Hydrogen hopes

After high hopes and dreams over the last five years, the hydrogen energy economy is undergoing a clear-eyed reassessment. The scenarios that envisioned hundreds of thousands of fuel-cell cars and trucks on the road by 2005 are fading, replaced with the realization that hydrogen-powered cars won’t be on the road until at least the end of the decade.

You could say, almost paradoxically, that the Bush administration’s unexpected $1.2-billion embrace of hydrogen as the energy source of the future was its death knell, at least for many environmentalists. As the sworn enemy of anything green, Bush had to be up to something. And he was.

The Bush vision has little to do with renewable energy and everything to do with diverting attention from his inaction on fuel-economy improvements for today’s cars. It’s also a convenient way to help his friends in the nuclear and coal industries, who would be tapped (and subsidized) to produce hydrogen as a byproduct.

So suspicion of Bush is one factor, but there’s also increasing hard evidence that the fuel-cell dream will be deferred. The National Academies of Science reported last week that even in the best possible case, hydrogen will have little impact on greenhouse gas emissions or oil imports for the next 25 years.

The committee said that to make hydrogen work, the government needs to create "a business environment that reflects societal priorities with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and oil imports." But this is the oil-soaked administration that made it a sign of personal virtue to kill the Kyoto Treaty.

Caveats and cautions also were coming from the environmental community. A MacArthur-funded report by Patrick Mazza and Roel Hammerschlag looks closely at so-called renewable hydrogen, produced by solar and wind power. Their report concludes it would be more efficient to use renewably generated electricity directly in battery cars than to harness it to produce hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles.

Their assessment calls for a "second look" at battery cars, which were sidelined by range problems in the late 1990s without ever really leaving their chargers. Mere hundreds were leased, though General Motors EV-1 owners were mightily sad to see their cars hauled off to scrap yards. Today’s batteries are better, the authors report.

John DeCicco, a mechanical engineer who analyzes the auto industry for Environmental Defense, says "showstoppers" for hydrogen include onboard hydrogen storage (the lack of practical high-density storage tanks), durability (fuel-cell reliability has not been demonstrated in the rough-and-tumble of the automotive environment), and catalyst costs (fuel cells use a lot of platinum, and prices will have to come down by a factor of 10 before a production-ready design is reached).

The challenge of building a nationwide fuel infrastructure for hydrogen also is daunting, though Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposed hydrogen highway network in California is a good start.

Fuel-cell cars are not a pipe dream, but we need to look at what’s road-ready right now. Hybrids are an excellent choice, and so are the Partial Zero-Emission Vehicles that are on sale in five states. We can always turn to the anger-powered cars, fueled by road rage, described in a recent issue of The Onion. The average frustrated, gridlocked motorist produces "hundreds of kilowatt-hours of negative energy," said a fictitious GM engineer quoted in the satirical report.