Hydrogen's Dirty Details - Village Voice

[hatrack]

"The day after George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, the president of the National Mining Association, Jack Gerard, wrote him a letter applauding Bush's plan for a pollution-free future powered by fuel cells, the battery-like devices that use hydrogen to release energy. "Coal—reliable, abundant, affordable and domestic," wrote Gerard, "will be the source for much of this hydrogen-powered fuel."

Gerard is right: The so-called hydrogen economy will be a boon for the mining industry. The clean-energy future that many environmentalists have dreamed of has been turned over to the coal industry and a notoriously dirty Siberian mining company run by Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin. A deal personally smoothed over by Bush has given Norilsk Nickel, one of the world's worst polluters, a toehold on American soil—and a major stake in the hydrogen economy. The new mining frenzy is emerging as yet another piece of Bush's "black hydrogen agenda," according to the Green Hydrogen Coalition, whose members include the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and Jeremy Rifkin, a leading proponent of hydrogen fuel cells.

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Hard-rock mineral miners will also have a big role in Bush's version of the hydrogen economy. The most promising hydrogen fuel cell designs depend on expensive platinum group metals, or PGMs, which catalyze hydrogen with oxygen to release energy while resisting corrosion. Most PGMs, particularly platinum and palladium, are produced as by-products of nickel and copper hard-rock mining and smelting, practices that scar landscapes and spew sulfur dioxide and heavy metals into the air and surrounding waterways. Only two mines in the world produce PGMs as their primary product. One is the Stillwater Mining Co. in Nye, Montana, where miners are digging deeper each year to extract palladium and platinum. The Stillwater mine actually enjoys a good reputation among environmentalists. It's underground, and its waste rock and tailings contain little of the toxins associated with the hard-rock mining of other minerals. "Stillwater operates so cleanly you can damn near eat off the floor," says Jim Kuipers, a mining engineer and consultant who has worked with the Mineral Policy Center, an environmental group that was not part of the agreement.

But earlier this year, Stillwater, the only U.S. producer of palladium and platinum, was taken over by Norilsk Nickel, the world's biggest producer of PGMs. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin discussed the deal in a meeting in 2002, and Norilsk hired Baker Botts, a law firm run by former secretary of state and Bush family friend James Baker, to ensure regulatory approval. As part of the deal, Norilsk got to name five new directors to Stillwater's board. But they're not Russians; they're heavy-hitting Americans, including a Bush pal or two: Craig Fuller, who served as assistant for cabinet affairs to President Ronald Reagan and chief of staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush; Steve Lucas, a GOP strategist who works as a lobbyist and attorney with one of California's most powerful law firms; former Michigan senator Don Riegle; veteran mining executive Jack Thompson; and Todd Schafer, a Moscow-based attorney for Hogan & Hartson, one of the biggest lobbying firms in D.C. (Schafer was a key lawyer in protecting Potanin's control of Uneximbank, the cornerstone of the oligarch's holdings.)"

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Much, much more at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0401/mbaard.php

[AbsolutMauser]

1. More wind power nonsense.

You get more hydrogen by mining than by busting up water. Sorry.

Anyway, you are not likely to get enough hydrogen flowing to meet demand by using wind and solar energy for the same reason wind and solar power are insufficient for power generation in general. A clear alternative is to use nuclear power plants to extract hydrogen from water.

Regardless, in order to get the hydrogen economy going, it is quicker and more efficient to get it from coal and other fossil fuels, utilizing the existing mining infrastructure.

Is it better to mine and use gasoline or to mine and use hydrogen? I would say the latter. Once you have hydrogen in the gas tanks instead of gasoline, you can push for extraction of hydrogen from cleaner sources. You can't jump from the coal and gas economy to a hydrogen economy in one step. It's too expensive and too damaging to the economy.

~AbM

[cprise]

2. Techno-myopia

Hydrogen is not very efficient, despite what you may have been told, and it doesn't facilitate renewable energy any more than internal combustion.

Research can and should be applied to both types of technology to increase our renewable options. Maybe hydrogen will meet with a breakthrough that will allow us to push for it with confidence. Right now, all it stands for is a vehicle to maintain the dominance of fossil fuels.

Right now, Volkswagen mass produces a clean diesel car that gets over 95 MPG. They drove this car around the world and got 98 MPG. It bests Honda's hybrid in most areas (its based on a regular car model that seats 4, for starters). For a modest jump in price (about 60% in the US), you can run it on biodiesel and there are all sorts of opportunities for increasing production this renewable fuel (it has been more than doubling every year since 1999).

DiamlerChrysler is now following suit with their own diesels and both are working with agricultural companies like ADM to increase biodiesel production, which in the US currently yields 3.2 units of energy for each unit used in production (the additonal energy is solar via photosynthesis). Elsewhere in the world, biomass is starting to fulfill Bush's hydrogen promises in a big way. Even Honda is getting into the act.

I think we should maintain the level of nuclear energy we have now and let renewables take over the rest.

[NNadir]

3. Hydrogen is not a fuel. It is a storage system and a poor one at that.

Hydrogen is NOT easily liquified and has a critical temperature below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. It has low viscosity, low energy density, and cannot be shipped practically over any large distance. Therefore it is both economically not viable, and is also very dangerous.

Hydrogen is a useful sythetic intermediate for better (liquifable) fuels such as propane and oxygenated species such as ethers and alcohols. Locally generated hydrogen whether produced by nuclear or renewable means thus can play a key role in our energy future. Hydrogen can indeed by made by reformation of coal with steam, however this predictably yields the same constituents as found in coal ash when it is burned, and considerably reduces the energy efficiency. As greenhouse gases are also released in this process, there is NO environmental advantage to this route to hydrogen. Indeed, because of the reduced efficiency, there is an environmental cost.

Any form of reduced carbon, not just coal, however can be used to make hydrogen. This is the means by which garbage into oil schemes work, decomposition of the organic materials and water into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, followed by catalytic hydrogenation of the carbon-monoxide to give hydrocarbons. The process, used industrially (with coal as the reductant) in both Apartheid era South Africa and Nazi Germany and re-explored by the Carter administration in the US is known as the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Feedstocks can be biomass as well as coal or garbage. This chemistry will certainly play a major industrial role in the future. The real choice is the form of the hydrocarbon to be chosen to be the motor fuel. My two favorites are dimethyl ether and propane. Both are relatively non-toxic and are easily removed from water in cases of spills. Gasoline sucks and ought to be abandoned, even in light of the huge infrastructure cost involved. Hybrid systems could make liquid propane a viable motor fuel. Dimethyl ether can be used in existing diesel engines with minor modifications under conditions which are relatively non-polluting.

Putting hydrogen in cars however is just a stupid fantasy. No wonder the Bushies have endorsed it.

The only thing to recommend hydrogen as a fuel is that its combustion product is water. Otherwise there is very little.