I’ve been on jury duty, so it seemed a good time to launch a new occasional feature, “Stories We Missed.” These are stories we didn’t get around to blogging on at the time.
Speaking of the legal system, the ChiPs are down for the California hydrogen highway cul de sac — literally. The future Ponches and Jons of the California Highway Patrol won’t be policing the hydrogen highway.
As Green Car Reports explained in a piece from this summer, “RIP Hydrogen Highway? California Takes Back Grant Dollars.”
… the future of hydrogen vehicles depends on a network of filling stations to allow people to go about their journeys as normal.
That future has taken a blow in California, with the news that $27 million in grants for hydrogen filling stations has been revoked by the California Energy Commission.
According to the Santa Monica Mirror (via Autoblog Green), the grants have been revoked so the state can reassess the grant process, after complaints that Linde Group and Air Products & Chemicals (AP&C)–two companies set to use around two-thirds of the grant money–had largely self-dealt the contracts.
… there are questions about how green the hydrogen actually is–since much of the fuel Linde and AP&C will sell is from natural gas, rather than renewable sources. Air products has said that one third of its hydrogen will be extracted from landfill biogas, meeting the state’s one-third-renewable energy requirements by 2020.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) require multiple technological (and other) miracles to succeed as practical, affordable, carbon-reducing consumer vehicles — and they require every plausible competitor, including electric vehicles, to fail first (see “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective” and “The car of the perpetual future” — The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen).
As I wrote in a 2005 journal article, “The car and fuel of the future” (which was the “hottest article” in Energy Policy from July 2006 through March 2007):
Using fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy has a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today….
Nothing that would significantly change that calculation has happened in the last few years. Moreover, as The Economist noted a few years ago, some say “the solution to large-scale hydrogen production lies in using renewable electricity to extract hydrogen from water via electrolysis” or using “nuclear power. But it would surely be easier simply to use this energy to charge the batteries of all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles.” Easier, hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper, and you don’t throw away 75% of the valuable carbon free electricity in the process!
Running HFCVs on natural gas makes no sense at all since the full life-cycle GHG emissions (including methane leakage) are merely comparable to the best gasoline hybrids. Also, building an expensive hydrogen fueling infrastructure over the next two decades around a fossil fuel would vastly increase the total long-term cost since that infrastructure would have to be replaced in the two decades after that by carbon-free hydrogen fueling stations.
These are but a few of the reasons the incredibly expensive infrastructure will never be built. No independent group ever proposed a plausible scenario under which the infrastructure would be built, so it’s no surprise California couldn’t figure it out. And that’s the fundamental reason hydrogen cars will not be practical or a cost-effective climate strategy in your lifetime. Or, as The Economist put it,
In other words, claims that hydrogen will be the automotive fuel of the future are as true today as they ever have been.
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Thanks for this article Joe. The Hydrogen Economy comes up in the new environmental book, Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner from UC Berkeley. (You are featured in it, Joe) The chapter is entitled “Hydrogen Zombie: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Hydrogen Dream” Fascinating read about how the modern hydrogen economy idea started, why Dick Cheney was such a promoter, how the hydrogen economy died, and how it was resurrected.
Hydrogen at best is not particularly different from a biofuel. A biofuel takes its raw materials (carbon dioxide, water) from the atmosphere or from a well, and then when it’s burned it gives everything back to the atmosphere, with no net pollution. One difference is, the biofuel is often close to edible and as such, has fewer ecological consequences if spilled in a crash. The biofuel is a stable liquid that fits in a gas tank and runs with almost normal car engines. Hydrogen is a leaky gas, hard to contain, often contained by some exotic chemical reaction.
I have known of two hydrogen explosions, one inside an early electric car, another in a lab with casualties. I expect that stories about hydrogen cars not exploding aren’t quite true. They might only explode inside a tunnel, in a parking garage or with the windows rolled up.
I hope this is the last we hear of hydrogen fuel cell cars, but I’m sure it will trotted out when we need a demonstration of how implausible anything but the current gasoline-powered arrangement is.
The purpose of the push for hydrogen was to delay the introduction of electric cars. They kept saying that there was no need to develop electric cars because in just 5 years we will have hydrogen and that will be far superior. Then, 5 years later, hydrogen was still just 5 years away. They managed to put about a 10 years delay on battery electrics while we continued to use fossil fuels. It was a pretty successful strategy, but now it has run out of gas.
The new strategy is to demonize government subsidies for clean energy. This is more difficult since fossil fuels, and so many other things receive government subsidies. But the low information and hard right wingers will buy into it.
Ultimately none of this is going to stop the transition to electrics, but they can slow it down a little so they will keep trying.
Here’s how I knew, since 2005, that the hydrogen car was not going to be ready for primetime anytime soon – George W. Bush was willing to throw a billion dollars at it.
Any time and money wasted on hydrogen is a diversion from really potent renewable, non-hydrocarbon, technologies. These diversions, like gas fracking, carbon capture and storage and nuclear power are pushed by the Right simply to delay renewables.
Let alone all the technical issues behind hydrogen cars is the underlying assumption, namely that the future is all about private transport.
If the local countryside is being razed for more roads or there is an ever increasing amount of motorised traffic zooming through my village I don’t really care if it’s running on petrol or electricity, the physical destruction and displacement is the same. There would be no pollution at point of use though.
And let’s not forget, the paint, electrics, tyres, interior finish, instruments, carpets, seats, etc, etc are all made from oil.
Sorting out the environmental damage from private transport is not just about changing its power source.
This is changing, plastics can be made from renewable feedstocks. In theory, a car can be made entirely without any fossil fuel inputs. And in practise this will happen. The only environmental problem that is inevitable is what you descibe: they take up space and need more and more roads.
Repeat after me: we don’t need so many cars.
EVs and PHEVs are enough of a threat now that the oil special interests are fighting tooth and nail to kill them off. So it’s pretty clear we should be fighting tooth and nail to support them.
Hydrogen leaks. Mild steel cannot hold hydrogen. Stainless steel is expensive! Hydrogen leaks through anything else. The other problems with hydrogen are dominated by the simple fact that hydrogen leaks.