The Hydrogen Economy

Savior of Humanity or an Economic Black Hole?

by Alice Friedemann

Skeptics scoff at perpetual motion,
free energy, and cold fusion, but what about energy from hydrogen?
Before we invest trillions of dollars in a hydrogen
economy, we should examine the science and pseudoscience behind the
hydrogen hype. Let’s begin by taking a hydrogen car out for a spin.

Although the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) in your
car can burn hydrogen, the hope is that someday fuel cells, which are
based on electrochemical processes rather than combustion (which
converts heat to mechanical work), will become more efficient and less
polluting than ICEs.¹
Fuel cells were invented before combustion engines in 1839 by William
Grove. But the ICE won the race by using abundant and inexpensive
gasoline, which is easy to transport and pour, and very high in energy
content.²

Production

Unlike gasoline, hydrogen isn’t an energy source — it’s an energy
carrier, like a battery. You have to make hydrogen and put energy into
it, both of which take energy.
Hydrogen has been used commercially for decades, so we already know how
to do this. There are two main ways to make hydrogen: using natural gas
as both the source and the energy to split hydrogen from
the carbon in natural gas (CH4), or using water as the source and
renewable energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water (H2O).

1) Making Hydrogen from Fossil Fuels. Currently, 96 percent of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, mainly for oil refining and partially hydrogenated oil.³ In the United States, 90 percent is made from natural gas, with an efficiency of 72 percent,⁴
which means you lose 28 percent of the energy
contained in the natural gas to make it (and that doesn’t count the
energy it took to extract and deliver the natural gas to the hydrogen
plant).

One of the main arguments made for switching to a
“hydrogen economy” is to prevent global warming that has been
attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. When hydrogen is made
from natural gas, however, nitrogen oxides are released, which are 58
times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.⁵
Coal releases large amounts of CO2
and mercury. Oil is too powerful and useful to waste on hydrogen — it
is concentrated sunshine brewed over hundreds of millions of years. A
gallon of gas represents about 196,000 pounds of
fossil plants, the amount in 40 acres of wheat.⁶

Natural gas as a source for hydrogen is too valuable. It is used to
create fertilizer (as both feedstock and energy source). This has led
to a many-fold increase in crop production,
allowing billions more people to be fed who otherwise wouldn’t be.^7,8 We also don’t have enough natural gas left to make a
hydrogen economy happen from this source. Extraction of natural gas is declining in North America.⁹
It will take at least a decade to even begin replacing natural gas
with imported liquid natural gas (LNG). Making LNG is so energy
intensive that it would be economically and environmentally insane to
use it as a source of hydrogen.¹⁰

2) Making Hydrogen from Water.
Only four percent of hydrogen is made from water via electrolysis. It
is done when the hydrogen must be extremely pure. Since most
electricity comes
from fossil fuels in plants that are 30 percent efficient, and
electrolysis is 70 percent efficient, you end up using four units of
energy to create one unit of hydrogen energy: 70% * 30% = 21%
efficiency.¹¹

Producing hydrogen by using fossil fuels as a feedstock or an energy
source defeats the purpose, since the whole point is to get away from
fossil fuels. The goal is to use renewable energy
to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis. When the wind is blowing,
current wind turbines can perform at 30–40 percent efficiency,
producing hydrogen at an overall rate of 25 percent
efficiency — 3 units of wind energy to get 1 unit of hydrogen energy.
The best solar cells available on a large scale have an efficiency of
ten percent, or 9 units of energy to get 1 hydrogen
unit of energy. If you use algae making hydrogen as a byproduct, the
efficiency is about .1 percent.¹² No matter how you look at it, producing hydrogen from water is
an energy sink. If you want a more dramatic demonstration, please mail me ten dollars and I’ll send you back a dollar.

Hydrogen can be made from biomass, but there are numerous problems:

1. it’s very seasonal;
2. it contains a lot of moisture, requiring energy to store and dry it before gasification;
3. there are limited supplies;
4. the quantities are not large or consistent enough for large-scale hydrogen production;
5. a huge amount of land is required because even cultivated biomass in good soil has a low yield — 10 tons per 2.4 acres;
6. the soil will be degraded from erosion and loss of fertility if stripped of biomass;
7. any energy put into the land to grow the biomass, such as fertilizer
   and planting and harvesting, will add to the energy costs;
8. the delivery costs to the central power plant must be added; and
9. it is not suitable for pure hydrogen production.¹³

Putting Energy into Hydrogen

No matter how it’s been made, hydrogen has no energy in it. It is the lowest energy dense fuel on earth.¹⁴ At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen
takes up three thousand times more space than gasoline containing an equivalent amount of energy.¹⁵
To put energy into hydrogen, it must be compressed or liquefied. To
compress hydrogen to the necessary 10,000 psi is a multi-stage process
that costs an additional 15 percent of the energy contained in the
hydrogen.

If you liquefy it, you will be able to get more hydrogen
energy into a smaller container, but you will lose 30–40 percent of the
energy in the process. Handling it requires extreme
precautions because it is so cold — minus 423 F. Fueling is typically
done mechanically with a robot arm.¹⁶

Storage

For the storage and transportation of liquid hydrogen, you need a heavy
cryogenic support system. The tank is cold enough to cause plugged
valves and other problems. If you add insulation
to prevent this, you will increase the weight of an already very heavy
storage tank, adding additional costs to the system.¹⁷

Let’s assume that a hydrogen car can go 55 miles per kg.¹⁸ A tank that can hold 3 kg of compressed gas will go 165 miles and weigh 400 kg (882
lbs).¹⁹
Compare that with a Honda Accord fuel tank that weighs 11 kg (25 lbs),
costs $100, and holds 17 gallons of gas. The overall weight is 73 kg
(161 lbs, or 8 lbs
per gallon). The driving range is 493 miles at 29 mpg. Here is how a
hydrogen tank stacks up against a gas tank in a Honda Accord:

	Amount of fuel	Tank weight with fuel	Driving range	Tank cost
Hydrogen	55 kg @3000 psi	400 kg	165 miles13	$200021
Gasoline	17 gallons	73 kg	493 miles	$100

According to the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration
(NHTSA), “Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful
technique for improving fuel economy. Each 10 percent
reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design
by approximately eight percent.”

The more you compress hydrogen, the smaller the tank can
be. But as you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the
thickness of the steel wall, and hence the weight of the tank.
Cost increases with pressure. At 2000 psi, it is $400 per kg. At 8000
psi, it is $2100 per kg.²⁰ And the tank will be huge — at 5000 psi, the tank could take up
ten times the volume of a gasoline tank containing the same energy content.

Fuel cells are heavy. According to Rosa Young, a physicist and vice
president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion
Devices in Troy, Michigan: “A metal hydride
storage system that can hold 5 kg of hydrogen, including the alloy,
container, and heat exchangers, would weigh approximately 300 kg (661
lbs), which would lower the fuel efficiency of the
vehicle.”²¹

Fuel cells are also expensive. In 2003, they cost $1 million or more.
At this stage, they have low reliability, need a much less expensive
catalyst than platinum, can clog and lose power
if there are impurities in the hydrogen, don’t last more than 1000
hours, have yet to achieve a driving range of more than 100 miles, and
can’t compete with electric hybrids like the
Toyota Prius, which is already more energy efficient and low in CO2
generation than projected fuel cells.²²

Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve gotten it into a
container, it wants to get out, and since it is the lightest of all
gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it
from escaping. Storage devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets,
and valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3–4 percent
per day.²³

Hydrogen also tends to make metal brittle.²⁴ Embrittled metal can create leaks. In a pipeline, it can cause cracking or fissuring, which can result in
potentially catastrophic failure.²⁵
Making metal strong enough to withstand hydrogen adds weight and cost.
Leaks also become more likely as the pressure grows higher.
It can leak from un-welded connections, fuel lines, and non-metal seals
such as gaskets, O-rings, pipe thread compounds, and packings. A
heavy-duty fuel cell engine may have thousands of seals.²⁶
Hydrogen has the lowest ignition point of any fuel, 20 times less than
gasoline. So if there’s a leak, it can be ignited by any number of
sources.²⁷ Worse, leaks are invisible — sometimes the only way to know there’s a leak is poor performance.

Transport

Canister trucks ($250,000 each) can carry enough fuel for 60 cars.²⁸
These trucks weigh 40,000 kg, but deliver only 400 kg of hydrogen. For
a delivery
distance of 150 miles, the delivery energy used is nearly 20 percent of
the usable energy in the hydrogen delivered. At 300 miles, that is 40
percent. The same size truck carrying gasoline delivers
10,000 gallons of fuel, enough to fill about 800 cars.²⁹

Another alternative is pipelines. The average cost of a natural gas
pipeline is one million dollars per mile, and we have 200,000 miles of
natural gas pipeline, which we can’t re-use
because they are composed of metal that would become brittle and leak,
as well as the incorrect diameter to maximize hydrogen throughput. If
we were to build a similar infrastructure to deliver
hydrogen it would cost $200 trillion. The major operating cost of
hydrogen pipelines is compressor power and maintenance.³⁰
Compressors in the pipeline keep the gas
moving, using hydrogen energy to push the gas forward. After 620 miles,
8 percent of the hydrogen has been used to move it through the pipeline.³¹

Conclusion

At some point along the chain of making, putting energy in, storing,
and delivering the hydrogen, we will have used more energy than we can
get back, and this doesn’t count the
energy used to make fuel cells, storage tanks, delivery systems, and
vehicles.³²
When fusion can make cheap hydrogen, when reliable long-lasting
nanotube fuel cells
exist, and when light-weight leak-proof carbon-fiber polymer-lined
storage tanks and pipelines can be made inexpensively, then we can
consider building the hydrogen economy infrastructure. Until then,
it’s vaporware. All of these technical obstacles must be overcome for
any of this to happen.³³
Meanwhile, the United States government should stop funding the
Freedom CAR program, which gives millions of tax dollars to the big
three automakers to work on hydrogen fuel cells. Instead, automakers
ought to be required to raise the average overall mileage their
vehicles get — the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard.³⁴

At some time in the future the price of oil and natural gas will
increase significantly due to geological depletion and political crises
in extracting countries. Since the hydrogen
infrastructure will be built using the existing oil-based
infrastructure (i.e. internal combustion engine vehicles, power plants
and factories, plastics, etc.), the price of hydrogen will go up as
well — it will never be cheaper than fossil fuels. As depletion
continues, factories will be driven out of business by high fuel costs^35,36,37 and the parts necessary to build the extremely complex storage tanks and fuel cells might become unavailable.

The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy
sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy than you
can earn, because in order to do so you
must overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, move heavy cars, prevent
leaks and brittle metals, and transport hydrogen to the destination. It
doesn’t matter if all of these problems are
solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create,
store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.

Any diversion of declining fossil fuels to a hydrogen
economy subtracts that energy from other possible uses, such as
planting, harvesting, delivering, and cooking food, heating homes, and
other essential activities. According to Joseph Romm, a Department of
Energy official who oversaw research on hydrogen and transportation
fuel cell research during the Clinton Administration:
“The energy and environmental problems facing the nation and the world,
especially global warming, are far too serious to risk making major
policy mistakes that misallocate scarce
resources.³⁸

References

1. Thomas, S. and Zalbowitz, M. 1999. Fuel cells — Green power. Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 5. www.lanl.gov/orgs/mpa/mpa11/Green%20Power.pdf
2. Pinkerton, F. E. and Wicke, B.G. 2004. “Bottling the Hydrogen Genie,” The Industry Physicist, Feb/Mar: 20–23.
3. Jacobson, M. F. September 8, 2004. “Waiter, Please Hold the Hydrogen.” San Francisco Chronicle, 9(B).
4. Hoffert, M. I., et al. November 1, 2002. “Advanced Technology Paths to
   Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet.” Science, 298, 981–987.
5. Union of Concerned Scientists. How Natural Gas Works. www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=84
6. Kruglinski, S. 2004. “What’s in a Gallon of Gas?” Discover, April, 11. http://discovermagazine.com/2004/apr/discover-data/
7. Fisher, D. E. and Fisher, M. J. 2001. “The Nitrogen Bomb.” Discover, April, 52–57.
8. Smil, V. 1997. “Global Population and the Nitrogen Cycle.” Scientific American, July, 76–81.
9. Darley, J. 2004. High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis. Chelsea Green Publishing.
10. Romm, J. J. 2004. The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate. Island Press, 154.
11. Ibid., 75.
12. Hayden, H. C. 2001. The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won’t Run the World. Vales Lake Publishing.
13. Simbeck, D. R., and Chang, E. 2002. Hydrogen Supply: Cost Estimate for Hydrogen Pathways — Scoping Analysis.
    Golden, Colorado: NREL/SR-540-32525, Prepared by SFA
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    and the International Hydrogen Infrastructure Group (IHIG), July, 13. www.nrel.gov/docs/fy03osti/32525.pdf
14. Ibid., 14.
15. Romm, 2004, 20.
16. Ibid., 94–95.
17. Phillips, T. and Price, S. 2003. “Rocks in your Gas Tank.” April 17. Science at NASA. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/17apr_zeolite.htm
18. Simbeck and Chang, 2002, 41.
19. Amos, W. A. 1998. Costs of Storing and Transporting Hydrogen. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, 20. www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/25106.pdf
20. Simbeck and Chang, 2002, 14.
21. Valenti, M. 2002. “Fill’er up — With Hydrogen.” Mechanical Engineering Magazine, Feb 2. www.memagazine.org/backissues/membersonly/feb02/features/ fillerup/fillerup.html
22. Romm, 2004, 7, 20, 122.
23. Ibid., 95, 122.
24. El kebir, O. A. and Szummer, A. 2002. “Comparison of Hydrogen Embrittlement of Stainless Steels and Nickel-base Alloys.” International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
    #27, July/August 7–8, 793–800.
25. Romm, 2004, 107.
26. Fuel Cell Engine Safety. December 2001. College of the Desert www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/tech_validation/pdfs/fcm06r0.pdf
27. Romm, J. J. 2004. Testimony for the Hearing Reviewing the Hydrogen Fuel and FreedomCAR Initiatives Submitted to the House Science Committee. March 3. http://gop.science.house.gov/hearings/full04/mar03/romm.pdf
28. Romm, 2004. The Hype About Hydrogen, 103.
29. Ibid., 104.
30. Ibid., 101–102.
31. Bossel, U. and Eliasson, B. 2003. “Energy and the Hydrogen Economy.” Jan 8. www.methanol.org/pdf/HydrogenEconomyReport2003.pdf
32. Ibid.
33. National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap Production, Delivery, Storage, Conversion, Applications, Public Education and Outreach. November 2002. U.S. Department of Energy. www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/national_h2_roadmap.pdf
34. Neil, D. 2003. “Rumble Seat: Toyota’s Spark of Genius.” Los Angeles Times. October 15. www.latimes.com/la-danneil-101503-pulitzer,0,7911314.story
35. Associated Press, 2004. “Oil Prices Raising Costs of Offshoots.” July 2. www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/02/biz/news03.prt
36. Abbott, C. 2004. “Soaring Energy Prices Dog Rosy U.S. Farm Economy.” Forbes, Reuters News Service. May 24.
37. Schneider, G. 2004. “Chemical Industry in Crisis: Natural Gas Prices
    Are Up, Factories Are Closing, And Jobs Are Vanishing.” Washington Post, 1(E). March 17. www.marshall.edu/cber/media/040317-WP-chemical.pdf
38. Romm, 2004. The Hype About Hydrogen, 8.