Easy on the gas, continued

The automobile industry is peeved about the cut of the budget for hydrogen fuel cells that I pointed out a couple of days ago.

As my readers know, I am a hydrogen fuel cell skeptic. To be clear, I believe that the technological hurdles for building efficient fuel cells for use in automobiles can be overcome (or at least I won't argue the point), so that a car, driving on the road, can go a fairly long way and emit no pollutants. That is, a hydrogen fuel cell can be designed to serve as a great battery, that just needs more hydrogen to recharge - though at this point, the ability of hydrogen to do this is not so great, as it's not all that efficient, its sole advantage being that it can be recharged quickly. Remember, hydrogen is not really a fuel, but rather an energy carrier. (I know my point about efficiency is subject to argument; there is a posting under the New York Times article that challenges that assertion, but all of the objective studies - rather than industry spin - I have read indicate that my concerns are correct.)

Nevertheless.

I don't have much confidence in the sourcing of the hydrogen. You're just moving the emissions to a different step in the process. Here's a key quote buried at the end of the NYT article: "The hard parts are reducing costs, developing an infrastructure and figuring out a hydrogen process with a low carbon footprint." Bingo. The rest of it can wait until item 3 is resolved - until then, this is all smoke and mirrors. See this article from the Times from a couple of years ago. I don't find it terribly helpful, and the article is wrong where it simply accepts the industry assertion that hydrogen fuel cells would have greater efficiency than gasoline engines, but that's journalism for you.

Then there's the idea that we can get carbon-neutral sourcing of hydrogen by using nuclear power. Let's get real for a moment. Nuclear energy has numerous hurdles, and the right-wing obsession with it is silly when it's not dangerous. It's too costly, too risky, too far off in the process, there's not enough uranium out there, and it's just not gonna happen. Even if you had a policy that favored it. How long does it take to build a nuclear power plant? According to a McKinsey study (h/t The Daily Dish), under the best possible scenario we get less than 100 megatons of carbon dioxide offset by nuclear power by 2030 - that is, less than 2% of current emissions. Can we wait two decades to address global warming issues? Can we build nuclear reactors in sufficient capacity and timeframes to keep up with consumption needs at current rates of growth? Not even close.

And the premise of that discussion assumes that the "clean" nuclear energy would be sourcing the hydrogen from H2O via (what is still extremely inefficient) hydrolysis. 

Which itself is not likely the case, either. Instead, the only practical source right now for generating large quantities of hydrogen is natural gas - another fossil fuel.  And if we're going to do that, as T. Boone would surely tell you (though it advances his economics to promote both natural gas and hydrogen, since he knows the hyrdrogen would come from the natural gas - remember, his interest isn't really combatting climate change, it's reducing reliance on foreign oil), natural gas is much more efficient if you use it directly as a fuel.

There's also the Hindenburg fuel station problem. That is, you're ok, supposedly, when the hydrogen is in a well-designed tank. But, at some point it's got to transfer from a storage tank to a car tank.

In the end, all of the auto industry's (self-serving) objections may be technically correct, when you look only at the last link in the chain. It's simply that, until you can make your way to that link, it just doesn't matter.