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Towards a Hydrogen Economy by Bob Siegel There is a hydrogen story beginning to emerge in this land, like a slowly developing Polaroid picture. Only the picture generally seems more like a scattered array of disparate elements rather than any kind of cohesive unity. That is why I was so surprised to hear two leaders in the industry, CEO’s Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Roger Saillant of Plug Power, sounding such similar themes despite the fact that Lovins’ most recent book focuses on hydrogen for transportation while Saillant’s Plug Power is in the stationary fuel cell business I was fortunate enough to hear these two at a conference session this past fall entitled, Steps Towards a Hydrogen Economy. The conference was Business Innovation for Sustainability and it was sponsored by Peter Senge’s Society for Organizational Learning. The session provided an insightful look into the minds of these two visionary thinkers. Despite the fact that they were nominally coming at the question of a prospective hydrogen future from different directions, there was a surprising degree of synergy in their message. Saillant, the former Ford manufacturing VP, started. He’s a hard-core realist with just enough dreamer mixed in to have given up a well insulated position for the opportunity to make something truly important happen with fuel cells. He said that in the absence of Aunt Martha, the hydrogen economy is still several decades away. Aunt Martha is, of course, that kindly old spinster who is nice enough to surprise you with a million dollar inheritance when she dies. Absent Aunt Martha, which presumably would be some kind of government incentive program for hydrogen, the day that hydrogen becomes fully entrenched as a mainstream energy source is fifty years away. This, as we shall see, differs from Lovins’ forecast but only as we would expect a manufacturing type to differ from a research type. They are, almost by definition, the empty and full portions of the cup, with one making his living from what is possible, and the other making what is possible actually happen. Saillant’s message is essentially a call for a mosaic approach. This means that as we move forward in implementing alternatives to the current unsustainable energy choices, a diversity of sources can and should be cultivated to contribute energy to a flexible and adaptive network of smart consumers. On the one hand, we must work with the existing electrical and fuel infrastructure. This is simply too large an investment to ignore, at least here at home. This challenges a number of H2 scenarios that are premised on the idea of distributed generation. However, there are 2 billion people in the developing world who are off this grid because it doesn’t exist there yet. They could bypass it entirely which is what has happened with telecommunications in China. They skipped right over the problem of laying phone lines to remote regions and went directly to cellular. The same thing can, and most likely will happen with energy. The energy mosaic of the future will have both distributed and centralized generation. Most people think of hydrogen as new, but hydrogen is not new. There is already quite a bit going on with hydrogen. There are, for example, over 900 miles of hydrogen pipeline installed in this country. Most steam electric power plants, including nuclear, use hydrogen as a coolant. Fifty million tons of H2 per year is being produced in this country right now. In fact, 6-8% of our natural gas is used to produce it. Of this, 90% is used within the chemical processing industry and is consumed where it is produced. Hydrogen gas is considerably safer than gasoline. When it burns in air it produces a flare, not an explosion. The fire can generally be controlled by simply closing the valve. The Hindenburg fire, contrary to popular myth, was not about hydrogen, it was actually the flammable canopy and the diesel fuel for the engine that caught fire. No deaths in that disaster were ever directly attributed to hydrogen. People have made a lot of noise about the fact that it takes more energy to produce H2 than it yields. Yet this is true of any fuel, including gasoline. But H2, when used in fuel cells is clean and quiet and lends itself well to CHP (combined heat and power) systems which can actually make it more efficient, all things considered. As it stands right now, it is cheaper and more efficient to move H2 through a pipeline than a comparable amount of electricity through a wire. Some analysts get hung up on the amount of energy content per unit volume or mass. The main thing is the net effect and because hydrogen fuel cells are so efficient in converting energy, the net effect compares favorably even with the fuel density as low as it is. There are two key points are. First of all, remember the mosaic. We have hydrogen being produced through electrolysis as provided by solar PV and wind. We have hydrogen storage supplying PEM fuel cells that power both residential and automotive applications. We have hydrogen provided by biomass sources as well. The future will be flexible and adaptive. Consider a hybrid version of the existing utility infrastructure with both centralized and distributed reforming of coal, petroleum or natural gas into H2. Hydrogen could be piped directly to the end user, natural gas could be provided and reformed at the point of need, or either one could be converted to electricity and then transmitted to the point of use. This flexible configuration will allow for a variety of approaches to evolve until such time as an optimal approach or approaches emerge. The second key point is the fact that, according to Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, our economy has been on a path towards “decarbonization” since its inception. Starting with wood and then coal, then oil and then natural gas, each of these hydrocarbon fuels has, in fact contained decreasing carbon content with a higher and higher fraction of hydrogen. So it stands to reason that using pure hydrogen would be the next logical step. Enter Amory Lovins, the soft-spoken, number-slinging, counterculture hero of the seventies. Once the fastest slide rule in the west, now he carries a palm-sized computer with a 2GB memory card. He has never taken his eye off the energy ball. Only now he has had time to sharpen his pencil to laser precision, and to come up with some answers. He has come out of his Rocky Mountain lair to promote his new book, Winning the Oil Endgame, not so he can make a bundle on it, but so you can read it. How do I know that? Because he has made it available for free download at www.oilendgame.com. The book is broad in scope but it primarily features the R&D results of a major crash program to develop an ultra-efficient “Hypercar” that can demonstrate the principles upon which a petroleum exit strategy can be based. Lovins describes the car as “more of a computer with wheels, than a car with chips.” But while the car features a number of highly integrated digital dynamic vehicle systems, it is the advanced composite materials that provide superior performance and safety at a fraction of existing vehicle weight that provides the breakthrough from an energy perspective. The extremely light weight of this vehicle provides acceleration and hill climbing performance comparable with existing vehicles with a tiny 47 hp power plant. What this, in turn, means is that for a hydrogen fuel cell version of this car, fuel economy is so good that it becomes possible to actually carry enough hydrogen onboard for a 300 mile cruising range without the need to compress the gas to bomb-like pressures. This, in turn, makes the vehicle even lighter. It is, in fact the ultra-low weight of the vehicle that makes the sophisticated dynamic suspension system necessary to ensure that the vehicle will handle in a manner that resembles the heavier vehicles we have all grown accustomed to. Yet this car, which is made of the same materials as pro football helmets, is safer in a crash than a conventional car made out of steel. Lovins goes on to chart out a transitional course that shows the leading car companies already moving in this direction. Implementing the carbon-fiber technology now positions them well, he says, as first hybrid-electrics and then, later, hydrogen fuel cell cars come rolling off the assembly lines. The amazing thing about all of this is that it will actually cost less to do this than it would to maintain the existing oil infrastructure, especially considering what we are now spending to secure the supply. Following this approach, Lovins says, will get our oil imports back to 1972 levels in 20 years and save $70 billion in the process. The key to doing this is to integrate deployment of both stationary and mobile hydrogen applications. This sounds a bit like Roger’s mosaic. In fact, in the weeks following the conference, Plug Power and Honda announced Phase 2 of a joint agreement to develop a home energy station, which they describe as “a fuel cell system that provides electricity and heat to a home or business, while also providing hydrogen for a fuel cell vehicle.” The product is connected to the natural gas grid. Since a car produces about the same amount of power as a typical home, and most cars spend most of the time sitting still, there is a tremendous amount of generating capacity being wasted as a car is parked in the garage at night. The same is true when hundreds of vehicles are parked outside of factories or office buildings or even shopping malls where so much more power is needed. There is a tremendous opportunity here to conserve both natural and capital resources if one is willing to think out of the box. Natural gas use won’t go up because of hydrogen offsets in refineries, power plant cooling, and in space heating from fuel cell waste heat. Plus, hydrogen can be produced from other sources, such as wind. Just Dakota’s wind power alone could make enough H2 for all US vehicles if they were all built as efficiently as Hypercars. Listening to these two speak certainly makes the hydrogen economy seem within reach, provided we are willing to change, which is never easy.
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