Publication date: 13-Feb-2004
Source: U-Wire

LOS ANGELES -- President George W. Bush's claim that the mass production of vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells by 2020 will be cost-effective and practical is unrealistic, according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.

In his State of the Union address in 2003, Bush announced a $1.2 billion hydrogen fuel initiative aimed at allowing the United States to move toward powering cars, trucks, homes and businesses without depending on foreign oil or producing harmful greenhouse gases.

On Monday, the Energy Department announced that it would include $318 million in its 2005 budget for fuel cell and hydrogen production.

Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, said it is the department's belief that hydrogen is the next frontier and economies based on hydrogen, rather than oil, are where the world is headed.

Surya G. K. Prakash, a professor of chemistry and co-director at University of Southern California's Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, is one scientist who disagrees.

Prakash, who researches fuel cells, said that a key thing to remember is that while hydrogen outwardly looks like a very attractive option for clean energy, it is very difficult and expensive to produce. With very little pure hydrogen occurring naturally in the environment, energy officials would have to think about a source for all the hydrogen that the country would use to power vehicles, Prakash said.

"You can't just make a hole in the ground where hydrogen will start pouring out," he said. "Hydrogen has to be made."

He also questioned the hype over hydrogen.

While hydrogen is a clean energy source that produces water when burned with oxygen rather than carbon dioxide -- allowing us to move away from depleting our fossil fuel supplies -- it is expensive and difficult to make.

One way to produce hydrogen is by electrically separating water, but 80 percent to 90 percent of our electricity is currently supplied by fossil fuels, creating the paradox of having to burn fossil fuels in order to get our alternative fuel.

Hydrogen is a gas above negative 250 degrees Celsius, very light and permeable through most material.

This in turn makes storing it and building a hydrogen infrastructure a very expensive proposition, Prakash said.

It would need to be stored in very heavy and expensive material to ensure that it does not escape. It is also extremely explosive, so it must be kept at certain pressures, making it dangerous to store.

Prakash said that while it is feasible to have gas pipelines that can easily transport oil from city to city, a similar infrastructure built for hydrogen would cost trillions of dollars.

A lot of support for the use of hydrogen and belief in the feasibility of hydrogen fuel cells for commercial use come from the knowledge that space shuttle engines currently use hydrogen as fuel. Prakash said that while it makes sense to use this type of energy for space shuttles it is just not feasible to produce the hydrogen infrastructure needed for commercial use.

The Loker Institute began work on hydrogen fuel cells in 1989 with a grant from the federal government. Shortly after their research began, Prakash said that they began to believe that there are better alternative-energy options.

George A. Olah, Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 1994 and director of the Loker Institute, said in an editorial to Chemical and Engineering News that it is reasonable to start considering methanol as an alternative to the expensive and dangerous hydrogen option.

Methanol is a cheap, bulk commercial chemical that is much easier to produce than hydrogen, because it can come from wood and by recycling the carbon dioxide from our atmosphere into the alcohol. As a liquid, it does not come with the storage concerns that hydrogen has.

The Loker Institute, in conjunction with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, also discovered a "direct methanol fuel cell." The DMFC technology is seen to have great promise and is currently being commercialized for use in devices such as cellular phones and laptops.

Olah said that it is realistic to say that methanol could eventually replace oil and gas as a fuel and as a chemical raw material to make products such as plastics. For this reason, he said, it is rewarding to start focusing energy and resources on developing a "methanol economy" rather than the "hydrogen economy."

In addition to developing alternative-energy sources the Loker Institute also looks at how to get more efficiency out of hydrocarbons such as oil, natural gas and coal. Prakash said such studies are important considering combustion engines, such as one used in cars and trucks, utilize only 17 percent of oil's energy potential. The rest is burned in the process of turning the fuel into thermal energy, which is then converted into electric energy to power the engine.

Fuel cells of any energy source -- whether hydrogen, natural gas or methanol - are more efficient because they turn fuel directly into electric energy, Prakash said. Fuel cells at room temperature are 90 percent efficient.

Creating fuel cells and other devices that more efficiently use fossil fuels or use an alternative fuel is crucial because of the inevitable depletion of fossil fuel stocks and our current dependence on them.