hydrogen

Seems like a dead end

Last week, Erik Hoffner posted about H2CAR, a process developed at Purdue University that would allegedly dramatically improve the productivity of coal or biomass gasification by adding hydrogen to the mix.

I was intrigued by the idea, and read the article. Unfortunately, I think this is a dead end.

Small is beautiful.

Here is a fun article from The Green Wombat retelling the "solar-to-hydrogen" car story for the millionth time. I read stories like this in Popular Mechanics decades ago. The article talks about using solar panels to store sunlight as hydrogen to burn in internal-combustion-powered cars. Australia has a lot of sunlight and summers can be hot. It would be far more efficient to use that sunlight to power swamp coolers to air-condition homes than to throw 90% of that solar energy away converting it to hydrogen and then burning it in a 30% efficient internal combustion engine. Passing hydrogen through a fuel cell to power an electric car or light a home would also be a lot more efficient.

We will wonk you

DR: You’re a big supporter of hydrogen, which is a storage medium for electrical energy. Moving our transportation infrastructure to hydrogen means offloading the power burden from oil and liquid fuels to electricity sources — predominantly natural gas and coal. How is that an environmental gain, to go from oil to coal? TT: It isn’t, […]

Warning: techno-engineering speak ahead

Amory Lovins is rightfully admired by environmentalists. But nobody is right all the time, and the hydrogen path is one of his few mistakes. He summarizes his argument for hydrogen in Twenty Hydrogen Myths (PDF). More extensive discussion is embedded in his book Winning the Oil Endgame (book-length PDF).

His basic proposal:

Let’s not fetishize size

Many environmentalists are reverse size queens -- "small is beautiful."

When Schumacher wrote the book of that title, he was responding to a real tendency to ignore diseconomies of scale -- a tendency that still exists. Up to a certain point, both organizations and physical plants produce more output for each unit of input as they grown in size. Past that point, costs of gigantism kick in, and efficiency begins to fall instead of rising.

But Schumacher assumed that this point always occurs at small or medium sizes. In fact, there are many cases in which you get economies of scale up to very large sizes indeed.

For example, computer CPUs are still made in giant factories, not neighborhood plants; your computer would cost a whole lot more if that were not the case.

A visit to Iceland spurs dreams of a hydrogen future

The loneliness of the long-distance rider. I have seen the future, and it works. The 111 bus rolls quietly up to the Mjodd terminal in eastern Reykjavik at 11:19 a.m., and I climb aboard. For 45 minutes, we cruise through the suburbs and then to the central square downtown, picking up and discharging eight passengers […]

Hydrogen girlie man?

Schwarzenegger blusters on about building a Hydrogen Highway in "the great state of California," but little ol' D.C. has beat him to the punch on one key front. This week, the District of Columbia became host to the first hydrogen-dispensing pump at a public gas station in North America.

Green-leaning folks may or may not think the hydrogen revolution is an admirable or even attainable goal, but it seems to be inching forward nonetheless.  Or, considering the fact that the new Shell-owned pump will be servicing a mere six demonstration minivans owned by GM, millimetering forward?

D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams could take a few lessons from Arnold on enthusiasm, though. "This is a good thing, unless I'm missing something," was the most effusive praise he could muster at the opening bash for the new pump.

Schwarzenegger’s “Green Hummer” plan sparks cultish following

Does this look green to you? The Hummer has come to be associated with a number of things — steroid-addled egomaniacs, over-compensating suburban dads, the highway to global-warming hell, even Monica Lewinsky’s antics in the Oval Office … But eco-friendly driving isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you travel in the “Green Hummer” underground, […]

Elizabeth Grossman reviews The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin A review of The Hydrogen

In his new book, The Hydrogen Economy, Jeremy Rifkin argues that throughout history, the use of energy has determined the rise and fall of civilizations. In this analysis, a civilization is successful until it begins spending more of its energy supply to maintain its infrastructure than to enhance the lives of its citizens. For example, ancient Rome began to falter when it expanded its domain at the expense of the health and welfare of its people, exploiting slaves, practicing unsustainable agriculture, and exhaustively felling forests for firewood.