A Concise History of the Concept of "Hydrogen Economy"

 

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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. 

 

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!