There's No Fuel Like an Old Fuel

Hydrogen versus Direct Electric

In the new age of gasoline-free automobiles, the ultimate decisions will be made by the automobile companies regarding the power source for our engines. Will they be Hydrogen based fuel cells or rechargeable batteries that hook into your home ac circuit?

It seems that everyone is in love with the idea of the plug-in electric, but I have yet to read an analysis that concerns a basic concept such as where and how will that electricity be generated. It seems that everyone expects electrons to flow out of the house socket as if by wizardry. Those electrons have to come from somewhere, folks, and we have to answers those question soon. Will those electrons come from nuclear plants such as pebble bed reactors? From " clean" coal plants? Natural gas plants? Oil shale fired plants? Wind turbines from the Midwest?

Or will the energy be based on a hydrogen produced and transported by the oil companies who now fuel your car? Can you really believe that Exxon Mobil, Phillips, Conoco, BP, and Shell want to give up their automobile-based profits and turn those dollars over to the electric companies without a fight? Will they allow their distribution and refining facilities to be made as obsolescent as buggy whip and ice factories? Or will they get into the wind turbine and electric business and go head to head with Duke?

The nearly bankrupt general Motors is coming out with the Chevrolet "Volt",ostensibly an electric car, however it comes with a gasoline "range extender" ("engine") to get the car home while simultaneously charging the battery. Good thing, because so far, the batteries on electrics allow only a range of 40 miles, which might be great for in-city errands, but totally unacceptable for taking a decent trip. So what they really are talking about is a $50,000 "station car"."Cheap!" as they used to say on the cover of MAD Magazine.

When you think of it, the hydrogen proponents are living in the same fantasy world as the electric guys. Hydrogen won't be sucked magically out of the ambient air, so where does the hydrogen come from? Here is a posting that you might want to read:

The mass media's fascination with fuel-cell powered cars is understandable. The promise of "clean, cheap energy from water" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it makes better fiction than reality. Hydrogen-powered cars just emit their pollution elsewhere.

In any chemical reaction like the one that powers your car, energy must be conserved; meaning that the energy must "come from" somewhere. So where does the hydrogen "fuel" for a fuel-cell car come from? Two possible sources are

* Water - plentiful and everywhere.
* & Methane - while the U.S. has some methane reserves, we would need to import it from "non-friendlies" in order to meet current (and future) demand.

Let's look at water. First of all, the hydrogen molecules in water are strongly bound to oxygen. Therefore, it takes (substantial) energy to split water into useful hydrogen (used by the fuel cell) and oxygen molecules. The majority of that energy - in America - is derived from coal power. If you take into account that a significant minority of the power grid in America is also nuclear, we have traded a clean-burning gasoline engine for nuclear and coal powered fuel-cells. Since so-called "greens" would never advocate more nuclear power - even though that would be the best solution - we can't and won't power fuel-cell cars from water-derived hydrogen.

If, instead, we power the car by reducing methane (CH4), then we have merely traded one energy source (gasoline) for another (methane) that is far less efficient -- and therefore produces MORE carbon-dioxide per mile traveled than gasoline!

Even though Honda is beginning to produce a hydrogen fuel cell automobile, the FCX they still have not answered the hydrogen production question. Furthermore, hydrogen merely displaces the environmental impact from the end user to the fuel producer for no net environmental gain

Critics also point out that hydrogen is costly to produce and the most common way to produce hydrogen is still from fossil fuels.

Analysis of the environmental impact of different fuel technologies has shown that the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.

I am sure that you have seen those television advertisements with oilman T.Boone Pickens in which he extols the need to develop the wind power present in the Mid-West. Certainly, that area of the country has a lot of potential energy, as the song, "Oklahoma", says, "where the wind comes sweeping down the plains". While Mr. Pickens seems willing to put up a lot of his money to develop this potential, the question of distribution seems not to to be addressed. Does the continental United States electric grid have the capacity to act as an efficient distributor of the electricity generated by wind power, or will the government have to spend billions of dollars in system upgrades and if so, is it worth the expense? An engineer I was speaking with several weeks ago told me that the electric grid system currently operates with a 95% degree of efficiency and the only question that needs to be answered is that of capacity.

We are in a period of uncertainty about future fuels, and no one will be safe placing one bet on the energy craps table. Despite the bleating of the environmentalists, look for more drilling and more efficient gasoline vehicles to predominate until the industry and market both answer some questions regarding fuel production, distribution and efficiency that have yet to be adequately answered. But is Pickens right?

Any engineers want to weigh in on this? Anyone? Bueller?