The car you drive 10 years from now will be very different from the car you’re driving today, in large part because of concerns about global warming. Indeed, the world population of automobiles is growing faster than the global population of humans, and cars are consumers’ biggest contribution to pollution, so automobile engines represent one of the biggest causes of future environmental damage. And whether environmentalists are right or wrong about global warming, concerns about the issue are starting to have a significant effect on political debate, which means it’s only a matter of time before it starts to have an effect on cars and especially the fuels they use. So, what kind of changes will there be, and what will tomorrow’s car be like?
Well, the poster child for the environmental movement is a car that uses a hydrogen-powered fuel cell in place of a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Even U.S. President George W. Bush talks about moving to a hydrogen-based economy. But I’m not convinced that hydrogen is the way to go, primarily because there are environmental costs to using hydrogen, as well as massive economic costs of switching from fossil fuels. Let’s start with the environmental effects.
The theory is that hydrogen is the perfect fuel because burning it or using it to power a fuel cell (which creates electricity) produces water vapour as exhaust, and hence does no environmental harm. There are two environmental problems with this view. First, you have to produce the hydrogen. And second, I’m not convinced that water vapour is as benign as people think it is.
There are three primary ways of producing hydrogen: from coal, from oil or natural gas, and from hydroelectric or wind-powered generators. The latter is the obvious first choice of environmentalists, but by using such electricity for generating hydrogen, you are diverting it away from the power grid, which means that we’re using dirtier forms of power generating instead. In effect, you are removing clean electricity from the grid, and replacing it with dirty electricity – and where’s the saving there? Of course, the obvious partial answer is that you produce hydrogen during the off-peak periods, when there’s excess capacity. That’s only a partial answer, though, because the power companies already manage demand and supply to optimize power production during peak periods, such as by closing hydroelectric spillways during slack periods. Moreover, generating electricity to produce hydrogen will be expensive unless you have the production facility close to a dam or wind turbine, which usually isn’t where the hydrogen’s needed.
Producing hydrogen from coal is cheaper and easier, but requires a separate step to capture and store the carbon produced in this process, or else you would be defeating your entire purpose before you even get the hydrogen to the car. The same is true of natural gas or oil, plus you have the added cost of diverting fuels that are widely used throughout the economy, raising the price of energy, and hence taxing economic production. That can be a good thing if it encourages conservation – but it still comes at an economic cost. Moreover, a team of Caltech researchers warns that hydrogen cars, production facilities, and transport systems would almost certainly leak some hydrogen into the atmosphere, where it could increase moisture in the stratosphere, cool the upper atmosphere, and (indirectly) destroy ozone.
Finally, let’s look at the problems created by releasing water vapour. One of the primary reasons for seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is because CO2 is a greenhouse gas – that is, it traps heat from the sun, and hence is thought to increase the Earth’s temperature. But no one ever mentions that water vapour is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 – it traps heat more effectively, and hence, I believe, would be worse than carbon dioxide. Think, for example, of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a hot, muggy day. Now imagine what it would be like if all those cars were producing water vapour – it would be like sitting in a sauna. I’ve never read anything about this in any environmental discussion, but I have to believe that producing large amounts of water vapour could produce even greater global warming than CO2. I’m not a scientist, and I may well be wrong – but I’d at least like to hear some discussion.
Now let’s turn to the economics of hydrogen. It will cost a lot of money to switch over to a hydrogen fuel system. Not only will we need to build hydrogen production facilities – lots of them – but we will have to completely duplicate the fuel distribution system in place now for petroleum products, as well as replace the cars on the highway. All of that is doable – it’s been done for diesel fuel and propane – but it will all cost money. And it’s possible that other alternatives will preempt hydrogen by offering solutions that are almost as good, available much sooner, and at substantially lower costs.
Let’s start by considering gasoline-electric hybrid engines, like Toyota’s Prius, and Honda’s Insight and hybrid-powered Civic. You can purchase one of these cars from a car dealer today, fill it with ordinary gasoline, and it will cut your driving carbon emissions by almost two-thirds compared to a conventional internal combustion engine. It’s more expensive, costing about US$5,000 more than a comparable conventional car, but for those people who drive a lot, notably fleet operators and people who travel extensively, the difference in capital cost is more than made up in fuel savings. And a hybrid engine is just about as clean as a car powered by a fuel cell that uses gasoline, which might be a halfway step to the hydrogen fuel cell car. Moreover, even a gas-powered fuel cell is still years away, and has yet to prove it’s ready for prime-time, whereas the hybrids are ready right now.
Finally, there’s another possibility that comes, quite literally, from left field: so-called “eco-ethanol.” Ethanol is a form of alcohol that can be burned in an ordinary gasoline-powered car engine with only minor adjustments. And it can be distributed in the same system as gasoline – in fact, ethanol and gasoline are often mixed to produce a cleaner-burning fuel. And ethanol as fuel has a major environmental advantage over petroleum: it reduces tail pipe CO2 emissions by more than 90% because the CO2 it releases into the atmosphere comes from the atmosphere in the first place when plants capture it during photosynthesis.
The downside is that ethanol production has been a politically-subsidized boondoggle for corn farmers since the 1970s as it’s more expensive than gasoline. However, bioengineering may just have changed that. New, bioengineered enzymes have recently been created that can produce ethanol from waste wood, straw, or something equally cheap and plentiful, and do so at a price that looks to be as cheap or cheaper than gasoline. U.S. ethanol production currently runs at about 8 billion liters a year, and Genencor, an American biotech company, reckons this figure could reach 75 billion liters a year by 2020. This would be enough to replace about two-thirds of America's current gasoline production.
Moreover, Royal Dutch Shell, which is a major oil company that is also placing significant side bets on future alternatives to petroleum, invested US$29 million in a Canadian company, Iogen, to help it produce eco-ethanol from cellulase (straw). Clearly, someone thinks that eco-ethanol has a future, and I’d be willing to bet it would be a more immediate, and more practical, future than hydrogen. Add to this that North America can become self-sufficient in ethanol a hell of a lot faster than it can become sufficient in petroleum, and you reduce the uncertainty associated with importing oil from the Middle East. And, you give farm voters a whole new cash crop with a massive new market.
The biggest unanswered questions, then, relate to the politics of energy. Switching to a hydrogen economy would cost a lot of money. Who’s going to pay for it? Will oil producers idly sit by and let politicians subsidize the changeover without opposition? Or will the farm and environmental lobbies be successful at pushing for a change to eco-ethanol, which would be fought tooth and nail by most of the world’s oil companies? The politics of energy are going to be even more interesting than the technology.
So, will hydrogen be the fuel of the future? It may – eventually. But it’s not clear how long it will be before that happens. I suspect that in 20 years we’ll still mostly be talking about hydrogen as the fuel of the future, even as we turn to more immediate answers that are cleaner – and more efficient and cheaper – than today’s car. I suspect that for the next 20 years at least, you will fuel your car pretty much the same way and in the same places that you do today. But what goes into the tank is going to change, and what revs under the hood will be different.
by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.
© Copyright, IF Research, September, 2003.
|
|