The 20th Anniversary of a Hydrogen Bomb
For Throwback Wednesday, Bush 43's fuel-cell boondoggle
It’s the tenth anniversary of a tenth anniversary.
Almost exactly a decade ago, I wrote a column exploring President George W. Bush’s dunderheaded hydrogen initiative. With the feds once again dabbling (using your dollars) with good ol’ atomic number 1, I think it’s time to revisit this corner of The Swamp’s energy corporatism.
Enjoy!
In his 2003 State of the Union Address, George W. Bush called for America to “lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.”
A decade later, the most prominent company working to build the “hydrogen economy” was sold, as the Hartford Business Journal put it, “for a song.”
A division of United Technologies Corporation, Connecticut-based UTC Power had access to its parent’s deep pockets. The fuel-cell manufacturer’s pedigree stretches back to the Apollo program. But an investment analyst told the Journal that he would “fall off my chair” if ClearEdge Power, a small startup headquartered in Oregon, acquired the company for as much as $200 million. “Maybe UTC just gave it to them,” he speculated, “saying, ‘Just take this off our hands.’”
The sale is a dose of reality for an “industry” based on subsidies, tax perks, and public-sector “customers.” But don’t expect local, state, and federal agencies to stop playing the giveaway game.
Long before Bush put the pomp of the presidency behind it, bubble-headed reporters were dutifully parroting the talking point that hydrogen is “the most abundant element in the universe.” Rarely did the media bother to ask why such a ubiquitous substance hadn’t already been adopted for the developed world’s transportation needs.
Economist Vaclav Smil provides the beginning of an explanation: “[H]ydrogen is merely an energy carrier and is not found in large amounts underground or in the atmosphere. It has to be produced first by a considerable investment of energy, be it the reduction of methane, the hydrolysis of water, or bacterial metabolism.” Worse, noted John H. Gibbons, former director of the Office of Technology Assessment, hydrogen has “low energy density” and is not “readily storable.”
The fuel is problematic and unavailable, the tech it’s supposed to power is pricey. Fuel cells react hydrogen with oxygen in a combustion-free process that generates the juice to run an electric motor. But the machines aren’t the gee-whiz creations of NASA engineers or Silicon Valley geeks. The first “gaseous voltaic battery” was invented by an Welshman in the mid-19th century. Despite more than a century and a half of improvements by hobbyists, tinkers, and dilettantes dreaming of a Hydrogen Age — and companies that received billions of dollars in taxpayer funding — fuel cells remain egregiously expensive. Even if manufacturers were able to make them for a ludicrously optimistic per-kilowatt cost of $500, a 115-horsepower unit would be $42,500. (A hydrogen car’s electric motor, chassis, tires, doors, seats, climate controls and such would probably add a couple more dollars to its price tag.)
Learn the facts, ignore pols’ press releases and photo ops, and it’s not difficult to see why the “fuel of the future,” as Bush called it in 2003, contributes nothing to the nation’s transportation system. Yet the “problem” of reliance on foreign oil and the obvious need to cut unemployment, two oft-cited justifications for government goodies to “alternative” energy, are trending in encouraging directions.
Fresh finds offshore, “fracking,” enhanced oil recovery — in the 21st century, hydrocarbon production has soared. The U.S. is experiencing an oil-and-gas revolution, and incumbent energy sources are grinding “green” options into irrelevancy. It won’t be long before the American-Canadian economy extracts all of the crude it uses (not many terrorism-funding sheiks in Canuckistan), and exports of liquefied natural gas are possible from all three coasts.
Gasoline consumption, as computed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, peaked in 2007. Super-efficient diesels, already quite popular in Europe, are finding buyers here. Hybrids (developed in Japan, not by a U.S. Department of Energy-auto industry “public-private partnership”) have carved out a niche — SUV-hating blue states love them. Looking ahead, the cheapness of natural gas is making it a legitimate fuel for vehicles. Millions of NGVs are driven throughout the world, and between 2001 and 2011, U.S. consumption of compressed natural gas for transportation more than doubled.
In the last five years, the U.S. oil-and-gas sector has created 45,000 jobs, and there’s no reason to expect the hiring surge to stop. There aren’t good data on how many Americans are employed in hydrogen. But after decades of subsidization, it’s doubtful that the folks working on fuel cells, for both transportation and stationary power generation, number more than a few thousand.
“Energy,” wrote the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, “is a very subtle concept. ... It is very, very difficult to get right.”
The 10th anniversary of Bush’s address should prompt “public servants” to rethink their hydrogen bomb. But it won’t. Getting energy wrong is a political-class specialty.
I wrote a similar response to the idea that New Mexico is going to move forward with the Hydrogen Hub Development Act for creating electricity. The science is flawed and will never (in the immediate future) produce anything of value to the US energy resources. Just to add, when someone like Geraldo Rivera goes on FOX and makes stupid unsubstantiated claims that Electric Vehicles will be the car of the future, makes me want to reach through the radio and strangle him. All Electric Cars will go the route of the Edsel. Perhaps Fusion will give us a reliable source for power in the future for vehicles and an alternative electrical power supply, but hydrogen is just another WOKE JOKE!!
MLG and the other kooks in Santa Fe need to study this carefully. Deja vu.