At Last- A Genuine Hoax!

H is for Hydrogen - the cleanest fuel there is . As long as it is made out of water. Which it is--right ?

Dream on- hydrogen produced from H2O is a rare and precious commodity , costing a quarter its weight in silver because of the high price of American electrical power-- most of which comes from coal. But don't count on cashing in the contents of your bathtub just yet . Though the hydrogen in a pound of water is worth $22 on paper, pure hydrogen produced by water electrolysis can't compete with the ordinary stuff, made from natural gas -- it sells for $6.00 a kilo liquefied . The two processes costs don't cross until electrical power gets  _almost _ too cheap to meter-- under thee tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour.

So when Alan Alda next  rhapsodizes as he drives yet another very special hydrogen car on a PBS Green TV special ,  you may want to ask where its fuel is coming from ?  And likewise the carbon fiber or titanium of its scarily pressurized gas tanks. The environmental economics of hydrogen are presently so preposterous as to serve as a sort of Found Advertising for Big Coal.

Neither Greens or Appalachian mountain scalpers can do a thing to reduce the energy cost of liquefying hydrogen, because thermodynamics dooms refrigerating the stuff to minus 400F to fearful inefficiency. When there's almost no heat to pump, heat pumps mostly spin their wheels.

So though energy in hydrogen made from methane costs only twice as much  money as that in  gasoline, there is another thermodynamic bill to pay.  Besides the carbon in the methane burned to CO2 to drive the  hydrogen production  process at the gas refinery, more fuel - mostly coal in the real world-- must  go up in smoke  to  liquefy the hydrogen , or cram it energetically it into storage. Put them together, and the bottom line is that today, a  hydrogen  fueled  compact  can end up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than an evil SUV.

Materials science  will help solve the hydrogen storage problem , jsut as it is stuffing ever more charge into batteries, yet compared to CO2 capture at coal plants, hydrogen is a thermodynamic joke played at Gaia's expense.  Media  enthusiasm  for the subject  has  cost naive investors a bundle too . Kudos for candor to Reason's Ron Bailey for providing the bottom line at the end of  his recent review  of Robert Zubrin's expose' , 'The Hydrogen Hoax':

"Disclosure: I own a few shares of stock in two hydrogen fuel cell companies which have declined more than 90 percent in value since I purchased them 6 years ago. In fact, a shareholder suit against one of the companies just netted me something like $30 as compensation... If you run out and buy such stocks based on what you read here, you've clearly not understood the arguments... if you nevertheless feel like mandating or subsidizing hydrogen production, one side effect may be that value of my almost worthless stock will go up."

As to why the relative  and highly variable amount of hydrogen in coal will continue  to dwarf the Hydrogen Economy as a real-time  environmental variable for decades to come, You read it here first-    

Comments

[Daniel]

See, I think environmental hysteria boils down to smokestacks. People see huge, belching smokestacks that stink, and they say "Ewww." It's right on the cover of Inconvenient Truth, in fact. They get a whiff of a car's fumes, and they cough.
"How can that be healthy!" they say!

So they try to ban smokestacks. You can't use coal, because it's smokey. But wind power or solar power, even if vastly less effecient and far most costly to construct (with big, polluting construction vehicles), are perfectly fine, because they don't smog up the countryside.

I always chuckle when people praise, say, the Tesla Roadster or hydrogen cars for "reducing greenhouse gases." They don't. What they mean is "It's doesn't have a stinky tail pipe!", which is much more visceral.

Ties into your whole "What's wrong with science and the media!?" theme: What's wrong is that science is complicated and requires effort to understand. The media prefers to simply grab something intuitive and visceral: Smokestacks are hideos, therefore, they can't be good!

Everything else gets lost in the pursuit of that beautiful imagery.

[Bob]

I'm not thrilled with the alcohol fuel bandwagon, either. It sounds like a disguised farm subsidy to me.

I think the Tesla Roadster does actually make sense. The processes to generate the electricity to charge it can be much more efficient than burning gasoline in a car.

http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/twentyfirstcenturycar.pdf

The best thing is that its power doesn't come from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Nigeria.

[Paul Ding]

Bob, that Tesla website is painfully dishonest. It assumes that you have a natural gas well in your back yard, and a natural-gas-powered electrical generator in your garage.

You or I would use public grid electricity, where there is coal-to-electricity efficiency of 35-50% and then we'd lose 7% of that electricity to transmission and distribution losses.

I can drive my wife, my dog, and a chest of drawers from Philadelphia to Chicago in my minivan in 12 hours, even with the air conditioning blasting in 100F weather, or the heater turned up in -10F weather. It takes four days to do that in a Tesla, and you have to turn off the air conditioning and the heater, leave the dog with someone who will feed it melamine, and ship the chest of drawers by truck at a cost of hundreds of dollars. How much sense did you say that Tesla makes?

[Russell Seitz]

Thank you for bringing the Tesla website to my attention -it is very stupid and dishonest website indeed. Expect to hear it celebrated on talk radio.

[Bob]

Maybe I'm equally stupid.

First, you are comparing apples to oranges. They are trying to develop the electric car market from the top down; the luxury sports car market first. The Tesla Roadster is a Ferrari or Porsche equivalent, not a Honda Civic or a Lincoln Navigator. How many people drive their Ferraris from Philadelphia to Chicago?

The Energy Efficiency section of the PDF starts with utility-generated electricity using natural gas. They give the well-to-outlet efficiency as 52.5%. They later give the average well-to-outlet efficiency of US electric generation as 41%. They give the outlet-to-wheel efficiency of the Roadster as 86%. That gives you 30% on the low end to 45% on the high end.

Don't get me started on the energy cost of replacing its batteries.

What have I missed? ANSWER : the half of the real world electricity that comes from coal . Multiply it by the reciprocal of 30 or 45 per cent and you have an electric car that is a de facto Stanley Steamer.

Yet there is hope for the Tesla enterprise- it could be elevated to the utmost respectability by a hostile takeover -- by Citroen or Dassault, say, for removing it lock stock and barrel to France , where wall plug electricity is three quarters nuclear would render La Tesla vraiment tres verte.

[Bob]

Sir:

It seems my post and your answer got mingled together.

I calculated the low side efficiency from Paul's low figure for coal plan efficiency. It's *still* more efficient than a gasoline engine.

The five year projected lifespan brings the battery down to 80% capacity. You can still drive it. It would be interesting to compare the energy costs of casting and machining an engine block and all the other moving parts with manufacturing a lithium-ion battery. A lithium-ion battery can be recycled profitably.

Neither the energy to manufacture the battery or to charge it has to come from oil.

I too would prefer nuclear power. I don't like living downwind of a coal power plant.

To me the main attraction of an electric car (besides the cool factor) is that it doesn't burn petroleum products imported from people who hate us.

I think a viable electric car would bring a different set of trade-offs. You trade range for low operating costs.

Recharging it would involve plugging it in when you get home and unplugging it in the morning, like your cell phone. A four-seater electric car with 200 mile range would make a great second car. For that matter, you can always rent a car for long trips.
REPLY

I addressed the car's CO2 footprint in practice , not its thermodynamic systems efficiency in theory- driving it in a nation where coal fired electricity predominates results in CO2 emissions per mile driven that obviate its claim to be carbon neutral.

As you note, the rapid decay of its battery capacity requires frequent recycling to sustain the performance that makes it a cool machine.
I could also postulate supercapacitor energy storage to get around the battery hysteresis and decay problem ,but at present energy storage densities it would ruin the range or the acceleration.

Please review the Battelle energy density of manufactured materials studies -- they should lead you to rethink your views on the matter .
this concludes my comment on the thread.

[F. R. Anscombe]

A trivial comment: the chlor-alkali industrial sector liberates hydrogen from water as a byproduct during its manufacture of chlorine and sodium hydroxide. Auto firms in need of hydrogen have gone to chlorine-makers, while chlorine firms are beginning to install hydrogen fuel cells in order to make their factories more energy efficient. This is not to dispute the view that cleaving hydrogen from water is expensive and energy intensive in its own right.

[Thomas Philbrick]

Coal processing (coal to plant to transformers to electricity in your house) has an overall efficiency of 1.6%. It's a simple matter of loss at each stage (or each stage's efficiency). In 2005 the US got 52% of their energy from coal. The 1.6% number comes from Tester's book Sustainable Energy (chapter 2). Tell me how off these numbers are, because I've commonly seen that the processing plants average 32% efficiency (coal to electricity). From this response "You or I would use public grid electricity, where there is coal-to-electricity efficiency of 35-50% and then we'd lose 7% of that electricity to transmission and distribution losses." I wonder how they only claim 7% loss in all of the remaining steps from the plant to the lightbulbs in our homes???

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An integrated, segregated society is better

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It is never okay to lie, sometimes okay to lie

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There are too many, not enough handicapped parking spaces in our city

[Sandra]

The quality of education is, is not lower than 15 years ago

[john]

People are too strict on other people

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Before buying some shares of stock people should lean the situation properly.

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Google gets into the messy business of telecommunications. I don’t mean to say Google’s day job is easy but the telecom market gets it involved with government agencies like the FCC on a more regular basis. Like many other large telcos the company will have to spend more and more money lobbying and technology differentiation may be less important than government regulations in ensuring future success.

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[Stephanie]

Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?

[Joshua's Law Online Course]

Hydrogen could be much dangerous to use in common goods then it's only useful for scientific research in space or underwater something like that. until unless they came up with something new non-dangerous chemical mixer this can't be became avilable to common consumer.

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Hydrogen fusion are the dreams of many physicists!!

A way to produce electrical power, so cheap and clean that nothing could improve that!!

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In longer run we may going to adopt hydrogen as a regular fuel, as present gasoline fuels are running out, other like nuclear have much of the dangers like mass distraction, solar & wind can't provide the energy we needed so only one solution is hydrogen which only one fuel which can we depend.