the perfect fuel. It’s not. In short, it’s a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
To create hydrogen you have to apply energy to water in order to separate the compound into its constituent elements. That energy by law must be equal to the amount of energy released by recombining oxygen and hydrogen in the hydrogen car’s engine. In practice, it actually requires a greater amount of energy ro separate H2O, than is released by recombining H2 and O2. This is because of the loss of energy in forms of heat and light.
Hydrogen cars, therefore, actually increase the overall amount of pollution while moving it to a different point of origin.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:33 pm
Glad we’ve got a lot of shale.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:43 pm
Yes, there’s no magic, but I think that it isn’t quite so bleak as the quotes indicate. Modern otto cycle gasoline engines are 20-30% efficient at converting chemical energy to mechanical energy. A fuel cell vehicle fueled by gasoline or alcohol would need a reformer, a fuel cell, and electric motors. There’s a wide variability in cited efficiencies for each component, but it’s not too hard to come up efficiences from 10-40% (with the low end being more likely to be achieved in the near term, I suspect)
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:44 pm
Great info!
With hurricanes, refinery shortages, oil shortages, balance of payments, National debt, human misery increasing and the obvious inablility of government to solve all of our problems and protect us from cradle to grave, do you suppose anyone in charge would ever call on Americans to turn from humanism and recognize God’s power and call on Him for Mercy? Me thinks something is badly broken spiritualy in this society and the effects are being felt by Natures groans.
All that may be somewhat in conflict with Rule No. 6 above!
September 23rd, 2005 at 5:40 pm
TO: Donald Sensing
RE: Gas Prices?
Since we moved to Pueblo, from Denver, we don’t do that much driving anymore.
Used to be 30 minutes to work. 45 minutes home from work. Drive across town to a sole-source-of-supply store? 60 minutes.
Now, it’s 15 minutes to anyplace. And 5 to most places we go regularly.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Being in a Chemistry department, I see lots of proposals for new catalysts that could possibly be the base for the new Hydrogen engines. Problem is, there made from platinum, and there isn’t enough platinum in the world to remove oil cars and replace them with hydrogen ones.
Why is the goverment wasting money on pop-science?
September 23rd, 2005 at 10:04 pm
My only question is why aren’t other people saying this same thing. I had kind of wondered about it myself but your views certainly cement them solidly. Thanks
September 23rd, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Having read the article from C&D I have to say it sounds like a hit piece on hybrids and EVs
“…national power grid could not energize millions of vehicles without massive expansion of horrors—nuclear generation—the dark side of the hybrid miracle is now beginning to surface.”
What hybrid miracle? Who’s claiming that this new tech is a panacea? It’s new tech. It’s got bugs. In time they may be worked out.
My wife and I have a 2005 Prius. We average 46 mpg summer, 37 mpg winter (Michigan).
The author is correct in that hybrids are not economical. yet.
However, they are efficient.
September 24th, 2005 at 12:11 am
It’s probably not the best idea to accept Car & Driver as an authoritative source on things scientific or to expect even-handedness from them about non-IC automobile engines. Their reporters aren’t hired on the basis of their advanced degrees in physics and there’s a fair amount of corporate commitment to gasoline.
Hydrogen IS a fuel, just like gasoline, but it’s better to think of it as a transport mechanism for energy. If we’re going to have cars, we need an energy transport mechanism that will:
1. Store approximately 1 gigajoule (GJ) in about 50 kilograms.
2. Cost about $50 per GJ.
3. Be able to be loaded into the car in ten minutes or less.
4. Be fairly safe to carry around.
5. Be available or producible in gigaton lots — the world uses about 7 megatons of gasoline PER DAY, 2.5 gigatons per year.
Gasoline right now meets all those criteria; hydrogen doesn’t meet #2 and #5. HOWEVER: Gasoline is going to stop meeting #5 in the near future (”near” may be 10 years; it’s very unlikely to be 50 years, and is certainly not as much as 100 years).
Gasoline is just a transport mechanism too; it’s transporting solar energy that shone on the Earth over a period of many hundreds of millions of years. As such, it’s horribly inefficient, capturing on the order of one trillionth of that energy. It also takes perhaps a hundred thousand times as long to produce petroleum as it takes us to use it, if indeed new oil is being produced by any natural mechanism any more (probably not).
Of course there aren’t any natural mechanisms producing hydrogen on earth either, but we do know how to do it artificially from a raw material that we have in immense quantities — water. We need a lot of cheap energy to do that, but it doesn’t have to be TRANSPORTABLE energy; it could come from large stationary solar receivers in deserts or in orbit, from nuclear plants located far away from population centers, or from wind or tidal energy. Note that such power sources could also be used to produced artificial gasoline, which has the advantage of being a denser transport mechanism and the HUGE disadvantage of creating pollution when it’s used. On balance, when we have those power sources, we’ll be better off using them to produce hydrogen.
September 24th, 2005 at 1:47 am
A “waste” product of a nuclear reactor is hydrogen. And if you do use electric cars, you had better have more non-polluting sources of electric power for the recharge. Those unintended consequences can get you; such as all of the water vapor from the hydrogen car exhausts freezing on the roads in the winter. Why not now use 10% blend ethanol. Brazil uses 25%. Pay the farmers not the Arabs. As to solar panels use; they need to be cleaned twice a year, which means someone climbs on to the roof. Based on statistics for ladder accidents, someone figured out 25,000 people a year would die from falls. Windmills outside of Livermore, California were shutdown for while because they kill too many birds and they are also very noisy when grouped. The proposed ones in Massachusetts would also block Senator Kennedy’s view from his house. So when Mr. Kennedy decides to sacrifice a bit, maybe we all should then consider it. But still watch out for those unintended consequences.
September 24th, 2005 at 8:26 am
There should be a gas stabilization tax, to keep prices high, but stable. One that goes down if the spot price goes up, too much too fast.
Instead of Kyoto regulating emissions, there should be a plan to get some 10 - 50% of gov’t revenue from gas taxes (or carbon), so that folks really try to change their behavior.
September 24th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
“gas stabilization tax” - another way to brutalize the poor.
September 26th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
I suggest browsing through The Ergoshepere (link below) for various interesting thoughts on energy. There are nice analyses on pluggable hybrids, co-generation, etc.
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/
January 7th, 2008 at 10:57 am
The 500 mpg car
I wrote last Friday (Can we cash-starve the oil tyrannies? Probably not) about whether the United States could starve Saudi-funded terrorism by eliminating the petrodollars the Saudis earn from selling us 1.53 million barrels of…