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Myth #1 - Hydrogen is too dangerous
Myth# 2 - Hydrogen is too expensive
Myth #3 - Hydrogen is not a clean fuel
Myth #4 - It's not efficient to produce hydrogen
from renewable energy sources
Myth #1 - Hydrogen is too dangerous
One major reason that the US has been so slow to develop a hydrogen economy is the public perception that hydrogen is too dangerous for common use. Actually, in regard to safety, hydrogen is very much like propane, which is widely used. Both gasses require careful handling and respect, but they can be safely used for every day applications.
It can be argued that hydrogen is safer than gasoline. Leaking hydrogen is quite unlikely to explode because it dissipates upward very quickly, and it takes four times as high a concentration of hydrogen as of gasoline vapor to ignite in the air.
The Hindenburg dirigible disaster in 1937 gave hydrogen a big public relations problem. However, it has recently been determined that the Hindenburg was covered with cloth doped with aluminum and iron oxide, now known to be a highly explosive and unstable substance (later used for rocket fuel!). It was the cloth doping which ignited from atmospheric electricity. In turn, this ignited the the hydrogen inside, which of course contributed to the conflagration.
Unfortunately, the huge and terrible spectacle captured on film has made an indelible impression on the public psyche, juxtaposing the idea of hydrogen fuel with the Hindenburg disaster. This created the extremely widespread idea, continuing even into the 21st century, that hydrogen is too dangerous for domestic use as a fuel. This mass misperception crippled development of hydrogen technology for consumers.
Myth# 2 - Hydrogen is too expensive
Well, at the moment it is too expensive for most of us, but that's because hydrogen development is at a "vicious circle" stage where there is not much economic incentive to make hydrogen fuel and sell it because consumer applications (hydrogen vehicles and appliances) are not widely available and affordable; and there is not much economic incentive to manufacture hydrogen appliances and vehicles because the fuel is not widely available and affordable.
So, right now,in the fall of 2003, hydrogen fuel for consumers is a novelty. However, this is not because hydrogen technology is complex and we don't have the capability to work with it, or that it is inherently expensive to produce hydrogen fuel.
On the contrary, for example, a competent do-it-yourselfer can build a hydrogen production system that uses renewable energy sources, and also build fuel cells to generate electricity from the hydrogen. Appliances that burn propane or natural gas can be converted to hydrogen reasonably easily.
The irony is that hydrogen is already in widespread use in the United States in industry, including to refine gasoline and diesel. The oil companies certainly wouldn't be using it if it wasn't cost effective for them.
A very large portion of the price consumers pay for fuel is for the cost of transporting it - in the case of oil and gasoline, from the well-head, often continents away, to our home town. Because hydrogen is so light, transporting it, especially over long distances, requires slightly different strategies that can involve added energy to compress and store it. However, this consideration is not as relevant as it might seem.
When hydrogen's cost to consumers is evaluated what is often missing from the equation is the fact that hydrogen can be made nearly anywhere, from any power source, including renewable energy sources - so to begin with, most or even all transportation costs can be eliminated. Why on earth should we pay to transport fuel thousands and thousands of miles when it can be made locally or even in our backyards? Per the US Department of Energy’s figures, the present price of delivered liquid hydrogen is around four times the cost of producing the hydrogen. That is a lot of financial incentive to produce it locally!
What the oil companies don't like about hydrogen is this previous-mentioned fact, and there is not much about it in the mass media. It will be very difficult for energy monopolies to survive in the coming hydrogen economy because a centralized infrastructure like the present one for fossil fuel will be superfluous, and people will wake up to this fact sooner or later, both as entrepreneurs and consumers. Renewable energy resources cannot be controlled in any way comparable to the way control is exercised over fossil fuel resources by a relatively small number of people. It will be not be so easy for a very few to become obscenely wealthy in the hydrogen business.
If you wish to truly compare the cost of hydrogen to fossil fuels, you must also consider the hidden costs of the fossil fuel economy. What "price" for the damage and destruction done to the health of people, ecosystems and economies, and who pays? The horror of huge disasters like the oil tanker wrecks of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, or the Prestige off Spain's Galician coast illustrate this issue dramatically, but even business as usual in the oil economy is an assault on the planet and all its inhabitants - we just don't find the little trickles of pollution all around us to be so newsworthy. The quality of our air, water and soil continues to be seriously compromised by the burning of fossil fuels and day to day "minor" spills and accidents here and there - some not so minor, like the routine dumping of jet fuel by both commercial and military aircraft. (It's done over both land and sea, by the way.)
So, compare this to hydrogen. For hydrogen being transported, the result of leaking and spills is... water. When it is "burned", the exhaust is... water.
Finally, in any cost comparison of hydrogen to other fuels, be sure that you're not looking at a comparison of apples to oranges. It's not really meaningful to compare the price of a gallon of hydrogen to a gallon of gasoline. What really counts is how many cents a mile your fuel costs, or how many cents per BTU it takes to heat your house. Using Amory Lovins’ figures, even at the present price of delivered liquid hydrogen, if you used it to power a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, your cost per mile would be about like getting gasoline for a dollar a gallon. It is reasonable to expect that as the hydrogen infrastructure is developed, the cost could be significantly lower, and if you make it yourself it could be much lower.
Myth #3 - Hydrogen is not a clean fuel
Hydrogen as fuel creates no toxic exhaust, but it is only really as clean as the energy source it is derived from. Obviously, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels creates pollution, though looking at the entire process including fuel production, transport and consumption, there is an overall reduction in pollutants created per mile driven, if you compare it to gasoline and diesel in vehicle applications, for instance. It is also potentially easier to control the pollution created by using hydrogen made from “dirty” sources, like coal and oil, because the pollution is limited to the fuel production process, instead of occurring everywhere from the wellhead to your vehicle’s tailpipe.
Any such "dirty" hydrogen should be viewed as transitional to hydrogen produced from non-polluting renewable energy sources. No doubt the oil companies will want to drag out the transition as long as possible.
Hopefully, this transition will be kept in mind as we move into a hydrogen economy. Ideally, we should skip as much as we can of the "dirty" hydrogen phase, and really devote our resources right away to producing clean hydrogen. It can certainly be done... but who is going to do it?
Myth #4 - It's not efficient to produce hydrogen from renewable energy sources
How do you measure efficiency? What may not be efficient on a large scale may be quite efficient on a smaller scale. 20th century thinking went toward bigger is more efficient, a la Henry Ford’s assembly lines. We now know that is certainly not always the case.
Again, one of the major issues of cost and efficiency is the transporting of fuel. About two-thirds of the cost of a gallon of gasoline is the cost of transporting it to the pump from the well-head. Locally produced hydrogen gets points for efficiency just because of the elimination of most of the transporting.
Why take electricity from solar panels or wind generators and make hydrogen to make electricity? Well, it would be great if you could just plug in directly to your solar panel or wind generator, but the fact is, you must have some kind of storage to have a reliable system that provides energy whenever you need it - whether or not the sun’s out or the wind’s blowing. Hydrogen in this context can store energy that would otherwise go to waste. Also, the use of hydrogen generated by renewables makes it possible to fuel vehicles from solar, wind and hydro power, so a household, business or community could potentially provide for all its energy needs on site or locally.
Solar technology is now progressing fast, after being largely neglected for many years. For instance, roofing material coated with a durable photovoltaic film has recently become available to builders. Simple innovations in solar panel design are significantly increasing the efficiency of electrolysis via photovoltaics, so that even on cloudy days there can be good hydrogen production. As the demand for solar power increases, the price of commercially available panels will become more affordable. Photovoltaics may still be a novelty for most people, but not for long. It will soon become ubiquitous as the technology matures, and using hydrogen to store solar energy will also become commonplace.
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