The Hydrogen Economy

In May 2003, the Federal Government sponsored an international conference on The Hydrogen Economy. Most of the attendees came from an energy background, but given the concerns about the future of oil elsewhere on this site, I also went, to form a view on whether hydrogen represents the future fuel of choice for transport (as its advocates would claim). Here I present:

• some general background on hydrogen
• the conference proceedings from a transport perspective
• some issues which arise from that perspective
• some personal conclusions
• links for further information

I hope that these thoughts may be of use to transport professionals who were unable to attend the conference.

Dave Kilsby, May 2003

The world's fossil fuels will not last forever. They have many advantages:
- their energy is highly concentrated
- they are transportable
- they are storable
- the global infrastructure for a fossil fuel system exists.

But their disadvantages are also obvious:
- they are a limited and non-renewable resource
- they are polluting
- they are unequally distributed throughout the world, leading to geo-political stresses.

Many alternative energy sources have been canvassed. These tend to be dependent on a primary source which is inconveniently located - the world's sunniest areas are deserts, the world's windiest regions are sparsely inhabited, deep sea oil or gas is hard to get at, and so on.

Hydrogen is a good energy carrier. It has none of the disadvantages of fossil fuels mentioned above. Unfortunately it does not exist in nature as pure hydrogen: it has to be manufactured. And how many of the advantages attributable to fossil fuels will hydrogen be able to claim?

The world's requirements are for an energy source that is transportable, storable, can be used for transportation, is economical to produce, renewable, pollution-free and independent of primary sources. The proceedings of the Hydrogen Economy conference allow us to explore how well hydrogen fits the bill.

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Most of the presentations can be found on the conference web site.

The opening paper was given by Professor Nejat Vesiroglu (Clean Energy Research Institute, University of Miami).

He reviewed forecasts of the world's growth in population and demand for energy. He then compared the costs - including the environmental costs - of fossil fuels, and summed up their advantages as: energy concentration, transportability, storability, and use of existing infrastructure; on the other hand their disadvantages were that they are a limited resource, they are polluting and their unequal distribution causes geopolitical stresses.

He concluded that the need was for an intermediate fuel which is independent of primary energy sources. Hydrogen fits the bill, not least because there are many options for making it. He reviewed the major concerns of the Rio Earth Summit and asserted that hydrogen had the potential to alleviate all of them.

A comparison of hydrogen and fossil fuels favoured hydrogen on energy per unit mass but because it is very light energy per unit volume was unfavourable. Somehow these two measures were combined in an unexplained "motivity factor" which demonstrated that hydrogen was superior.

Professor Vesiroglu was the first of many speakers to remind the conference that Jules Verne had predicted the hydrogen economy - in 1874.

He pointed out the greater energy efficiency of using hydrogen compared to using electricity from fossil-fuel-fired power stations (42% against 38%).

He concluded by predicting that while world energy demand would continue to rise, the proportion of it met by hydrogen fuel would rise from virtually nothing today to virtually 100% by 2074 (with fossil fuels correspondingly disapearing from the mix). We are at the start of the conversion period now.

Dr Rene Sachs, President of the Association for the Promotion of Hydrogen and its Applications (ALPHEA), outlined hydrogen and fuel cell activities in Western Europe. Germany accounts for half the activity. France (19%) is the only other significant player.

Larisa Dobriansky from the US Department of Energy outlined the US moves towards a hydrogen economy. President Bush has made a commitment to develop commercial hydrogen cars by 2020. The "Freedom Car" project is so called because it will give American citizens the freedom to drive where they like, when they like, in what they like, without dependence on imported oil. The energy to manufacture hydrogen would be found wherever necessary - possibly from more nuclear power.

Professor Thorstein Sigfusson gave an impressive talk about how Iceland is currently transforming its economy from oil to hydrogen. In broad terms one third of Iceland's greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, one third from fishing and one third from industry.

A joint venture company ("Icelandic New Energy" - Sigfusson is Chairman) has been set up. It expects demonstration projects to happen over the next ten years, followed by ten years of service production of vehicles before mass production then kicks in. There is a demonstration project currently under way using hydrogen buses and a commercial hydrogen filling station provided by Shell (it takes six and a half minutes to fuel a bus for a full day's work). The next target for demonstration is fishing vessels. A fishing boat needs about 1000 kg of hydrogen to be at sea for 4-5 days fishing.

Consultants from ACIL Tasman and Booz Allen Hamilton outlined the current state of the National Hydrogen Study. This will be an input to the National Energy Statement which is expected to be made by Federal Government later in the year. It is basically a resource document, setting out performance and cost relativities of various energy options.

This showed that the costs of producing, distributing and storing hydrogen have to come down hugely before it becomes an economic option. Hydrogen will leak out of polyethylene pipes, which rules out most current natural gas pipelines for future hydrogen distribution.

Several delegates thought that the National Hydrogen Study had been heavily influenced by the coal lobby, as it appeared to be very favourable to the gasification of coal as the future source of Australia's hydrogen. This process generates a large amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The process of geosequestration - ie pumping it underground in appropriate places and hoping it stays there - was seen as the right treatment for this unfortunate by-product.

Ian MacFarlane, the federal Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources then made a speech.

After lunch, the conference split into three workshop groups. Each was given a specific theme - strategic issues, technical issues, implementation issues - and the workshop outcomes (see later) would be input to the National Hydrogen Study.

The second day began with Reinhold Wurster from a German technology company reviewing the future of hydrogen in transport in detail. Among other things, he noted that Japan intends to manufacture 50,000 fuel cell vehicles by 2010 and a further 5 million 2010-2020!

Simon Whitehouse from the Western Australia government described the imminent trial of three hydrogen-powered buses in Perth. This is part of an international test involving ten other cities - each has three buses. He outlined the myriad of practical issues that had to be resolved before Perth's three buses start operation (in 2004).

Federal Minister of the Environment David Kemp made a speech. He reiterated why Australia wouldn't ratify the Kyoto agreement and expected that Australia would continue to be dependent on fossil fuels for a long time. The Coal 21 project (investigating coal gasification and geosequestration) had great potential for Australia.

Mike Jones from BP gave a fuel company's perspective on hydrogen. The production of hydrogen isn't expensive but the delivery of hydrogen is expensive.

Catherine Gregoire-Padró, an American chemical engineer, gave a very interesting talk about hydrogen from domestic and renewable sources. She raised a number of possibilities which are not yet being investigated commercially, including pyrolysis (the reformation of biomass). The "Holy Grail" was production of hydrogen by direct water splitting, and both photobiological (low tech solutions involving algal systems) and photoelectrochemical (for areas of high solar insolation) options could be pursued.

John Lewis, the Chairman of Tidal Energy Australia, presented a case study in renewable energy, namely a proposal to harness an unusually high tidal range at Derby (near Broome) by damming an inlet and installing a turbine.

John Lewis was followed by Wilson Tuckey, federal Minister of Regional Services, Territory and Local Government, the member for the Western Australian electorate of O'Connor and a passionate supporter of the Derby Tidal Energy project. Among other things he berated ACIL for "taking the Government's money" in the National Hydrogen Study and not telling them what to do (ie build the Derby tidal power station, produce hydrogen, build long distance pipelines and pump it all over Australia).

Professor Tony Owen (UNSW) looked at hydrogen from an economist's perspective. After a semi-academic lecture on how the costs and benefits of hydrogen should be treated, he concluded that the economic viability of hydrogen vehicles was dependent on the valuation of damages arising from competing technologies, and removal of market distortions.

Peter Newman, speaking as both a sustainability bureaucrat and a sustainability academic, outlined the Western Australia's Sustainability Strategy. An element of this is the establishment of a Taskforce to look at issues of oil vulnerability, the gas transition and the Hydrogen Economy. He referred to the gradual "decarbonisation" of the world's energy - wood, coal, oil, natural gas and ultimately the carbon-free hydrogen. He called for the decoupling not only of carbon from wealth but also of mobility from wealth, an implicit criticism of the US "Freedom Car" project.

John Titchen from Hydro Tasmania reviewed storage and distribution options for hydrogen. He concluded with a vision of his home state (Tasmania) with an economy powered by hydrogen created from renewable sources, similar to the vision being pursued in Iceland. Unlike Iceland, there was no indication of any practical steps yet to achieve this vision.

David Johnson (Shell) gave a view of storage options for hydrogen from a global perspective. He outlined some scenarios envisaged by futurologists used by Shell. Shell is interested in hydrogen because it wants to remain profitable in the long term.

The three workshops of the previous day then reported back.

In his summing up, Robin Batterham (Chief Scientist of Australia) concluded that:

• the Hydrogen Economy targets sustainability
• the Hydrogen Economy offers more pathways than any other option
• there is much activity worldwide, but ...
• the economics of hydrogen are not yet compelling, and further breakthroughs must be made
• these breakthroughs are not only needed on technicalities but also in public awareness and regulatory processes
• Australia is too small to be a world leader
• so we have to focus on our strengths - something we are not good at - but the potential pay-off is dramatic.

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Some reflections follow. NB these are personal, not those of the conference at large.

• Hydrogen is currently very expensive to make, distribute and store. The technologists at the conference had faith that this would change.
• Australia's abundance of coal and gas predisposes federal government to solutions which use it, with consequent greenhouse problems to solve.
• Production of hydrogen from seawater seems a worthy goal, as it could be linked with desalination plants.
• Hydrogen has great potential for a fuel for remote areas, as it can be made on-site via renewables. Antarctica is a prime example. Barrels of diesel fuel have to be shipped in at present to one of the world's windiest regions.
• The three big markets for hydrogen in Australia are probably remote areas (for distributed generation), cities (for urban transportation) and major industrial areas (for concentrated power).
• The focus of transport interest was on the car of the future, which is not surprising given the investment of the world's car-makers in R&D. But surely long-distance rail or coastal shipping would be more amenable to alternative energy sources than the private car? A railway locomotive is essentially a mobile power plant on rails, and a fuel-cell-powered locomotive connected to a hydrogen tender seems quite possible (and not so far off today's diesel-electric locomotives). Likewise, most ships are floating payloads with power plants attached.
• Low-energy vehicles (eg light motorcycles) are often found in large numbers in overseas cities, but not in Australian ones. Many commentators believe that such vehicles are much more appropriate for urban transportation than the much bigger, heavier and more expensive cars that are used across the board today. Fuel cells have the potential to reduce two of the biggest problems of light motorcycles - they are dirty and they are noisy. Safety issues would of course remain whatever the power source, but it is a curious use of language to consider these vehicles "dangerous" because they come off second-best in collisions with cars or trucks.
• Without solid public and political support for hydrogen, all the enthusiasm of technologists will get nowhere.
• Nobody is likely to get excited at trials which involve vehicles which can be counted on the fingers of one hand unless the trials are part of a clear long-term strategy (which is not to say that small-scale non-strategic tests are without purpose). Iceland has shown what can be done. If Australia were to follow suit, the obvious place to do so would be Tasmania - of similar area and population to Iceland, largely self-contained and with a lot of renewable energy sources.
• Fuel excise duty on petrol and diesel currently contributes over five billion dollars a year to the national Treasury. What would the taxation response be if hydrogen were to erode this revenue stream in future? Federal government has great potential to impact on the perceived price of hydrogen via taxation but no-one raised this.
• Major financial constraints apply to anything we might want to do in Australia. There just isn't the money for what we would like to do - we're too small in world terms.
• The Derby Tidal Energy project seems to have some major question-marks over it environmentally but ultimately it is just in the wrong place - too far away from where the energy is needed to be useful.

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• The "Age of Hydrogen" WILL eventually take over from the "Age of Oil". There are many possible pathways to a hydrogen economy and practically all countries should be able to follow one that suits them.
• The economics of hydrogen are currently unfavourable to wider take-up. There are many significant R&D challenges in the production, distribution, storage and use of hydrogen. These challenges will be tackled over the next 20-30 years.
• Transportation is seen as one of the biggest potential end-user markets, along with power for portable devices and distributed (off-grid) power generation. Given its current dependence on oil and the finite nature of that resource, this seems realistic.
• The private sector (energy companies, automotive companies) will fund most of the R&D and the development of a hydrogen economy will reflect their objectives, influenced but not controlled by public policy makers.

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Try surfing the web for more references to hydrogen vehicles and fuel cells. There is a mountain of stuff out there.

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