Hydrogen: Common Misconceptions - Part 4

Critics of hydrogen will often write that hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier. This is true, but deceptive. The issue has to do with efficiency, which I addressed here:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977120951

Sam Carana also addressed the hydrogen efficiency issue here:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977121475

In short, stating that hydrogen is not an energy source implies that energy is lost in converting that energy to a hydrogen fuel (efficiency), and that an energy source is needed in any case. However, efficiency and conversion are issues in all our uses of energy, whether converting crude oil to gasoline or diesel fuel, or converting coal to electricity. So, efficiency and conversion are issues with all of our energy uses, and hydrogen stacks up to other fuels in this regard.

This article addresses a similar misconception about hydrogen: Hydrogen is too expensive to compete with gasoline.

Today, the opposite is probably true, given that hydrogen can be produced for the transportation market by small, natural gas reformers on-site. Natural gas is already distributed, so the cost of oil refining and transport (ocean tankers and tanker trucks) is eliminated. At the time the Rocky Mountain Instituted analyzed this question, retail gasoline was $1.35 per gallon. Today, that price has at least doubled. Amory Lovins noted:

BP, Ford, and Accenture, among others, have confirmed that hydrogen from natural gas can compete with gasoline in cost per km. This comparison is robust: hydrogen made in 20- or 180-nominal-car-per-day natural-gas reformers would have remained competitive with retail and wholesale gasoline, respectively, at the actual average prices of U.S. natural gas and gasoline for the past 22 years.

Even hydrogen produced by electrolysis (splitting water molecules) might be competitive with gasoline if small scale electrolyzers were in mass production. Much of the misininformation about the high cost of hydrogen rests on formerly believed assumptions about the level of purity needed for transportation fuel cells. Today, that cost is estimated to be 1/10th DOE's original targets for 2010, due to technologies that allow less pure form of hydrogen to be used in fuel cells. Another source of misinformation about the high cost of hydrogen rests on the assumption that it would be produced in large quantities at central production centers, and then distributed to fueling stations. This is how gasoline is presently distributed from the oil fields to refineries to gas pumps. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is produced on-site, precluding the expense of distribution.

Last week, oil approached $84 per barrel. An analyst on CNN predicted that the next administration is going to have to contend with $100 per barrel oil. Smart energy policies and planning (i.e., distributed generation) holds the promise of speeding up the hydrogen transition due to the emerging cost-competitiveness of hydrogen.