Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the It still baffles me how the big airlines can continue to be so utterly moronic. That they think shenanigans like this are going to somehow help their bottom line instead of just really pissing off their most important customers. What a waste of lobbying effort. If this is the kind of crap they're going to rely on to compete with SWA and JB, they're even worse off than I thought. (Good thing my big-4 747 captain uncle M doesn't read my blog...)
The big-4 airlines remind me of the big 3 automakers. Late last week, James Spearot, the Director of the Chemical and Environmental Sciences Laboratory at the General Motors Research and Development Center, gave a talk to an ensemble undergrad enginenerding crowd at CU. Turns out GM is pinning all their hopes for the future on hydrogen.
You know, that hydrogen. The hydrogen that doesn't exist as a free molecule on the Earth's surface, so must be extracted from other substances at very high energy cost? Yea, that hydrogen. Without doing so directly, Spearot essentially laid out a vision for more corporate welfare, entrusting the future to a vision of so much R&D investment in H2 extraction and storage that it will make the stuff cheap enough for the average consumer.
I say good luck. Spearot started the talk by swiping at pessimists (was he staring me straight in the eye?), listing off ten or fifteen bullet points of the most common charges against H2 economy. They were all petty, easily overcome engineering challenges (how to store it, how to convert it, etc). What he left out was the reality I stated above, and I'll repeat it all for you now:
Petroleum is concentrated energy. Its creation has relied on two things that I would call gifts to mankind: millions of years of solar energy (making green stuff) and millions of years of high pressures and temperatures in geologic storage (turning green stuff into black stuff).
As we extract petroleum, we get more energy out of burning it than we put in to its discovery, extraction, processing, transportation, storage and sale. That's pretty cool, but by how is it possible? Because millions of years of geology made it possible. The term for this energy out / energy in balance is Energy Returned on Energy Invested or EROI.
In a sense you can use the same "gift" idea about nuclear energy. Astrophysics (specifically, supernovas creating very heavy elements) has made uranium available to us in sufficiently concentrated form (one earplug sized pellet of U-235 gives as much energy as one ton of coal). We get more energy out than we put in to extract and process it, so EROI is positive.
H2 inherently can never be on the plus side of the EROI equation because it requires energy to create it. Oil is already there, you just have to suck it out of the ground. But H2 isn't already there, you have to use a lot of energy just to get it "there." The separation of H from H20 or CH4 consumes more energy than it produces. The hydrogen economy, if it ever materializes, will be an energy sink, requiring energy produced by nuclear dedicated to feeding the hydrogen energy sink.
Does this mean it can't or won't happen? No, but it means that it won't be cheap, and read that as a colossal understatement. And some think it'll be so expensive that we'll face a meltdown before we even get there.
Comments
# 1 | SqueakyRat | February 27, 2006 1:48 PM
According to the best economic theorists, markets work most efficiently when prices are kept a complete secret.
# 2 | Mark | February 28, 2006 10:16 AM
The interest in hydrogen as a fuel lies in its portability (or I should say, potential for portability - we're not there yet). Nuclear power can help see us through the end of oil because, as you noted, we get more out than we put in. No one thinks (at least, I haven't seen the idea floated around) we're going to have portable reactors on autos. So, we need some high-density energy storage that we can load in autos and hydrogen is one possibility - storage batteries are another. At any rate, I do agree that the politicos either miss or ignore the total cost of hydrogen as a portable fuel, but I would argue we still need to pursue research on this approach because we'll need something and the list of contenders is short. Practically, we'll probably see nuclear generated power transferred to hydrogen/storage batteries in autos - it's about the only way to start with a positive EROI that has the capacity to satiate our energy appetite.
# 3 | Aslan365 | March 1, 2006 4:07 PM
It may be possible to use nuclear power to create free hydrogen--but the process will still be far more costly than cracking petroleum. There's a real problem here--one that a few pie-eyed speeches, and a handful of billion-dollar grants, will not necessarily resolve.