The Tracker needed to read in Popular Mechanics this article by Eric Sofge over the hydrogen wars. It helped me out. I have to admit to thinking the last administration’s embrace of a new hydrogen economy vision, with cars and lots else running on H2, was sort of crazy. For one, I figured that if we had a huge source of the gas without a big carbon footprint in its manufacture, we should pipe ALL of it to coal plants, adjust their burners, and take a big load off the atmosphere without having to build an entire new infrastructure to replace gasoline and diesel in vehicles. For another, it smelled of being a serious green energy policy feint for an administration whose real goal was to have no serious green energy policy at all.

Yet … one still reads regularly of authoritative sounding announcements of progress toward hydrogen fuel cell cars and such and with plausibly sensible ways to get all that hydrogen.

Sofge breaks it all down under the hed  Why the Hydrogen Feud Needs to End: Analysis. He seems to be ticked off at both factions, decrying them each as bitterly “painting the other as ignorant, liars, or both.” They each have their own numbers in a fight that is a “deathmatch between battery-powered electric vehicles and hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles.” One might point out each is an electric. But as he writes, the prevailing idea appears to be that one of these zero-emission vehicle ideas has to die. Perhaps, he says, that’s wrong.

One would like to see more in here on how exactly hydrogen’s boosters think that the gas itself and related infrastructure might make a substantial impact on greenhouse gases and on energy independence. But it does persuade one (me anyway) that neither tactic merits outright hostility and both merit further research.

Related News on Hydrogen (PR, really):

I just learned something. The first is that I somehow neglected yesterday to publish this post, so here it is today and maybe a bit better for the delay. Otherwise, this would be an UPDATE that most ksjtracker readers likely would miss.

The second is that in the fat glossy promotional magazine that industrial megacompany Siemens AG publishes and a copy of which showed up in the mailbox, called Pictures of the Future (link goes to whole mag), is a tidbit that mentions using hydrogen as a storage medium for buffering the output of wind farms: The article, by Christian Buck, is Energy Storage / Trapping the Wind. Presumably hydrogen storage would work for solar too. It fails to say how efficient it is to turn electricity (vie electrolysis) into H2 and O2 for preservation in salt caverns, and then to close the loop, but it does say that large scale cost ought to be quite low and maybe a lot better than pumped storage. That is news to me.

The whole magazine is of course very gushy and slickly positive about all the things that Siemens does. Most of it could be stoutly true. So if you like thumping huge industrial equipment and don’t want to be bothered by the on-the-other-hand aspects of hard-knuckle journalism, another that caught my eye is a piece by Florian Martini called Offshore Wind / High Altitude Harvest. The piece may make one feel vertiginous. Those windmills are TALL.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.