The Hydrogen Hoax (2007)
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
1) The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product.
2) The delivery argument: this doesn't even begin to make sense. Straw man argument where he claims it couldn't be delivered efficiently in the domains he suggests. It is harder to deliver hydrogen than hydrocarbons, but the numbers he quotes are just garbage.
3) Limiting the vehicle storage to compressed gas (muh hindenberg) and cryo. No serious people really talk about this to my knowledge. Metal hydrides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...) are the way hydrogen probably would be transported in a hydrogen economy. It's still less efficient volumetrically than hydrocarbons, but then so is everything else. The argument that it must be as dense as hydrocarbons is just goalposting. People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. At least at one point, the envisioned hydrogen economy was you just retrofit hydride "gas tanks" to existing internal combustion machines. If you can make everything else work, that's a fairly reasonable thing to do. Which is probably why Zubrin never mentions it.
4) Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. I think this is Zubrin's biggest fear. His goalposting about fuel cell efficiency is silly: so what if they're not more efficient on some measurement than an ideal diesel motor? They don't smell as bad either.
Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
(Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).
I do have to wonder whether this was intentional, though. The author appears to be targeting the government administration at the time. He's buttering them up by starting with a rant with which they're likely to agree. I'm not sure that it was intentional, but if it was, it was a smart move.
The advantage of hydrides over hydrogen is you don't release all the flammable gas at once, improving safety.
Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qhj31/e...
As I mention elsewhere in this thread, hydrocarbons will dominate the air travel industry long after most others have converted. The less carbon in flux, the better.
Really, it doesn't matter whether we burn hydrogen or carbon. How much carbon is in flux is irrelevant. The main thing - the only thing - is to stop digging it up. The cycle must be closed. After that, it's safe to let the market decide the most efficient energy cycles.
I've always thought that the best approach would be to find a way to take advantage of the hydrogen delivery infrastructure that already exists in the form of gas stations on every other corner. If we could just come up with a scalable way to split hydrocarbon molecules without actually burning them, we'd be able to turn most CO2 emission sources into harmless water sources. Might as well wish for flying cars and unlimited fusion power while I'm at it, I guess...
Granted by the time we could manage something like that there would be far better options out there including using excess power generation to synthesize fuel from the air and water - let alone batteries which may use the energy more efficiently.
So yes prices of gasoline went up once it started being widely used.
IMO the storage and transportation issue is what kills hydrogen. Also compression losses are nontrivial.
Assuming we need to manufacture fuel in renewable way methane or ethanol sounds like good ways to go. Both can be done in scale by abusing bacteria/algee.
Overall I want my car to just have a standard form factor "power unit" and swap it out to whatever the new hotness is.
I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.
Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. The comparison is totally sound. The hydrocarbons for gasoline are readily drilled out of the ground. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured either from these hydrocarbons (which is pointless for fuel, you can just use the hydrocarbons directly) or via electricity (which is far more expensive).
A mass market for carbon could not reduce the price below that of its inputs. Even if we had abundant cheap electricity it's unclear that hydrogen would really be economical against all alternatives.
> People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
He's comparing fuels, you're comparing batteries to fuels, which doesn't make sense.
> Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in.
So the six billion dollars of investment mentioned aren't enough?
> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry.
This habit of putting people into ideological boxes inhibits your ability to make rational assessments.
> For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed.
You must have overread the part where he argues for ethanol fuel as a means to break up OPEC.
> I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
That's not the message though. The message is "it doesn't work, period" and "it is a hoax". I'm not in the position to say that his calculations are right or wrong, but given the lack of progress on hydrogen as a fuel, it's probably not far off the truth.
>>Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. ...
twenty million metric tons of hydrogen a year made from natural gas versus a couple billion of gasoline made from oil; not comparable at all for the suggested economic uses of hydrogen as a fuel. If hydrogen were used, it would be produced in a different way. Otherwise people could just burn the natural gas.
People invested more than 6 billion in fracking. Fuel cells are promising, and of course I compare fuel cells and the proposed hydrogen economy to batteries; they're used to store energy.
I loathe war mongering neocons, and Zubrin absolutely is one and as such has discredited himself as any kind of policy wonk who expects to be listened to by serious people. That said, some of his martian speculations are amusing, and I might even have an amusing conversation if I were in the same room with him, where the more prominent ones (Bill Kristol) I would be in danger of clubbing to death like a baby seal.
There has been considerable progress in fuel cell vehicles, for example. The Honda Clarity fuel cell version has an estimated 360+ mi (US EPA) range: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-cl... . Fill times are significantly better than current high-rate battery electric vehicle charging.
It seems to me the key will be in whether we make advancements faster in higher energy-density batteries vs. scale up of direct hydrogen production (e.g., https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells ) . Electrolysis using grid power probably does not make sense. It would be valid to question, even if we could directly scale up hydrogen production from renewable sources, wouldn't it make more sense to use the same area for electricity production? If we're talking about ground transportation, the only advantages would be in range and fill time of FCVs over BEVs. Simplicity strongly favors BEVs over FCVs.
Hydrogen combustion for ground transportation (although neat!) just does not seem compelling. It will take a lot of plumbing refits, fuel injector changes, ECU recalibration, etc. to make an existing IC car burn hydrogen. And if you're designing from scratch, why continue the burden of using an Otto cycle reciprocating machine over fuel cells?
Absent compelling reasons to do otherwise (which the Zubrin article does not present), it seems like continuing the research relevant to BEVs and renewable hydrogen production on parallel paths is the prudent thing to do.
Could you be more specific?
> the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
How is this measured? Are you saying that a gasoline car has 100x the range of an EV car with a battery volume equal to the gas tank's volume? That seems excessive.
Watts per kilogram. A kilo of gasoline contains about 100x the energy of a lithium ion battery.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_199.shtml
It's virtually impossible to beat hydrocarbons for chemical potential energy density. Diesel is the most dense commonly available such fuel. You put a liquid in a tank and move the complexity to the heat engine (which is 20-50% efficient depending on the size of the motor). Batteries don't even come close. Which is why if you put a fuel tank in a tesla with 1200lbs of gasoline in it (about 170 gallons), and operated it at comparable performance, its range would be considerably longer, despite lack of woo like regenerative braking and more efficient electric motors.
It's one of the things Zubrin is complaining about in his mendacious article. Fair complaint; "gee the periodic table won't cooperate" -though metal hydrides are not terrible either, and in conjunction with fuel cells (potentially 100% efficient, despite his saying "nuh uh"), could be considerably better than a hydrocarbon car.
This credibility attack doesn't wash at all. Zubrin is a conservative thinker, yes, but he's not a spokesperson for the defense industry. He is a staunchly independent aerospace consultant whose project is humans-to-Mars. He's actually worked against industry interests since his plans are vastly less profitable than the cost-plus boondogles the traditional industry lobbies for (SLS, etc.).
I think he might be speaking outside his element here, but I also think the date (2007) is very important. This was back in the middle of the worst parts of the Iraq war, with rising oil prices. Oil we got then was mostly from the middle east. People felt we needed to get off oil for economic and national security reasons, not because of climate change per se. The predictable result was blue-sky research into the hydrogen economy on things that really couldn't be deployed at that time (and still are barely deployed now, 12 years later). Zubrin's argument at the time, which this essay is a part of, was that we should switch to "flex fuel" engines which can take diesel or biofuels. Then we wouldn't be dependent on the sweet crude from the middle east.
Now, in 2019, most of the oil we get is from relative friendlies in Canada and Venezuela, and we have better refineries for converting poor-quality crude from these sources into gasoline for cars. Improved battery efficiencies driven by mobile phones and notebooks have made electric storage for cars actually feasible. Solar efficiencies make locally produced energy economically viable. In short, energy world in 2019 looks nothing like 2007, and I don't think this article is very interesting at this point in time.
But the article seem to condemn Hydrogen as any part of any zero-carbon economy because of this, as though any energy medium unsuitable for cars is automatically disqualified entirely from the green economy. I can imagine other use-cases where Hydrogen actually works well.
In large vehicles, for example, where a heavy reinforced tank isn't as much of a liability, like maybe a locomotive.
The use of hydrogen as an energy-storage medium for large stationary power plants also seems reasonable, maybe a solar power plant could split water when sunlight is abundant, and recombine it in the fuel-cell when energy-demand is high, using hydrogen storage to bridge the gap.
Or, similarly, a nuclear plant could split water at an efficient, steady "base-load" rate, and recombine it at different rates to match demand.
Viewed as an industrial-scale energy-storage medium, it makes more sense. It still has to compete with other industrial-scale energy storage media, but it's a very different landscape from vehicle fuels.
Hydrogen's place is for rare times when renewables or short term storage can't do it. This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market, the part nuclear fans seem to harp on (even though nuclear would be terrible for filling it also.) For such rare uses fuel cells would be inappropriate; gas turbines would be better (even if the round trip efficiency were lousy.)
So whether or not Hydrogen is useful really boils down to whether or not hydrogen is a superior source of energy storage versus Lithium batteries, compressed air, flywheels or whatever.
> This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market
It's not the 'last 10-20% of the electrical power market'.
What renewables like solar and wind can't cover, without effective energy storage, is 100% of the power requirements 30-40% of the time.
Solar only works when the sun is shining. Wind mills only work when the wind is blowing at a appropriate speed. Unless you produce a massive excess of energy and then store it somewhere then neither of these two technologies can ever replace traditional power generation.
The best you can can achieve otherwise is to have solar power during the bright hours of the day and then massive number of natural gas turbines to pick up the slack the rest of the time.
Traditional power generation plants are a poor match with renewable because they can't vary their output quick enough to match the wildly variable capacity of solar and wind.
So the important part of the question is whether or not hydrogen is a useful mechanism to store the energy. And so far it has not been.
- lithium has scarcity issues which will only get worse with electric vehicles - liquid batteries likewise require some more rarer elements, corrosive enough to require - underground storage (of air pressure, CO2, etc) requires caverns/mines on site - pumped hydro has even tighter site constraints - biofuel/synfuel is decent for mid-to-long term storage, but slow to generate - flywheel has energy density issues
Hydrogen, your main limits are basically steel for tanks, and some rare metals in catalytic amounts.
There hasn't been enough incentive in energy storage deployment to push the scaling up and costs down. But I think we are closest to an "embarrassingly parallel" deployment of hydrogen as energy storage.
This is exactly backwards. It is only useful for long term storage. For short term storage, other alternatives would more efficient and economically superior.
Hydrogen's advantage is that huge quantities of it can be stored underground, at very low cost. Hydrogen can act as a literal rainy day energy fund, and to smooth over seasonal differences in energy production and use.
The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft.
However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable.
It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.
The way forward is absolutely going to be battery power for short flights and synthetic liquid hydrocarbons for longer distances.
I don't see hydrogen in any form, including hydrides, meeting these criteria. Not to mention, the entire distribution infrastructure is tooled out for liquid hydrocarbons.
Synfuel is expensive compared to fossil fuel, but not dramatically so.
You're currently looking at ~$0.64/L for FF jet fuel, ~$0.95/L for biodiesels, and $1.15/L for fully synthetic fuels eg Fischer-Tropsch.
https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/192/2018/01/Bann-Seamus-...
That's true for jet propellant, but it's not true for hydrogen. A hydrogen powered airplane would have to have a much greater volume than an equivalent airplane fueled with regular jet fuel, but it would have substantially less weight. I'm not sure how this would work out for overall performance, though -- you'd have substantially more direct drag to overcome, but on the other hand you'd have a lot less lift-related drag simply because you'd need a lot less lift.
As a thought-experiment, you could imagine an aircraft roughly the size and shape of a 757 but with the weight and payload capacity of a 737. This might be an acceptable design for a cargo carrying aircraft, but realistically, a passenger-carrying aircraft would need large cylindrical tanks on the wings for safety reasons, but also with increased drag.
> Not to mention, the entire distribution infrastructure is tooled out for liquid hydrocarbons.
In the specific case of hydrogen-powered commercial aviation, this doesn't matter at all, because there would not be a distribution infrastructure, at least as we generally think of it. Instead, we'd need to distribute water and electricity to airports, and the hydrogen would be produced and stored on-site. The equipment to make and store liquid hydrogen wouldn't necessarily be cheap, but over any significant period of time it would likely be dominated by the cost of electricity necessary to produce the hydrogen through electrolysis.
The economics of synthetic fuels for aviation are probably still better, but I think that it might be a lot closer than people imagine. If you could cheaply retro-fit existing airframes for hydrogen they'd be a lot closer still, but I don't think that's likely. It's an interesting possibility to think about though.
Precisely. Any weight savings of energy density per wt of hydrogen are offset by the poor energy/volume, plus the need for cylindrical tanks for stress reasons. Wing fuel tanks are roughly wing-shaped, meaning no increase to cross section. Hydrogen would require sets of cylinders, which add walls which add weight yet don't directly aid the engineering constraints, or exist outside the current flight envelope, adding drag.
Maybe some big advancement in construction methods could allow synergy of hydrogen tanks walls with aircraft structure, but you are still stuck with 1/3rd volumetric density of energy, meaning larger cross section, more drag, and more fuel usage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...
The technology is easily scalable to meet demand, in fact it has to scale far less than how much battery production has to scale from current levels.
I'm convinced it's not a question of if, but a question of when this becomes a major thing. We're at the point where we need all the technological and societal mechanisms we can muster.
Define 'increasingly'
And after you get you H2, what are you going to do with it? You're not going to use it to power vehicles, that's for sure.
For transport hydrogen suffers a lot of the same issues as lithium. The storage systems are all heavy. Compare with an empty gasoline tank you can lift with one hand.
Which is already addressed in the article: hydrogen is best as a storage medium, but even as that it's not-green and very mediocre storage.
Oh, plus thousands of words, with numerous arguments, detailed calculations, examples, and formulas, for why hydrogen doesn't work.
But don't let that affect your bias towards the article, or god forbid, temp you to at least keep the former (anti-hydrogen arguments) and ignore the former (ethanol push).
Hydrogen is useful as a solve for the energy storage problem in green energy. For example, excess solar energy can be stored as hydrogen fuel. Also this solves the "fuel quickly" problem for people who need to drive long distances.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602407
It's 2019 and this is still going on.
For current information on Germany's energy mix see https://www.agora-energiewende.de/
We heard the explosion 7km away.
A leak in the petrol tanks at a station won't cause explosions in itself, it causes polluted ground water. Not to mention it's quite hard to get petrol to blow up, you need a pretty specific mix of fuel and air.
Hydrogen pretty much blows up no matter what if there is a leak.