Humankind's Tragic Mistake: How we Blew our Chances of Survival

 

A chronicle of how our civilization (if we want to call it in this way) blew its chance of survival. If we had invested in what really mattered, energy, we could have made it. But we preferred to invest in the toys we like so much: military hardware. And think that these 6 trillion dollars of hardware were used to make sure that some foreigners would send us the energy the US needed. With the same money, we could have had the same amount of energy produced at home. So much money thrown away, and that doesn't count the damage done on the receiving end. And now we are throwing away another good chunk of our remaining resources to follow the impossible hydrogen dream

 

An amazing article by Paul Gipe.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/19/beating-swords-into-plowshares-or-wind-turbines-solar-panels-we-could-have-done-it/

 

 

We Could Have 100% Renewable Electricity If We Had Invested in Wind and Solar Instead of War in the Middle East

Yes, the United States could be generating 100% of its electricity from renewable energy if we had used the money spent on our ill-advised wars in the Middle East to build wind and solar systems, as well as battery storage, here at home.

That’s the startling conclusion of a simple calculation my colleague Robert Freehling and I made after the latest reports on the economic cost of our wars in the Middle East.

This is, after all, not rocket science. Money spent on war–anywhere–is money lost. It’s not an investment in the future. It’s money quite literally that goes up in smoke.

In contrast, money spent on building wind and solar farms or putting solar systems on rooftops is money invested in the future that will be earning returns–in the form of electricity–for 20 to 30 years.

I’ve followed this topic since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I posted my first article on this subject on July 4, 2005, and I’ve been updating that article periodically since then as the cost of our wars continued to grow.

On the anniversary of September 11th this year, news articles on the cost of the war in Afghanistan prompted me to take another look at our lost opportunities to invest in infrastructure here at home for the direct benefit of Americans.

What I learned shocked me. Using what I call a back-of-the-envelope method, I calculated that we could have installed enough wind turbines to more than provide 100% of our electricity with what we’d spent on war.

That just didn’t seem right. These are big numbers and it’s easy to get them wrong. After all, we’ve been told for decades that it’s simply too expensive to install that many wind turbines and solar panels. We could never afford it, critics warned.

So I called my colleague and renewable energy analyst Robert Freehling for help. I’ve relied on Freehling to sort out such thorny problems in the past.

His conclusion? Yes, we could be generating 100% of our electricity in this country from just wind and solar; that is, not counting existing hydro, geothermal, or biomass generation. Freehling, though, goes even further. We would be generating so much renewable electricity that we could store huge amounts in batteries–electricity storage that also would be paid for with our “war savings.”

How did we reach such a conclusion? Did we use a supercomputer to calculate all the possible permutations of what a renewable electricity supply would look like?

No. We kept it simple. We looked at two respected estimates of what our wars have cost in economic terms to the US taxpayer, not what they’ve cost in human suffering, nor what they’ve cost the countries on the receiving end of our expenditures.

The National Priorities Project calculates that the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost $4.9 trillion, a sum that continues to rise. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates $5.9 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. Their latest estimate raises that to $6.4 trillion through FY 2020.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, “A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” For a sense of perspective, one billion is 1,000 million. Thus, a trillion is one million million. That’s a one with twelve zeros behind it–a very big number.

We made no attempt to match the annual costs of the wars to the deployment of wind and solar. Again, we kept it simple. We simply prorated the costs over two decades with the exception explained below.

Freehling’s simple spreadsheet model assumes ramping up installations from a low base over a decade to reflect the necessity of scaling up manufacturing to meet the demand. Then he held installations constant for another decade until he reached 100% renewable generation from wind and solar. If we had started in 2001, the whole conversion would be accomplished by 2020.

Shockingly, there was a lot of money left over. So Freehling plowed the remainder into battery storage using the same approach as with wind and solar. He scaled installations up from a low base until the industry was likely to reach maturity.

Existing renewable generation from hydro, geothermal, and biomass was then shunted into the mass of new storage. Batteries would be used to equalize the grid when winds were light or the sun had set. The remainder could then be used to charge electric vehicles.

Wind and solar are cheap today. That was not so, two decades ago. Freehling accounts for this by using historical figures for the cost of wind and solar.

He dropped the initial cost of wind from $2,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity in the year 2000 to about $1,400 today.

Solar has seen a dramatic drop in cost during the past two decades. Freehling used $12,000 per kilowatt as the cost of solar capacity in 2000 and dropped it to nearly $1,500 per kilowatt in 2020.

We apportioned how much wind and how much solar were built, based on the work of my French colleague Bernard Chabot. He found that for a temperate climate, such as the United States, the optimum mix of generation is 60% wind and 40% solar energy. This mix minimizes the amount of storage needed.

Batteries are still expensive. The cost of battery storage, however, has fallen 80% in the past decade alone notes Freehling. He suggests that the cost of battery storage would have fallen even more rapidly through economies-of-scale if we had begun deploying them at scale sooner. Batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) would also be cheaper today if we had plowed some of our war savings into battery development.

Here in California, the Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) requires 4-hours of storage for it to reliably meet peak demand.” Our scenario calls for one million megawatts of wind and another one million megawatts of solar. This scenario uses some 700,000 MW of batteries to store 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) or 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The amount of storage is approximately enough to meet the peak electricity demand for the entire United States for a period of 4 hours.

All together, wind, solar, and storage would be capable of providing 4,400 TWh per year–the amount of electricity generated annually in the United States–for an investment of $6 trillion over two decades.

The United States produces more than 700 TWh per year–about 17% of annual electricity generation–from existing wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass. Existing renewables would be capable of powering more than one-third to as much as one-half of the entire US passenger vehicle fleet with electricity.

If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.

Incredible.

What a lost opportunity.
———-
Paul Gipe is a renewable energy analyst and the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for the past four decades.

• United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion

• Cost of National Security, National Priorities Project

• Watson Institute of Public Affairs, Brown University, Economic Costs of War

• Beating Swords into Wind Turbines–or Solar Panels if You Like, December 29, 2007. This op-ed was originally posted on July 4, 2005 and then appeared at Renewable Energy Access.com (Now RenewableEnergyWorld.com) on July 11, 2005. This version has been updated with current figures for the cost of the war and estimates of its total direct and indirect costs (to the USA only).

 

 

 

 

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

 

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don't need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium). 

In other words, renewables can't be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, "disruptive" technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.  

Tony Seba -- sharp as always -- has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba's ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline -- actually a collapse -- of the industrial civilization during the next few decades. 

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a "dip" in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world. But we might not be able to avoid total collapse if we don't keep investing a significant fraction of the available resources in the transition.

Unfortunately, this idea faces stiff opposition from various industrial lobbies, and especially from a diehard section of environmentalism that remains stuck to ideas that have been shown several times to be ineffective: exhortations for good behavior, individual energy saving, carbon taxes, and the like. All these things have been proposed for decades and failed to make a dent in the predominance of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases. In part, the opposition takes the form of wasting resources for technologies that are known to be inefficient (carbon sequestration) or useless (hydrogen), or both things at the same time. We need to do better than that. We need something different. 

If we want something to change, we need to change something. 

We can make it!!

The EROI of Photovoltaic Energy is now Higher than that of Crude Oil has Ever Been.

This is an article that I published today in the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." As a discussion, it is not very deep -- of course, it is written for the general public and these articles have a limit of 650 words. Yet, I think not many people, even among energy specialists, have realized the silent revolution that has turned photovoltaic energy from an expensive, niche technology into something that has an EROEI higher than that of petroleum in the "golden days." Don't expect it to "replace fossil fuels," as some people would expect it to do. It is a different technology, with different capabilities, different applications, with its strong and weak points. But it is starting to change the world, and it will. 

How about hydrogen, the subject of this blog? Well, if we have cheap and abundant energy from PV, we could use hydrogen to store it. But that is an expensive storage solution and will be used (if it is ever used) when all the other possibilities have been exhausted.

 

Photovoltaic Energy is an Opportunity that the Country Should not Miss

Imagine a bank account that pays you 100% interest  That is, after you have deposited 1000 euros, it gives you another thousand euros at the end of the year, and so on every year. You would like a bank account like that!

Obviously, there is no bank account that yields so much, but there are technologies that yield at such levels, albeit not in monetary but in energy terms. There is an article published this month by Fthenakis and Leccisi which reviews the situation and finds a truly excellent yield of photovoltaic technology due to the technological improvements of the last 5-7 years. In practice, for good insolation, as we could have in Southern Europe, a photovoltaic system returns the energy needed to build it in about a year! We are now at the levels of oil during its heyday, when it was abundant and cheap, and perhaps even oil was not doing so well at that time.

Read Also

That of Fthenakis and Leccisi is not the only article that comes to this conclusion, all recent studies on the subject come to similar conclusions. A very recent article in “EDP Science” . Basically, the electricity produced by photovoltaic plants is often the cheapest in absolute terms, the growth of installations continues to exceed forecasts, and we are now talking about the "photovoltaic revolution." We face the real possibility of eliminating fossil fuels once and for all from the global energy system.

Now, I know that you are already with your fingers on the keyboard to write in the comments "but the variability?" "I don't want to see panels in front of my house!" "And how about waste ?" and things like that. I know. Everyone knows these things. However, think about that.

We have a technology that costs less than the others, and which is particularly suited to Italy, “the country of the sun.” It allows us to produce energy in our home without having to import it at a high price. We also have the added benefit of having mountains that we can use for storing  energy in the form of hydroelectric reservoirs. There are many other ways to manage variability - it's not an unsolvable problem . Then, about waste and recycling, we will have to invest in it, of course. But keep in mind that photovoltaic systems do not use rare or polluting materials. They can be recycled without major problems and we will certainly do so in the future. At the moment, it is a marginal problem.

In short, photovoltaic energy is an opportunity that we should not miss to relaunch the "country system" in Italy. And, indeed, things are going pretty well. In Italy we have reached 10% of electricity production from photovoltaic energy and it is a good result from which we can start decarbonise to truly the energy system. Certain things seem to have been understood nationally. You can read it in the "Pniec", Integrated National Plan for Energy and Climate, which provides for a fundamental role for renewable technologies, and in particular for photovoltaic energy.

But there remains a resistance rearguard formed by a rather ill-matched coalition that includes the oil companies, the diehard nuclearists, the cold fusion miracleists, those who are still paying the bills for the diesel car they bought, and, in general, a whole section of the environmental movement that rejects any change in the name of a "degrowth" thinking that we'll be happy to stay in the dark and in the cold.

To everyone their opinions but, in practice, at this point the only thing that can block the photovoltaic revolution is bureaucracy, perhaps the only truly "infinite resource" in the universe. On this point too, the government seems to be willing to do something to streamline and speed up the procedures of installation. It won't be easy, but with a little patience, we will get there.

 

The Greens trapped in a multi-dimensional gate from the 1980s

 

 

For your curiosity, here is a picture of a street demonstration by a group of Greens against a planned wind plant on the Appennini mountains, in Italy. And, no, it is not from the 1980s. It was last week! Really. The main street signs says "No all'eolico selvaggio," that is, "No to the wild wind power"

I have no doubt that this small group of Greens who collected in the town of "Vicchio" truly believe in what they are doing (I know some of them personally). But they are a good example of the mental fog that's overtaking the minds of most people, but in particular the "Greens." They seem to find no contradiction in sponsoring carbon taxes and advocating measures to reduce emissions, while at the same time approving "green hydrogen" and protesting against all sorts of renewable energy plants (and being against nuclear energy, too!). 

Truly, they seem to have emerged out of a multi-dimensional gate, catapulted to our time from the 1980s, still holding the same signs they were showing at that time.

But so is life. One of the good things of the universe is that contradictions can't exist for long. The natural evolution of things tends to remove them. It will happen this time, too, one way or another.

Government of the lobbies, by the lobbies, for the lobbies. How can we hope to ever move in the right direction?

 

Above: a tweet by the French Minister of Transportation on June 14, 2021 -- translated into English. 

This post is not directly about hydrogen, but it deals with the capability of our politicians of planning on any field related to energy. Mr. Djebbari shows such a total misunderstanding of the quantitative aspects related to the energy transition that goes beyond mere incompetency. It cannot be a bug, it must be a feature of the system.

Djebbari's tweet was noted by Jean-Marc Jancovici, who posted a comment on Linkedin. Here it is, translated into English.

Our Transport Minister sent a tweet last night (French time) to rejoice in the upcoming flight of an A320 with only biofuels, calling it "ecology": https://lnkd.in/dWp-NpK

A few things will help to put this information in context:

- on the day the tweet was sent, there were 85000 commercial flights worldwide (https://lnkd.in/dBFQaXx). If, in order to repay a debt of EUR 85000, you tell your banker that you have found EUR 1 of income, it is unlikely that he will consider that this fundamentally changes the problem.

 

- currently, deforestation is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This deforestation has one main determinant: to remove forests to obtain agricultural land. Therefore, a question arises: does not any area devoted to energy crops be tantamount to exacerbating deforestation, by domino effect? If this same area were devoted to food, would we not avoid the associated deforestation? However, if it induces deforestation (directly or indirectly), the production of an agrofuel generates more emissions per liter than oil.

 

In its report "being able to fly in 2050", The Shift Project and SUPAERO DECARBO (which is made up of former students of ISAE, and currently working in the aeronautical sector, so they are not "painters" it seems to me) recalled that, even by selecting all the technical improvements to come in a very, very optimistic way, air traffic had to decrease for this sector to comply with the Paris Agreement. If this conclusion does not seem to you to be well-founded, it should be refuted with convincing "counter-calculations", and nothing else.

And I think it is enough to understand how wrong was Djebbari in praising Airbus and Safran for having engaged in a task that's nothing more than a good example of a greenwashing stunt. Air travel will never be based on biofuels, at least not on this planet. But just in case you would like to have some more detailed data, take a look at this post where I try to estimate how many people would die of starvation according to the fraction of the world's food supply would be allocated to produce aviation fuels. 

The situation with hydrogen is not very different, although there is no obvious limit to the amount that could be produced using renewable energy, the problems involved in converting the aviation industry to using hydrogen as fuel are nightmarish, to say the least.

Whether we deal with biofuels or with hydrogen, I think there are at least 4 hypotheses to frame the issue

1. Politicians are truly unable to grasp the simplest quantitative aspects of energy production. They are truly ignorant and careless and they refuse to be taught by those who know more than they do. That's called at times the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," but no matter how you call it, it is very common. 

2. Politicians know that they are lying, but they lie for political reasons ("white man speak with two forked tongue") In this case, the French Minister Djebbari thought he could gain a little visibility for himself by means of a potshot at Greenpeace and it is just what he did. 

3. Politicians lie because they are on the payroll of powerful lobbies. In this case, we would have to imagine that the aviation lobby, or the fossil fuel lobby, organized a little PR stunt by flying a plane on 100% biofuels and they enlisted the transport minister to give visibility to it. Of course, in this case, everybody knows it is a scam, but then this is how PR works. 

4. All the three hypotheses above are true to a certain extent.

 

So, given the situation, our government system can be defined as "by the lobbies, for the lobbies, in the name of the lobbies." I don't have to tell you that the challenge to to solve problems that are not just urgent, but vital is a little difficult.

 

A Concise History of the Concept of "Hydrogen Economy"

 

\    

The concept of "hydrogen economy" has a distinct "1960s" feeling. It is the idea of maintaining the lifestyle of the post-war period, with suburban homes, green lawns around them, two cars in every garage,  and all that. The only difference would be that this world would be powered with clean hydrogen. It is a dream that started with the dream of cheap and abundant energy that nuclear plants were believed to be able to produce. The idea changed shape many times, but it always remained a dream, and probably will continue to be so in the future.

 by Ugo Bardi

Before discussing the history of the concept of "hydrogen economy" we should try to define it. As you should expect, there are several variations on the theme but, basically, it is not about a single technology but a combination of three: 1) energy storage, 2) energy vectoring, and 3) fuel for vehicles. 

This "hydrogen triad" misses the fundamental point of how hydrogen should be created. Often, that's supposed to be done using electrolysis powered by renewable energy but, alternatively, from natural gas, a process that would be made "green" by carbon sequestration. There are other variations on the theme, all have in common being multi-step processes with considerable efficiency losses. And all have in common the fact of never having been proven to be economically feasible on a large scale.

Indeed, the immediate problem with replacing fossil fuels is not vectoring or storage, surely not powering individual cars. It is the enormous investments needed to build up the primary production infrastructure that would be needed in terms of solar or wind plants (or nuclear), which don't seem to be materializing fast enough to generate a smooth transition. Surely, not growing fast enough to be compatible with a relatively inefficient infrastructure based on hydrogen. Nevertheless, the "hydrogen economy" seems to be rapidly becoming the center of the debate. 

Indeed, the Google Ngrams show two distinct peaks of interest for the concept, that grew and rapidly faded away. But it seems clear that a third cycle of interest is starting to appear 

So, why this focus on a technology that lacks the basic elements that would make it useful in the near term? As it is often the case, ideas do not arrive all of a sudden, out of the blue. If we want to understand what made hydrogen so popular nowadays, we need to examine how the idea developed over at least a couple of centuries of scientific developments.

That hydrogen could be used as fuel was known from the early 19th century and already in 1804, the first internal combustion engine in history was powered by hydrogen. The first explicit mention of hydrogen as an energy storage medium goes back to John Haldane in 1923, where he even discussed the possibility of using "oxidation cells," what we call today "fuel cells," invented by William Grove already in 1838.

But these ideas remained at the margins of the discussion for a long time: no one could find a practical use for a fuel, hydrogen, that was more expensive and more difficult to store than the conventional fossil fuels. Things started to change with the development of nuclear energy in the 1950s, promising a new era of abundance. But, in the beginning, hydrogen found no role in the nuclear dream. For instance, you wouldn't find any mention of hydrogen as an energy carrier in the "manifesto" of the atomic age that was the 1957 TV documentary by Walt Disney, "Our Friend, the Atom." 

In the book derived from the movie, there was an entire chapter dedicated to how nuclear energy was going to power homes, ships, submarines, and even planes. But nothing was said about the need for fuels for road transportation, with the atomic car just briefly mentioned as "not a possibility for the near future." The engineers of Ford thought otherwise when, in the same year (1957) they proposed the concept of a nuclear-powered car, the Ford Nucleon. But nobody really believed that such a car could ever be produced. At the beginning of the nuclear age, nobody really saw the need or the possibility of entirely replacing fossil fuels from the world's energy infrastructure.

The idea of hydrogen as an element of the new nuclear infrastructure started gaining weight only in the 1960s, in parallel with the problems that the nuclear industry was experiencing. With the oil crisis of 1973, the nuclear industry seemed to have a golden opportunity to become the main supplier of the world's energy, but it had already run into trouble. The assessments of the world's uranium ores showed that mineral uranium was not abundant enough to support a large expansion of nuclear energy as envisaged at that time. The industry had a technological solution: "fast" reactors that could be used to "breed" fissile materials in the form of plutonium. The fast reactor technology could have postponed "peak uranium" of at least a few thousand years. 

Fast reactors turned out to be more expensive and complex than expected, but the problem was not technological but strategic. The "plutonium-based economy" would have generated a gigantic proliferation problem. It was clear to the Western leaders that diffusing this technology all over the world put them at risk of losing the monopoly of weapons of mass destruction that they shared with the Soviet Union. 

So, if fast breeders were to be built, they needed to be only a few very large ones, to allow tight military control and also to exploit economies of scale. But that led to another problem: how to carry the energy to consumers? Electrical lines have a distance limit of the order of a thousand km, and can hardly cross the sea. It was at this point that the idea of hydrogen as an energy carrier crept in. It could have been used to distribute nuclear energy at a long distance without the need to distribute the reactors themselves. 

It was a concept discussed perhaps for the first time in 1969 by the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, He was, (now he is in his 90s) a creative scientist who proposed that just 10 gigantic fast reactors of a few TW each would have been enough to power the whole world. These reactors could be built on some remote oceanic islands, where the water needed for cooling would have been abundantly available. The uranium needed as a fuel could be simply extracted from seawater. Then, the energy would have been transformed into liquid hydrogen at low temperature and carried everywhere in the world by hydrogen carrier ships. In the image from one of Marchetti's papers, you see how an existing coral atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, Canton Island, could be converted into a Terawatt power nuclear central.

To paraphrase the theme of Disney's "nuclear manifesto" of 1957, the hydrogen genius was now out of the bottle. In 1970, John Bockris, another creative scientist, coined the term "hydrogen-based economy." In the meantime, NASA had started using hydrogen-powered fuel cells for the Gemini manned spacecraft program. It was only at this point that the "hydrogen car" started being proposed, replacing in the public's imagination the obviously unfeasible nuclear-powered car. It was a daring scheme (to say the least), but not impossible from a purely technological viewpoint.

But, as we all know, the dreams of a plutonium economy failed utterly, together with the whole nuclear industry. We can see in the Ngrams how the concept of "fast breeder" picked up interest and then faded, together with that of nuclear energy. The reasons for the downfall are complex and controversial but, surely, can't be reduced to accusing the "Greens" of ideological prejudices against nuclear energy. Mainly, the decline can be attributed to two factors: one was the fear of nuclear proliferation by the US government, the other the opposition of the fossil fuel industry, unwilling to cede the control of the world's energy production to a competitor. Whatever the causes, in the 1980s the interest in a large expansion of the nuclear infrastructure rapidly declined, although the existing plants remained in operation.

And hydrogen? The downfall of nuclear energy could have carried with it also the plans for hydrogen as an energy carrier, but that didn't happen. The proponents repositioned the concept of "hydrogen economy" as a way to utilize renewable energy. 

One problem was that renewable energy, be it solar, wind, or whatever, is inherently a distributed technology, so why would it need hydrogen as a carrier? Yet, renewables had a problem that nuclear energy didn't have, that of intermittency. That required some kind of storage and hydrogen would have done the job, at least in theory. Add that at in the 1980s there were no good batteries that could have powered road vehicles, and that made the idea of a "hydrogen car" powered by fuel cells attractive. Then, you may understand that the idea of a hydrogen-based economy would maintain its grip on people's imagination. You can see in the figure (from Google Ngrams) how the concept of "hydrogen car picked up interest. 

It was a short-lived cycle of interest. It was soon realized that the technical problems involved were nightmarish and probably unsolvable. Fuel cells worked nicely in space, but, on Earth, the kind used in the Gemini spacecraft, were rapidly poisoned by the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Other kinds of cells that could work on Earth were unreliable and, more than that, required platinum as a catalyst and that made them expensive. And not just that, there was not enough mineral platinum on Earth to make it possible to use these cells as a replacement for the combustion engines used in transportation. In the meantime, oil prices had gone down, the crises of the 1970s and 1980s seemed to be over, so, who needed hydrogen? Why spend money on it? The first cycle of interest in the hydrogen-based economy faded out in the mid-1980s. 

But the story was not over. Some researchers remained stubbornly committed to hydrogen and, in 1989, Geoffrey Ballard developed a new kind of fuel cell that used a conducting polymer as the electrolyte. It was a significant improvement, although not the breakthrough that it was said to be at the time. Then, in 1998, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere argued that the world's oil resources were being rapidly depleted and that production would soon start declining. It was a concept that, later on, Campbell dubbed "Peak Oil." In 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center of New York showed that we lived in a fragile world where the supply of vital crude oil that kept civilization moving was far from guaranteed. Two years later, there would come the invasion of Iraq by the US, not the first and not the last of the "wars for oil." 

All these factors led to a return of interest in hydrogen energy, stimulated by the popular book by Jeremy Rifkin, "The Hydrogen Economy," published in 2002. The new cycle of interest peaked in 2006 (again, look at the Ngrams results, above), and then it faded. The problems that had brought the first cycle to its end were still there: cost, inefficiency, and unreliability (and not enough platinum for the fuel cells). Besides, a new generation of batteries was sounding the death knell for the idea of using hydrogen to power vehicles. Look at the compared cycles of hydrogen and of lithium batteries.

 Note the different widths of the peaks. It is typical: technologies that work (lithium) keep being mentioned in the scientific literature. Instead, technologies that are fads (hydrogen) show narrow peaks of interest, then they disappear. You can't just keep telling people that you'll bring them a technological marvel without ever delivering it. 

At this point, you would be tempted to say that hydrogen as an energy carrier and storage medium is a dead hydrogen airship in the water. But no, the Ngram data show that we are going toward a third cycle. The media confirm this impression. The discussion on the hydrogen economy is restarting, research grants are being provided, plans are being made. 

Did something change that's generating this new cycle? Not really, the technologies are still the same. Surely there have been marginal improvements, but much more significant improvements have been with batteries and, in comparison, hydrogen remains an expensive and inefficient method to store energy. So, why this new round of interest in hydrogen?

The vagaries of memes are always open to interpretation, and, in this case, we can suppose that one of the elements that push hydrogen back to the global consciousness lies in its origins of supporting technology for a centralized economy, the one that would have resulted from the widespread use of fast breeder reactors. In this sense, hydrogen is in a different league from that of most renewable technologies that exist and operate over a distributed network. 

So, even if the nuclear industry is today a pale shadow of what it was in the 1960s, there remains the fossil fuel industry to champion the role of centralized energy supply. And, obviously, it is the fossil fuel producers, who produce hydrogen from fossil sources, those who are going to benefit most by a return to hydrogen, no matter how short-lived it will be. 

There may be another, deeper, reason for the success of the hydrogen meme with the public. It is because most people, understandably, resist change even when they realize that change is necessary. So, replacing fossil fuels with renewables is something that will force most of us to radical changes in our lifestyle. Conversely, hydrogen promises change with no change: it would be just a question of switching from a dirty fuel to a clean one, and things would remain more or less the same. We would still fill up the tanks of our cars at a service station, we would still have electric power on demand, we would still take two weeks of vacation in Hawai'i once per year. 

Unfortunately, people change only when they are forced to and that's what's probably going to happen. But, for a while, we can still dream of a hydrogen-based society that seems to be curiously similar to that of the US suburbs of the 1960s. Dreams rarely come true, though. 

 

Atomic Cars of the 1950s.

 

I just discovered that the "Ford Nucleon" was not the only atomic car of the 1950s. I found this "retro-future" image of a curious object that never ever made it to a full-size maquette, as the Nucleon did. This one, has a sort of Sputnik satellite at the back, supposed to contain uranium or plutonium as fuel. 

It is one more example of our fascination with impossible innovations coupled with our fascination with cars. The result is this kind of automotive monstrosities. Hydrogen cars are not very different, maybe a little less impossible, but still impractical.

 

 
 

Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist

 

The "hydrogen economy" is like a zombie: no matter how many times it is slain, it keeps coming at you. Like a Hollywood zombie movie, hydrogen seems to exert a tremendous fascination because it is being sold to people as a way to keep doing everything we have been doing without any need for sacrifices or for changing our ways. Unfortunately, reality is not a movie, and the reverse is also true. Hydrogen is a pie in the sky that delays the real innovation that would make it possible to phase out fossil fuels from the world's energy mix.  (image source)

 This post was originally published on "Cassandra's Legacy" on Dec 21, 2020

 

 

This is a re-worked and updated version of a post that I published in 2007, in Italian, during one more of the periodic returns of the "hydrogen economy," a fashionable idea that leads nowhere. For more technical information on the hydrogen scam, see the exhaustive treatment by Antonio Turiel in three posts on his blog "Crash Oil", in Spanish, "The Hydrogen Fever" One, two, and Three, all written by "Beamspot."

Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist

By Ugo Bardi



I think it was in 2004 when an Italian company based in Tuscany developed a hydrogen car and organized a presentation for the president of the Tuscan regional government. I was invited to attend as the local fuel cell expert.

 
So, I showed up in the courtyard of the Tuscan government building where a truck had unloaded the car. It turned out to be a modified Fiat Multipla that you may know as having been awarded the 2014 prize for the ugliest car ever made. Of course, that was not the problem. It was that it was not a fuel cell car. It was just an ordinary car fitted with two compressed hydrogen cylinders under the body. The hydrogen went directly into the internal combustion engine.

Before the President appeared, I had a chance to drive that car. I managed to make a full tour of the courtyard of the building, but it was like riding an asthmatic horse. The technician of the company told me that, yes, the regulation of the carburetor was not so easy. I could only agree on that.

When the President showed up, he clearly had no idea of what was going on and what he was supposed to do. He sat at the wheel, drove the car for a few meters in heavy bumps, then he gave up and just sat there in order to be photographed by the journalists. The day after, the local newspapers showed the photos of the president driving the "hydrogen car," a prodigy of the Tuscan inventive. Then the car disappeared forever into the dustbin of history, together with the long list of hydrogen-powered prototypes that were made, shown, and scrapped over the years.

That was just part of a story that had started for me in 1980, when I arrived in Berkeley, in California, to do a post-doc stage at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. At that time, the worst of the first oil crisis was over but the shock was still felt, and everywhere in the US and in the world it was a flourishing of research projects dedicated to new forms of energy.

In Berkeley, I worked for two years on fuel cells; the technology that was to be used to transform hydrogen into electricity and that was - and still is - essential to the concept of "hydrogen-based economy" (The idea was already well known in the 1980s, Rifkin didn't invent anything with his 2002 book). It was an interesting field, even fascinating, but very difficult. We were studying the "core" of the device, the catalyst. How it worked and what could be done to improve its performance. I think we did some good research work, although we found nothing revolutionary.

With the end of my contract at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab approaching, I started looking for a job. I remember that I was told that there was someone in Canada who had set up a company dedicated to developing fuel cells. I vaguely thought about sending them a resume but, eventually, I didn't. For what I was told, that company was little more than a garage staffed with a few enthusiasts. Not the kind of thing that promised a bright future for a researcher.

It was a mistake on my part. Later on, the company grew and its leader, Geoffrey Ballard, became famous. They improved a fuel cell design that had been developed earlier on by NASA and the result was a major advance. It made possible the first fuel-cell bus in the world (1993). That led to Ballard being nominated "hero of the planet" in 1999.

In the 1990s it occurred to me several times that, if in 1982 I had sent that resume to Ballard, maybe I could have been one of the developers of what seemed to be the revolution of the century. Maybe I would have been named "Hero of the Planet" too! The polymer membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) was the device that would have made possible the hydrogen-based economy: clean prosperity for everyone. Ans I would have made a lot of money.

But, as it has often happened to me in my life, I found myself in the wrong place and out of sync with the rest of the world. In 1982, when I was looking for a job, the oil crisis seemed to be over and oil prices had fallen sharply. The interest in alternative energies was waning and, with the foresight typical of human beings, research programs on energy were being abandoned. There was little room, as a result, for a fuel cell expert. The best I could find in the US was an offer to work in a research center in Montana. It did not attract me so much and, in the end, I decided to return to my university, in Italy. There, I tried to set up a research program on fuel cells, but nobody was interested (again, the typical foresight of human beings). So after a few years, I moved to different subjects.

In the meantime, the interest in new forms of energy waxed and waned with the vagaries of oil prices. In 1991, the first gulf war was already an alarm bell, but the 9/11 attacks of 2001 made it clear to everyone that the supply of crude oil to the West was not guaranteed. Perhaps as a consequence, in 2002 there came Jeremy Rifkin's book "The Hydrogen Based Economy." Promoted by a high-profile campaign, it was a huge success and the idea became rapidly popular. Hydrogen was understood as the way to solve all energy problems in a single sweep: not only hydrogen was clean and renewable, but it required no changes in people's lifestyle or habits. It was just a question of filling up your car's tank with something that was not gasoline, all the rest would remain unchanged. It was in perfect agreement with what George W. Bush had said, "The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation."

Even though I had not been working on fuel cells in Italy, Rifkin's success caused me to be shining of reflected light. It turned out that I was one of the few researchers in Italy having some hands-on experience with fuel cells. I was invited to speak at conferences and public presentations and some people even started calling me "Professor Hydrogen."(!!)

I must admit that, in the beginning, I spoke as if I believed in the idea of the hydrogen-based economy, and maybe I did. But, gradually, I started having serious doubts. I even had a chance to meet Rifkin in person in 2006 at a conference that I had organized in Tuscany. His talk was all hype and no substance. When he was asked technical questions, all he could answer was something like "have faith," and then he would change subject.

As I started being more and more bothered by the hype on hydrogen, soon I saw what the real problem was. Back in the 1980s, in Berkeley, we already knew that the critical feature of fuel cells of the kind that can work near room temperature (called PEM, polymer electrode membrane cells) is the need for a catalyst at the electrodes. Without a catalyst, the cell just doesn't work at room temperature and the only catalyst that can make the cell work is platinum.

Of course, platinum is expensive, but that's not the main problem, as I discovered when I started getting involved in studies on mineral depletion. If you were to replace the current vehicles with fuel cells, there would be no way to produce enough platinum from mines (for details, you can see this 2014 article of mine). Indeed, the two years I had spent at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab were dedicated to finding ways to use less platinum, or something else in place of platinum. It wasn't just me working on it, it was a whole research group, one of the several engaged on the subject.

There are several tricks you can play to reduce the platinum loading in fuel cells. You can use small particles and exploit their large surface/volume ratio. But small particles are highly active, they move, react with each other to form larger particles, and, eventually, your electrode no longer works. Of course, there are tricks to stabilize small particles: one of the things I worked on was platinum alloys. At times, some of these alloys seemed to work little miracles. But the problem was that the miracle worked only for a while, then something happened, the alloy "de-alloyed" and the catalyst didn't work anymore. Not the right kind of behavior for something that you expect to work on a commercial vehicle for at least ten years.

Today, the problem has not been solved. I looked at a recent review on this subject and I saw that people are still struggling with the same problems I had when I worked as a young postdoc in Berkeley: reducing the platinum loading on the electrode by using alloys. I am sure that good progress has been made in nearly 40 years, but technological progress is subjected to diminishing returns, just like many human activities. You can move forward, but the farther you go, the more expensive it becomes -- to say nothing of the reliability problems of highly sophisticated technologies that deal with dispersed nanoparticles. And no way has been found, so far, to replace platinum with some other metal in low temperature fuel cells. Without a substitute for platinum, the hydrogen-based economy remains a pie in the sky.

Note also that the platinum supply is just one of the problems plaguing the idea of the "hydrogen economy." There are many others: storage, safety, durability, efficiency, energy return, and probably more. No surprise that I stopped believing in the idea. I became a "former hydrogenist," one of those people who had approached the hydrogen idea with plenty of hopes, but who soon became disillusioned.

 
That doesn't mean there don't exist niche markets for hydrogen as an energy storage technology, but fuel cells are still mainly used for prototypes or toys. There is one commercial hydrogen car, the Toyota Mirai, an expensive and exotic car in a world where lithium batteries provide the same performance at a much lower cost. Hydrogen powered planes are a possibility, but there are none flying today, likely because they are an engineering nightmare. Perhaps a good use for hydrogen could be powering marine vessels, although fuel cells may be too expensive for this purpose. As energy storage systems, coupling electrolysis and fuel cell systems may do the job, but they are more expensive than batteries and their efficiency is also much smaller.

So, what's left of the grand idea of a "Hydrogen Based Economy," the promise of a world both prosperous and clean? Very little, it seems to me. Nevertheless, nowadays, the idea seems to be enjoying a renaissance, at least in terms of the surrounding hype, this time with the label of "blue hydrogen." This is hydrogen that should be created from fossil fuels, while the carbon generated in the process should be captured and stored underground. Clearly, it is just a trick to make it possible for the fossil fuel industry to keep going for a while longer.

And why "blue" hydrogen? Ah.... well, that's the miracle of our times: propaganda. Just as we can have "colored revolutions" it seems that we can invent "colored technologies." We have also "green hydrogen" and "grey hydrogen" and the latest fad seems to be "green kerosene." Karl Rove had understood it so well when he said that "nowadays we create our own reality." It is so powerful that it can turn hydrogen blue and you can read here how this miracle was performed. But it will be harder to create platinum that is just not there. In the meantime, the hydrogen zombie keeps marching on!