Nobrainer’s Think Tank

For a while, many of us have known the drawbacks of hydrogen, or H2, powered and fuel cell powered cars. The storage of H2 is difficult. Liquid H2 must be kept incredibly cold and gaseous H2 is amazingly combustible. There seems to be an ingenious solution from a real genius. Stan Ovshinsky is the brains behind what may be the most innovative company anywhere. I’ll save my commentary on metal-hydride technology for another day.

However, I’m frequently left to ponder the need to switch to a hydrogen based economy? It surely is nice to think that vehicle tailpipe emissions would be reduced to simple water vapor (actually that thought scares me, too). The sad reality is that nothing will likely significantly improve our environment or bank accounts. The only advantage is that we’ll be implementing a huge system to avoid importing a bunch of oil… maybe.

Let’s not forget that H2 doesn’t just automatically appear in huge tanks all over the world. Read the fact sheet from the White House. Hidden in that statement is the admission that H2 power isn’t all neat and clean like some people want you to believe. There are even concerns that excess releases of H2 gas could be as detrimental to “global warming” as anything else.

Hydrogen is all around us. However, it must be converted to what we need, H2 gas. It can easily be derived from vegetable oils and ethanol. I’m not sure we can come close to having enough agricultural output to support our need for this clean fuel. Would you rather eat or drive? Consider this commentary from the Weekly Standard where I noted that “John Kerry Wants You to Starve”. If all our cars burned ethanol, we would need nearly 10 times as much corn as our country currently grows!

It can also be taken from natural gas. Why derive it from natural gas when we can just burn natural gas? Alas, some experts even recommend pulling H2 from our good ol’ buddy, Gasoline. Does this sound like a great solution to you?

Let’s not forget the byproducts of removing hydrogen from compounds that contain mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Yeah, that pretty much leaves a lot of waste carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

I’m sure that you astute observers and amateur scientists have noted my glaring omission. Hydrogen, H2, is abundant in what else? H2O. Correct. Apply electricity to H2O and yield H2 and O2. Of course this reaction is exactly opposite of what happens in fuel cell. It takes a huge amount of energy to make it happen. Where does that energy come from? Mostly from burning fossil fuels of course (granted the current plan is to burn American, not foreign, fossil fuels). As of last year, less than 10% of our power came from clean, renewable (albeit often expensive) energy sources. You may not need raw materials for these renewable forms, just perfect environmental conditions. Which means we must make amends with our other old friend, nuclear power.

I thought a hydrogen economy was going to clean our air and solve all our problems. Hydrogen may be renewable and available from American sources, but it surely isn’t going to be enough.

At this point, I don’t see us solving any problems, just spending a lot more money.

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More interesting sources:
-“Are we there yet? As hydrogen fuel cell technology evolves, alternative fuel sources are being considered” - From ‘The Brown and White’ at Lehigh University
- FuturePundit
- or google for “hydrogen fuel sources”