A Hydrogen Fueled Future?
Vic Biorseth, http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com
Why not? Don't get me wrong: I don't think the world is about to run out of oil. As pointed out in the Eco-Nazi page, the world's proven reserves of oil always seem to go up year after year, never down. In fact, to my knowledge, they have never gone down. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
We tend to feel that oil is a very precious commodity when we look at the seemingly rocketing prices, as the price of regular gasoline approaches three dollars per gallon. But, over any span of years, including since the very invention of the automobile, we haven't noticed all those things that went up the same or more. Eggs, for instance, or butter, or milk, or bacon, or even chicken. Benjamin Franklin would probably roll in his grave if he were informed of the current price of a postage stamp. What we have lost sight of is the old accounting concept of the future value of money. If we look at the price of gasoline in absolutely constant dollars, we see that it is about the same or less today than it was at whatever beginning points you might choose.
Nevertheless, oil is fairly dirty, and hydrogen is rather clean, and for that reason alone if for no other we should be seriously contemplating how to get us from an oil-based most common fuel to a hydrogen-based most common fuel. And, there is the added incentive that most of the world's proven oil reserves happen to be underground in lands occupied by people who do not particularly like us, and who quite often even despise us. So long as these unpleasant people hold most of the untapped oil reserves, they have, more than anybody else, the ability to manipulate world supply and therefore price on the open market. I don't know about you, but I find it unacceptably irksome that any decision made in Saudi Arabia can have an almost immediate effect on my own personal budget here in Ohio. In my mind, oil represents almost an entire commodity market that is crying out to be replaced by something new.
I've had the experience of riding in a modern hybrid combination gas/electric car, and came away mostly unimpressed. It works very well, and will do well for lots of people, but not me. I don't know about you, but I can't stand to drive a car that can't get out of its own way. Just like the brakes, when I step on the gas, I expect something to happen, and when I step on it hard, I expect something dramatic to happen. In this car, what happened mostly was hesitation and slow, slow acceleration. Which might be fine for some; just not for me. Hydrogen at least carries the promise, however tentative, of real power, like what we're used to.
The problem is not how to make a car run on hydrogen; that's been done to death. The problem is how to economically make hydrogen in quantities suitable for use as fuel, as a replacement for all forms of gasoline, diesel and crude oil. Quite a few years ago some shade-tree mechanics in California converted an American car to run on hydrogen, and all they really had to modify was the carburetion system. Same intake manifold, same exhaust, same old V-8 engine, same transmission. Much more sophisticated ones have been done since then; some using the hydrogen fuel cell as a hydrogen-powered battery to run an electric motor to run the car, and some using pressurized hydrogen to actually combust in the engine to drive the car. Either way, they work, and the only exhaust they produce is good old H2O - which is to say, water. In the form of water vapor, and actual condensed water, which drips from the tail pipes. You can drink it.
I know that the Department of Defense, some years ago, did some tests on hydrogen-powered proto-type military vehicles using hydride tanks to hold the pressurized hydrogen fuel. A hydride is a metallic substance, usually in the form of pellets, that has an electro-chemical affinity for hydrogen. The hydrogen bonds into or onto the hydride and is not in the form of pure free hydrogen any more. Application of a small amount of heat causes the hydrogen to separate from the hydride and become free and available for fuel. In a test I saw on TV they fired an armor-piercing incendiary round through one of these hydride tanks and all it did was phizz. No explosion; no flames.
Even in the absence of any hydride-usage, hydrogen should be considerably safer, as a substance, than gasoline. It tends to be self extinguishing because when you burn hydrogen, what you get is water. Next time you see again - and you will see again - the old film of the famous Hindenburg disaster, note how slowly it burned, and how water was pouring out of the fire onto the people below, and how many people, including passengers, actually survived. Then, try imagining the same scene if the Hindenburg had been filled with gasoline instead of hydrogen. How many do you suppose might have survived that little inferno?
During my Army years, I had occasion to see a trailer for a 2.5 ton truck, full of five gallon gas cans, go up in flames. The gas cans were going off one or two or three at a time, and it was quite a spectacular show. The full ones would heat up and expand enough to pop a seam or a lid, and then they would go off in a giant, unbelievable fireball. The half or partially full ones that were not strapped down would sometimes take off like flaming rockets, arcing through the air and making a great fireball wherever they landed. But the empty ones were the worst of all. They went off just like dynamite, with a ferocious blast, enough to even put the fire out for a couple of seconds or so. But then it would get going again quickly, and the process continued until there was no more left to burn. Believe me, whether empty or full, you do not want to be in the immediate neighborhood when any gas container goes off. While it's not something we think about very often or at all, and I could be wrong about it, I would personally feel somewhat safer burning hydrogen than gasoline as a fuel in any vehicle.
So, why can't Detroit just get with the program and produce hydrogen cars for us? Well, because we need lots of places to periodically gas them up, and we already have this huge infrastructure built up around gas stations, refineries, ports, pipelines and delivery systems. Making hydrogen is easy enough. All you have to do to crack hydrogen out of water is stick positive and negative electrodes in the water and apply a current across them. The bubbles that come off of one are hydrogen, and the bubbles that come off the other are oxygen. Nothing to it. And, when you burn hydrogen, it recombines with oxygen and again forms water. Very simple. The real problem is an economic one: it takes more energy, in the form of electricity, to crack hydrogen out of water than you can get out of the hydrogen that is produced. That's the problem.
It will only be resolved when it looks to be a financially sound investment opportunity that will pay off for the investors. Right now, as a fuel, hydrogen looks to be about three times more efficient as a fuel than gas products. Meaning, it's a better fuel; you get more horsepower and/or torque out of it, per unit, than you get out of gas. I would like to see some big time NHRA team with a happy sponsor splurge on a new hydrogen-powered dragster just to see how it might stack up against the typical dragster today running nitro-methane. Especially if they combined it with a nitrous-oxide boost, for the added oxygen. It would probably be more difficult for anyone in NASCAR to experiment with hydrogen, because they are already saddled with heavy rules and regulations. One NASCAR team probably couldn't do it; they would all have to do it, if they could do it at all.
I think a greater incentive to move us all in the direction of a common hydrogen fuel might involve government contracts, and even defense contracts. Let engineering firms compete for lucrative contracts to produce, not only hydrogen, but hydrogen powered government vehicles. Trucks; cars; tanks; ships; planes. Perhaps floating hydrogen factories; instead of oil platforms, hydrogen platforms, put in place for convenience, not for the presence of any "proven reserves." Platforms are already floating on the raw material from which to make hydrogen. All they need is a windmill or two and some solar panels to be in the hydrogen producing business. Perhaps the Navy could use ships of the fleet dedicated to making hydrogen for other ships of the fleet. I submit that right now, today, every military ship that has aboard a nuclear power plant has the electrical ability to make all the hydrogen and all the fresh water it will ever need for itself and for any other supporting vessels or vehicles.
As far as a network of hydrogen gas stations for the masses to use - well, at the moment, in my admittedly limited intellect, the only viable solution I see involves a gradual, one or a few at a time, partial conversion of existing gas stations to hydrogen, made on the premises, out of water. Water is plentiful; it is generally already available on the premises of every gas station in America. Station owners will have to be prepared for a higher water bill, if they don't have their own well. The real problem is where to get the electricity with which to crack hydrogen out of the water, and to compress it into a holding tank of some kind.
Well, I can imagine a gas station with a windmill, and/or with solar panels on the roof, or even with a gas-powered generator to produce electricity for cracking hydrogen. Or any combination of the above. Once the numbers of hydrogen customers begin to compete with the numbers of gas customers, the number of gas pumps will go down and the number of hydrogen pumps will go up. Pumps will be different, needing as they will some sort of pressure locking system before you turn on the hydrogen to fill your fuel cell or hydride tank or whatever. At any rate, you can see that the price of hydrogen will be tied to the local cost of producing hydrogen. It will be tied to an electric bill and a water bill, and perhaps to some capital investment in solar panels / windmills / generators / fuel for generators, and so forth. Not to Arab sheiks or foreign dictators.
Eventually, no trucks will be periodically pulling in to fill the gas station's tanks, which will become permanently empty. Fuel will be produced on the spot. If you've read what I wrote in the Eco-Nazi page, then you know that I favor nuclear power plants, and why. They produce electricity more cleanly, efficiently and safely than any other kind of power plant. Eventually, if there were enough of them brought on-line, the cost of transmitted electrical power would go down. Whether it would go down enough to make cracking hydrogen economically feasible, I don't know, but I do know that down is the correct direction for transmitted electrical power costs to move.
When it is financially worthwhile for it to be done, someone will produce a way to generate hydrogen in a profitable way, and the geo-political world will never quite be the same again. But, in many ways, things will be pretty much the same for most of us. Most of us haven't had to rebuild a carburetor in years; the whole automotive world has already switched to fuel injection. Changes to make the cars we are driving today run on hydrogen should be minimal. If you grew up fiddling around with cars, you can probably do it yourself.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about today, the 31st, the actual, real Memorial Day. If you are a fellow veteran, God bless you and yours. If you are currently serving, God bless you and yours. For all those who didn't make it home, may the Lord of Mercy see not their sins, but their magnificent sacrifice. For no greater love hath any man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.
On this day in 1968 my Marcie and I were married, combining a somber day of reflection into a day of joy. For any who left some part of their anatomy or of their psyche on the field of honor, may they come home to know peace, to be embraced by a grateful nation, and to be engulfed by the infinite love of Almighty God.
May you please God, and may you live forever.
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