While Hyping Hydrogen, Big Oil Prepares A Generation Of Dirty Fossil Fuels

[hatrack]

WATCH the "incredible, amazing, crazy-sensible" world of Honda's new hydrogen car marketing on television and you'll see weird cartoon rodents taking showers in squeaky clean water that pours from the car's exhaust. It's as if Honda has singlehandedly fulfilled every environmentalist's fantasy for a clean energy future: a car that plugs into your house, feeding off a hydrogen supply that also provides your lights and power. So where can you buy this ecology-preserving wonder? You can't. Despite Honda's triumphant presentation of the first "fuel cell family" - Jon and Sandy Spallino and daughters last month took to the highways of California in their new Pounds 1m hydrogen Honda - the company won't have one for sale until 2020 at the earliest. Hydrogen has been the fuel of choice for US energy futurologists and environmentalists since President Bush announced two years ago that he wanted children born then to be able to put their first car keys in a hydrogen car. Every big carmaker is working on hydrogen technology.

All the auto manufacturers have hydrogen prototypes and all the oil companies - Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron, and even Exxon Mobil - have hydrogen programmes. But even with the best will in the world, the hydrogen age is probably more than half a century away. Bjorn Skulason, managing director of Iceland New Energy, a Shell-sponsored project to turn Iceland into a hydrogen-only economy, says: "It will take at least 40-50 years before you replace everything with hydrogen," he says. That means what powers the car of the future may not be hydrogen, as Honda predicts, nor biofuels, nor electricity generated from unsightly wind turbines, but yet more fossil fuels - and dirtier ones at that. The world's never ending need for energy is about to send the global oil companies in search of a whole new barrel of nastier hydrocarbons.

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What distresses environmentalists about uncoventional oil is the effort needed to extract it. Shell puts the world's largest diggers to work at its vast open pits next to the Athabasca River in Canada, gouging 100 metric tons of oil-soaked sand with every stroke. Each barrel of synthetic oil from oil sands generates roughly twice as much carbon dioxide during its production as a barrel of conventional oil and uses up the equivalent energy to one barrel of oil for every five produced. GTL is similarly wasteful, with some 45% of the gas fed into a GTL plant lost in the process, making it nearly twice as polluting as burning the original natural gas. Shell argues that its company-wide climate change targets mean that it can be relied upon to offset the extra carbon dioxide produced by oil sands with cuts elsewhere in the company and it is committed to return the land to the same state it was before the development began.

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The Oak Ridge study admits that even to reach the 5m bpd that Canada is targeting for its oil sands production by 2030 will require overcoming water shortages, attracting and housing enough manpower, and finding enough gas to power the process. Total predicts only some 2m bpd will come from Canada's oil sands by 2015, and dismisses Canada's claims to hold 180bn barrels of oil sands reserves, arguing only 70bn-100bn barrels should count as economic. When Total and Royal/Dutch Shell committed to developing Venezuela's Orinoco heavy oil belt and the Athabasca sands at the end of the 1990s, it was brave move. The production is only profitable at some $25, and at the time the oil price was hovering above $10. Even now, not everyone thinks it is a bet worth making. BP has ignored unconventional oils, arguing it can make more money investing in conventional production elsewhere. Albert Bresson, Shell's head of forward planning, told The Business: "If Saudi Arabia says 'we are open for business, 20m barrels per day is no problem', we will stop developing unconventional oil." With the price of oil hovering around $60 a barrel, developments like these are probably inevitable. Mattenet says: "The beauty of heavy oil projects, like LNG and GTL, is that you have a very long production plateau and don't have a decline like you do in offshore fields."

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http://www.rednova.com/news/science/192908/dirty_oil_the_wests_saviour_the_greens_worst_nightmare/

[Tux]

1. Special

Screw alternative fuels that would boost the environment and maintain an economic system that is dependant on oil. Fuck the future, I want my tax cut today.

[Kolesar]

2. Great article. Great 4 paragraph summary

I have an idea: if we drive 30% less, and buy cars that get 30% better fuel economy, we will cut gasoline consumption in half.

.7 * .7 => .49

[NNadir]

3. We shall see. The oil companies may go the way of Western Union.

That was once a great American industrial giant.

[phantom power]

4. I just hope we don't ALL go the way of Western Union...

[NNadir]

5. Good point.

[Coastie for Truth]

6. A little web searching experiment

Go to the US Patent Office's - type any major oil company name into "term 1" and click "field #1" down to "Assignee name".

Then type any new energy technology (fuel cell, photovoltaic, whatever) into "term 2" and leave "field #2" at "all fields".

Hit enter ---> it's really amazing how many patents you can get without doing any real research, isn't it?

It's even more amazing how aggressively they'll go after energy related "vapor ware" paper patents without any plans to market anything ---> just to keep others out of the market.

;)

[amandabeech]

7. Talk is increasing once again about putting a Candu nuclear

reactor in the tar sands area to replace the natural gas in making steam, and possibly a different type to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water. I suppose that the carbon dioxide could be sequestered in part in the Albert oil fields and empty gas wells. Currently, a U.S. synfuels plant in North Dakota sends co2 by pipeline into some depleting Saskatchewan fields. Could a co2 pipeline to Prudhoe Bay be far off with this crowd?

The problem with the tar sands, and particularly oil shale, is the energy returned on energy invested. With the tar sands it is 2:1 or 3:2. Shale oil might not break even, even if new technology similar to that used in the tar sands recently tested in Australia becomes widespread. And shale oil mining and processing is supposed to be messier than tar sands and has required considerable amounts of water which is generally scarce in western Colorado, Utah and Wyoming where the stuff occurs. It is not any type of panacea.


Edit: grammar--it's been a long week.

[NNadir]

8. This is a waste of a perfectly good nuclear reactor.

I definitely do not support the exploitation of tar sands. There are far better options, especially where nuclear reactors are concerned.

[Vogon_Glory]

9. The Fossil Fuel Big Shots Know That...

The fossil fuel big shots know that the very best is the enemy of the better. That's why they're touting hydrogen fuel cells. They know that the demand for gasoline would begin to drop here in North America, Europe, and much of Asia would drop if people began buying lots of hybrid cars. They also know that intermediate technologies like some of the ideas for biomass and micro-fuel cells would also interfere with their profits.