Hydrogen as a Fuel for Automobiles and Other Vehicles

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* Hydrogen initially APPEARS to be an ideal fuel for vehicles.

* If Hydrogen is oxidized (or even burned), it creates virtually no pollution.
* Hydrogen does not exist naturally and so it must be extracted from other chemicals, such as
by the electrolysis of water. Such processes requires very large amounts of external energy to
accomplish.
* The vast majority (95%) of current Hydrogen production in the US is made by a catalytic
conversion of methane gas, because it is easier and cheaper than electrolysis of water. However,
those processes of using fossil fuels to create Hydrogen create around 9 pounds of carbon
dioxide for each pound of Hydrogen produced, so they are terribly un-Green.
* A scientific Law called the Conservation of Energy requires that the external source of energy
MUST supply at least as much energy as the hydrogen could ever later release.
* Hydrogen gas has very low density, where one pound takes up nearly 200 cubic feet of
volume. So gaseous Hydrogen is not very practical as a fuel.
* Compressing Hydrogen to 3,000 PSI is very difficult, very expensive to do, and requires a lot
of external energy to accomplish. Once it is in such extremely high-pressure (heavy) tanks, it
poses an extreme danger should a vehicle ever get into an accident.
* The sum of these factors, and others, make Hydrogen a rather undesirable fuel for vehicles.

This presentation was first placed on the Internet in August 2003.

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First, it will be WONDERFUL if and when battery-powered vehicles and/or hydrogen fuel-cell-
powered vehicles become economically practical. Neither seems very likely during the next thirty
or probably fifty years, until and unless some great breakthroughs are found in energy production.

Sadly, many slippery people are now promoting devices that they claim have miraculous
capabilities, which they certainly get a lot of people to send in money for! I have seen promotions
for products that allegedly use hydrogen to produce 200 watts of electricity; that claim to create
hydrogen to burn in a standard car engine; that claim to produce as much as a liter of hydrogen
per minute; that claim to produce several times as much power in hydrogen as is allegedly used
up in making it! (This last is a violation of the Conservation of Energy, but the promoters and
business operators claim that they do not need to use standard laws of science, even though
none of them has any College Degree!). If you are in the market for such things, I suggest that
you keep in mind that NASA spends more than a million dollars for the 200-watt hydrogen fuel
cells they use to produce electricity on satellites! And you really believe that some joker is willing
to sell you an equivalent system for a hundred dollars?

On first glance, Hydrogen seems to be the ideal fuel for automobiles and other vehicles. It doesn't
seem like one could get any cleaner burning, since hydrogen burns (or oxidizes) to form simply
water vapor. Nothing else! No pollution! What a seemingly incredible advancement over our
current internal combustion engines that put thousands of tons of pollutants into the Earth's
atmosphere, and their many other environmental problems. Did you know that EVERY gallon of
gasoline you burn up sends around 18 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?note 1

Hydrogen (H2) plus Oxygen (O) makes H2O, water, or actually, water vapor, at higher
temperatures. And Hydrogen is actually capable of NEARLY meeting those high expectations.

And there is even a concept, and somewhat of a device, called a Fuel Cell (originally
conceptualized in the 1830s), which can use this chemical reaction to generate electricity. During
the 1960s, NASA developed Fuel Cells which produced electricity for spacecraft. They worked
reliably and fine, but they were horrendously expensive. There have been people trying to make
inexpensive versions ever since! In the early 1990s, some breakthroughs were found. The
concept of a Fuel Cell is actually pretty simple. You provide a supply of hydrogen gas and oxygen
gas (which is usually from the air) which are separate, with a unique barrier between them. The
simplest version of a Fuel Cell is to allow the NUCLEUS of the hydrogen atom to pass through
the barrier while not allowing the electron to also pass through. The electron is then caused to
follow some DIFFERENT path to eventually get to where the nucleus had gone to, where the end
result will be water molecules. The electrons are negatively charged, and when they are forced to
follow that alternate path, they are MOVING CHARGES which is the same as an electric current.
In words, it therefore seems quite simple to have a Fuel Cell produce electricity. However, in
practical terms, there are lots of complications! It may still be ten or twenty years before any
reliable technology will exist which has tolerable cost.

And WHY is a Fuel Cell such an attractive thing? Why not simply try to BURN the Hydrogen in a
conventional engine? There are actually two major reasons. The central one is that modern
internal combustion engines only have an overall efficiency of around 21% (up from around 15%
in the 1970s), while the fuel cell process has the THEORETICAL CAPABILITY of being nearly
100% efficient (although existing ones are generally around 40% efficient). The second reason is
that Fuel Cells provide a CONTROLLED OUTPUT of power. In an internal combustion engine,
the oxidation of Hydrogen can and would occur in two VERY different ways! The desired on is by
combustion (technically, conflagration), where the laminar flame front speed is around 8 feet per
second at standard temperature and pressure. The undesired one is by explosion (technically,
detonation), where the flame speed is over 9,000 feet per second, many times the speed of
sound and incredibly dangerous! You might notice that NO experts really ever talk about using
Hydrogen as an actual FUEL for existing engines (although there are many less educated people
who talk about that a lot!) These are the reasons for that! (A few experimental vehicles HAVE
been built to burn Hydrogen in a modified internal combustion engine, but they have not really
impressed anyone.)

But Hydrogen itself has an ENORMOUS disadvantage, as well as many smaller ones. It cannot
really be considered a "fuel" at all! Yes, it IS, but it isn't! It IS because of the exothermic chemical
reaction described here. It ISN'T, because it does not occur naturally. We have such an
attachment to petroleum and natural gas and coal and uranium BECAUSE they exist naturally.
We actually have the technology to manufacture petroleum, but it would be so involved and
expensive to do that it would never be worth it. Hydrogen is very different. It is so chemically
reactive that it IMMEDIATELY combines with nearly any other atom (ion, actually) that happens
to be near it. So there is NO natural supply of Hydrogen, anywhere on Earth. There cannot be!

This really changes the equation A LOT! Essentially, Hydrogen should be considered to be
similar to a battery, where electricity is produced somewhere else and then STORED in it. And it
turns out that the chemical and atomic properties of Hydrogen are such that it is rather difficult to
pull hydrogen atoms out of any of the molecules that it exists in. That means that a lot of power is
needed to separate out the hydrogen. In a sense, that is a reason why it is attractive! If a LOT of
energy is needed to separate it out, then the SAME LOT OF ENERGY will get released when it is
able to recombine. (The Conservation of Energy is involved here.)
It turns out that there are ways that methane gas can be combined with very high temperature
steam, with a special catalyst, where Hydrogen is produced. THAT is the process by which
around 95% of American Industrial Hydrogen is produced. Unfortunately, it not only uses the
fossil fuel methane as chemical stock material, but the process required very high temperatures,
which uses up even more fossil fuels. For each pound of Hydrogen produced from methane, over
9 pounds of carbon dioxide is created and released into the atmosphere. Since around two
pounds of Hydrogen gas is needed to equal the energy in a gallon of gasoline, this means that
the process for creating Hydrogen from methane gas produces roughly the SAME amount of
Global Warming carbon dioxide as did the gallon of gasoline being replaced! That is NOT Green!

One obvious primary source of Hydrogen is water. That process does NOT give off any carbon
dioxide. However, it requires really large amounts of electricity to drive the process, and the
creation of that electricity in a distant powerplant (usually by burning coal) gives off a lot of carbon
dioxide as well. These concepts that are allegedly so Green, really are not!

Here is part of a paragraph from the Grolier Encyclopedia:

Electrolysis is an energy-consuming process. To obtain 2 grams of hydrogen and 16 grams of

oxygen by the electrolysis of 18 grams of water, the equivalent of 68,300 calories of electrical
energy must be supplied. This same quantity of energy, however, can then be recovered from the
hydrogen and oxygen, either suddenly in an explosion or slowly if they are brought together in a
FUEL CELL.

Two grams of Hydrogen is only 1/227 pound, so the electrical energy actually required to produce
a pound of Hydrogen is therefore 68,300 * 227 or 15,500,000 calories of electrical energy! This
can be converted into 18,000 watt-hours or 18 kWh. As noted below, the existing technologies to
create Hydrogen by electrolysis are all around 20% efficient, which means that around 100 kWh
of electricity is used up to produce a single pound of Hydrogen gas. If a house's current 15-cent
per kilowatt of electricity is used, that therefore would require at least $15 of house electricity to
be used up to create that single pound of hydrogen gas! We will see below that one pound of
hydrogen gas contains just under half of the chemical energy of a single gallon of gasoline, so,
even if everything else was perfect, more than $30 of modern house electricity would be required
to simply PRODUCE an equivalent amount of Hydrogen gas to one gallon of gasoline! And then
that gas would have to be ferociously compressed and all the rest.

Notice that we have implicitly referred to the Conservation of Energy here. We had to USE 100
kWh of electricity to MAKE the pound of Hydrogen, but it can only RELEASE the 20 kWh of
energy which it can contain. This is a "detail" regarding Hydrogen that no one ever seems willing
to mention! We just saw that even if we were only going to try to compete with house electricity,
We would have to use $15 of electricity to make the Hydrogen which could replace only 20 kWh
or $3 worth of electricity. Would anyone seriously think that sort of thinking would represent any
possible SAVINGS?

Down below, we will see that the lowest quality of Industrial Hydrogen was sold for around $42
per K-tank (per pound) in 2003, which actually represents a fairly attractive pricing! (Note that
meant that in 2003, the two pounds of Hydrogen necessary to have the same amount of chemical
energy (126,000 Btus) as one gallon of gasoline would have involved TWO K-size tanks and cost
around $85!) In 2006, the price was still about the same for a K-tank of compressed Hydrogen.
This price is in a DELIVERED form, of standard high-pressure tanks, called K-size tanks, which is
how one can buy one pound of Hydrogen gas at a time. However, in really large quantity, such as
full (very high pressure) tanker truckloads, the recent price publicized is generally around $3 to $5
per CCF (hundred cubic feet) of Hydrogen, but that price is FOB, meaning that the cost of freight
shipment in such a truck is added on. The point here is that there is an extremely wide range of
possible costs for Hydrogen gas! Proponents of Hydrogen always cite the $3 to $5 per CCF,
which means $6 to $10 per pound (200 cf) of compressed Hydrogen gas, or $12 to $20 for
enough Hydrogen gas to contain the equal energy as one gallon of gasoline. But after the freight
is added, and then the handling and storage charges of a local industrial warehouse, even under
these BEST conditions, the final price of the Hydrogen to the customer seems certain to be at
least $40 (for enough Hydrogen to equal the energy in one gallon of gasoline.) The promoters
and salespeople never seem to mention this, but even if relatively few middlemen try to profit
from handling the Hydrogen, it is hard to see why many vehicle owners would be willing to pay
$40 or $85 to buy enough Hydrogen to replace a single gallon of gasoline.

You noticed above that these high prices are primarily due to the impressive amounts of
electricity necessary to separate Hydrogen from water or any other molecule. It is an element that
binds VERY tightly in molecules! Actually, again, that is simply saying the Conservation of Energy
again! If immense amounts of power is REQUIRED to separate it, then the exact same immense
amount of power can be released when it is again allowed to join oxygen or other elements into
stable compounds. There is nothing magical about that! It is ONLY because it is so hard to
separate Hydrogen that it therefore contains so much energy as a potential fuel.

It would be fantastic if "free hydrogen" was all over the place to be collected and then used as
fuel! No dice! It already released all that energy long before we were around, in securely bonding
into those molecules.

And even these prices do not actually include all the final costs to a vehicle owner. K-size
industrial tanks are NOT owned by the user, but instead RENTED, such that the tank owner can
do the regular required testing to ensure that the tank has not deteriorated to a point of not being
safe. (Demurrage) It figures that the US government would require MASSIVE testing of any 3,000
PSI tanks which are inside of vehicles on public highways!

In any case, we KNOW that you CAN get compressed Hydrogen locally from an Industrial Gas
supplier, at roughly that $42 per full K-tank (which is one pound of Hydrogen gas at 3,000 PSI
pressure). Should it turn out that you can obtain highly compressed Hydrogen gas at lower cost, it
seems unlikely that you will ever get the full tanker truckload price, but you would be free to try to
find the best price you can. This presentation is simply describing known facts. This presentation
will continue with the KNOWN price which you are likely to be able to buy compressed Hydrogen
gas for, the $42 per K-tank (which is produced from the fossil fuel methane gas).

Because of the problems of storage and transport of Hydrogen gas, around 95% of the Hydrogen
that is currently produced, is USED right at that same location! Most of the remaining 5% is
compressed or liquified down to near absolute zero, for transport to use at other locations. Much
of the glowing reports that keep getting into the news are SPECULATIONS regarding future
hopes, rather than any actual reality!

As with nearly all other subjects on the Internet, there are plenty of web-sites that present
information which might APPEAR to be extremely attractive! One even claims to provide a
GALLON of compressed hydrogen for less than a gallon of gasoline costs! Quite amusing. I
wonder what their price is for "a gallon of dynamite" or "a gallon of Uranium" or "a gallon of
potatoes"! But they are counting on the public to not be able to know that a GALLON of a
COMPRESSED GAS is a meaningless concept! And they seem to also overlook the FACT that it
requires a K-tank weighing close to 100 pounds to provide the necessary strength to contain even
ONE POUND of Hydrogen gas compressed to 200 atmospheres (3,000 PSI)! A GALLON indeed!
Such statements are only made by people who are ignorant of the actual scientific facts! The sad
thing is that there are a LOT of people who will read their stuff and believe that they actually know
what they are talking about, and will give them money so that they could "improve" their products!
It is too bad that the word SCAM cannot automatically appear in such web-sites!

Unfortunately, the Laws are such that they can get away with nearly anything in such claims!
YOUR FINGER is composed (primarily) of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. You could
therefore CLAIM that you have a "supply of hydrogen" available! And LEGALLY, that might be
considered to be true, but PRACTICALLY, it is silly. To try to extract the hydrogen atoms out of
any dead animal carcass IS possible, but both very difficult to do and also rather pointless! "Add a
dead cat to your car's gas tank and get 100 miles per cat!" I'm surprised that no one has claimed
that (yet)! (In the sense of brutal accuracy, a 7-pound cat's body probably only has enough actual
chemical energy in it for around 20 miles max! And not much of that is in Hydrogen but rather in
Carbon!)

Another example: A company in England apparently recently (late 2009) became aware of this
web-page, but they clearly didn't read it! They recognized that I am considered an expert in this
field, and they ASKED for me to visit their web-site and then give them my opinions on it!

They must certainly now regret asking that!

Their web-site is pretty and attractive. It starts off referring to a Patented Bio-Reactor (impressive
sounding, huh?) which produces hydrogen by using algae. Four hundred years from now, I have
little doubt that algae WILL be used to generate electricity, and possibly even hydrogen. But not
in OUR lifetimes, except on a tiny scale in a laboratory.

They then decided to use BOLD type to express an outrageous claim: "Enough to power two cars
and the electricity in your home"

I should now point out that their web-page ended with a very prominent request for investors in
their company! THAT was essentially the central reason for the existence of that web-page!

They happen to mention that their current device can produce 8.4 liters of hydrogen during light
periods. Weird wording??? They are actually saying that if a day is completely sunny, 8.4 liters
can be produced. Fine. And to the public, I guess that sounds impressive! What they do NOT say
is that one pound of hydrogen takes up nearly 200 cubic feet or about 5.5 cubic meters. One liter
is 1/1000 of a cubic meter. So what they are ACTUALLY saying is that IF there are about 650
consecutive totally sunny days, their system should be able to produce ONE POUND of
hydrogen. (In England, it is RARELY really sunny!) But they are ACTUALLY claiming that within a
few years of full operation, their equipment could produce one pound of hydrogen gas. And after
a few more years, they might have TWO pounds of hydrogen gas, which happens to contain
about the same energy as one gallon of gasoline!

The impressive sounding statements in that web-site probably do not seem so impressive to you
any more???

In a rather brief web-page, it is disappointing to see mis-spellings!

Sadly, there WILL be people who read that web-page and decide to INVEST in their company.
Thinking that the company actually has some brilliant insights or inventions or knowledge.

One real disadvantage in using algae to produce either electricity or hydrogen is the fact that the
photosynthesis process used by the algae is only about 1% efficient in converting incoming solar
energy into glucose. So even before the glucose is used to be chemically decomposed into
constituent chemicals, there is a real disadvantage regarding overall efficiency. But it IS GREEN!
Again, in maybe 400 years, I am confident that algae will be a prominent method of producing the
power we then use!

The main point here is that there are endless web-sites which now exist which provide
SELECTED information, which is all meant to MISLEAD readers into either wanting to buy
something or invest in some company.

Several years back, a group of people in Southern California aggressively tried to get me to either
be part of their research or to endorse their research. They admitted to me that they wanted me
mostly because I AM a scientist, as they admitted that none of the rest of them were! Yet, they
considered themselves to be experts in hydrogen! In their efforts of trying to get me to join their
efforts, they even told me of "independent proof" that their process did all they claimed. They
eventually even provided me with a "lab report" by that (alleged) test laboratory. It was amusing
to see (alleged) results which claimed to produce around FOUR TIMES as much energy in the
(alleged) created hydrogen than they ever claimed to need to use to produce it! Any actual
scientist would find that laughable, as it claimed to be an extreme violation of the Conservation of
Energy!

When I pointed that out, they told me that they had advanced BEYOND science, and that they did
not NEED to meet any of the requirements of any accepted scientific laws!

I then told them that IF they had actually done what they claimed, then why not take that FOUR
TIMES THE ENERGY that they claimed to create and use that energy to produce 16 times the
original energy used? And then again to produce 64 times, and then 256 times, and then 1024
times, etc. Shoot, in their little laboratory with such a magical process, they could obvious quickly
produce more electricity than the entire world could ever need! Who CARES about silly ideas like
the Conservation of Energy?

They actually did not easily give up! Over the following year, they contacted me twice again,
finally admitting that their device still needed refinements, and that they needed investors to give
them several million dollars so that they could continue. So they wanted to use MY REPUTATION
in order to deceive potential investors into believing that they had any idea what they were trying
to do! Imagine, a group of people with NO Science or Engineering education, or any background
in any related fields, and who did not even accept the universally accepted scientific laws! And
you know what? I suspect that there WERE probably gullible people who probably gave them the
millions of dollars they wanted.

As long as the "victim" (my term) does not know enough to know whether the "con artists" (my
term) were telling truths or exaggerations or lies, and if they can come across as SMOOTH
enough, didn't Barnum once say that there's a sucker born every minute?

So THIS presentation DOES NOT TRY TO SELL YOU ANYTHING! It is intended ONLY to try to
provide you with some accurate and correct information for WHEN you get confronted with such
spectacular and impressive claims of magical solutions.

Duh!

Peak Power Rating vs. Average Power Rating

You may drive a car which was advertised as having a 495 horsepower engine, and that may
have even affected whether you bought that specific car. That engine rating can be called a
PEAK POWER RATING, being the greatest amount of power that it is capable of producing.
When creating that enormous amount of power, it is realistic to expect to get around one or two
MPG gas mileage. But for AVERAGE driving on an Interstate Highway, your engine only
produces around 40 horsepower, during which you may get 25 miles per gallon gas mileage. This
AVERAGE situation is a far more accurate description of what YOU CAN ACTUALLY EXPECT,
such as regarding gas mileage. Both situations are true, but they are extremely different. One is a
situation which sounds very impressive, but which you will likely NEVER actually experience,
except possibly rarely for a second or two at a stoplight! The other is a situation which you may
experience every day of driving! IF you were only given ONE of the numbers, which would you
consider more important to know?

Whenever electricity ratings are given for alternative energy devices, they seem to always be
PEAK POWER RATINGS, meaning the greatest amount of electricity or power which can be
created. That is entirely different than ratings for AVERAGE USAGE CONDITIONS, which would
be realistic numbers of amounts of electricity or power which might NORMALLY be expected to
be provided. The discussion and calculations included here will indicate that OFTEN the
realistically expectable amounts of electricity or power is only around ONE-TENTH that of the
PEAK POWER RATINGS. But no one bothers to mention this important fact! So advertising
makes claims of spectacular performance numbers for photovoltaic solar-electric panels, and for
solar roof panels, and for electric vehicles, and for Hybrid vehicles, and for windmill-electricity-
generation, and even for FUTURE giant windmills and hydrogen as a fuel. They invariably state
PEAK POWER RATINGS, like that 495 horsepower engine in the car, numbers that may be
technically true but are extremely misleading.

The point here is that the amazing claims which are constantly made in the media seem to all
ignore the fact that hydrogen does not exist naturally and that it is quite expensive to generate.
Even if it is extremely GREEN, are YOU willing to replace each $3 gallon of gasoline with more
than $85 worth of Hydrogen (two pounds)? When the time comes in the alleged future "Hydrogen
Economy", will that seem attractive to YOU? THIS should be a clue to you that all the media
excitement regarding the future of Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is all leaving out some REALLY
important details!

You can look up something called the Electrochemical Equivalent of Hydrogen in many
Reference books. It is the amount of electrical energy that exists in the chemical bonding of
Hydrogen atoms inside of the molecules it exists in, such as water, H2O. Those Reference books
show that 12,062.183 ampere-hours of electrical energy is required to release a single pound of
Hydrogen from any chemical compound. This is a LOT of energy! It turns out that there are no
"perfect" devices to do this, and the best tend to be around 20% efficient at getting the Hydrogen
released, regarding the electricity used. So we actually need to use up around 60,000 ampere-
hours of electrical energy in order to get one pound of Hydrogen released (and therefore
available as a fuel). That is a LOT of electricity! Your kitchen toaster uses around 15 amps of
electricity, for maybe 30 seconds. Here, we are talking about 100 amperes of electricity being
used continuously for 600 hours or 25 days!

So, proponents of "the coming Hydrogen economy" brag about the fact that Hydrogen CAN be
produced by electrolyzing water to separate it into Hydrogen and Oxygen gases. Then they brag
about the fact that when Hydrogen burns, it combines with Oxygen to create "lots of power, and
just water vapor". Those statements are totally true, and nearly everyone seems to totally trust
the people pushing Hydrogen and Fuel Cells, without asking the next, VERY IMPORTANT,
question! Didn't the First Law of Thermodynamics prove to us that we cannot have energy simply
appear? That there is a Conservation of Energy? So, if we have to SEPARATE the Hydrogen
from the water to start with, doesn't it seem obvious that it has to require AT LEAST AS MUCH
energy as will later be released when the Hydrogen again winds up as part of water? How come
nobody asks this really obvious question???

In fact, there is another closely related Law of Nature, regarding something called Entropy, where
NO actual process can be 100% efficient. So, as discussed below, to provide all that electricity
needed to release Hydrogen from any chemical compound and then store it: (1) coal must first
get burned in a power plant; (2) it must heat water into steam; (3) that steam must drive high
speed turbines; (4) the turbines must drive alternators [down to about 30% of the coal's energy
left at this point]; (5) the electricity must then travel through wires and transformers to get to your
house [down to about 13% of the coal's energy left at this point]; (6) an electrolysis apparatus
must use (a LOT of) electricity to produce Hydrogen gas [down to about 2.5% of the coal's energy
left at this point]; (7) that gas must be tremendously compressed to be of manageable size; (8)
THEN you finally get to the Fuel Cell technologies that are still being developed!

The result of this is that Hydrogen power for vehicles might SOUND amazingly Green, but the
reality is that the power consumed [fuel burned] (at that distant electric power plant that you never
see) to create the Hydrogen is at least six times the amount of power associated with a gallon of
gasoline! This results in that distant electric power plant burning around six times as much coal
and converting it into carbon dioxide as when a vehicle simply burned gasoline in its engine!
(Linked web-pages to this one give the specifics where a gallon of gasoline burned in a vehicle
produces around 18.3 pounds of carbon dioxide which gets released into the atmosphere. Due to
those steps enumerated above, around 37 pounds of coal must be burned in an electric power
plant, which releases around 108 pounds of carbon dioxide, to produce enough electricity to
provide enough electric power to match the performance of one gallon of gasoline. Currently,
producing Hydrogen is even worse than this, because current technologies to decompose water
are nowhere near being efficient! So at the very BEST, these supposedly GREEN technologies
cause AT LEAST SIX TIMES AS MUCH carbon dioxide to be released (at that distant power
plant) than if the original gallon of gasoline was burned as always!

For now, no one seems willing to tell the public these things, because they REALLY want to get
the public to eventually buy a zillion Hydrogen powered vehicles! This exact same situation
occurred some years back (in the 1980s and 1990s) when Battery-powered vehicles were
supposed to be the FUTURE! Battery power is GREAT, IF you only consider the vehicle itself. It
gives off ZERO pollution! But these same issues regarding the massive amount of electricity
needed to re-charge those batteries (even for golf carts) already costs about as much as what the
equivalent amount of gasoline would have cost! And at the distant power plant where that
electricity was produced, a LOT of pollution, MANY TIMES MORE, carbon dioxide and
atmospheric heat was created and released. You just don't see it! Ditto, with Hydrogen!

It seems fascinating that two technologies that are promoted as GREEN, battery-powered electric
vehicles and future hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles) are each horrendous when the whole
picture is examined, because that distant power plant has to burn ferocious amounts of coal to
produce that much electricity! And the many people who optimistically think that they will be able
to use a few solar panels or a small windmill to produce a hundred amperes of electricity for 25
constant days to generate one pound of Hydrogen? I have a Bridge in Brooklyn that I think you
may want to buy!

Faraday
More than a century ago, Michael Faraday discovered many of the basic facts of electricity. One
of them is that it is possible to use electricity to chemically separate the elements of some
compounds. He discovered (in what is now called one of Faraday's Laws) that it took 96,501
international Coulombs (or one Faraday) of electricity to pass through an electrolyte to chemically
alter one gram equivalent weight. Since Hydrogen has atomic mass 1, this means that 96,501
Coulombs of electricity must be passed through an electrolyte (in this case, usually water) to
release ONE gram of Hydrogen from the water! One ampere is defined as one Coulomb per
second. This means that we need to use ONE AMPERE of for 96,501 seconds (over 26
continuous hours) to generate ONE GRAM of Hydrogen gas! To generate ONE POUND of
hydrogen, we are talking around 44 million ampere-seconds of electricity! At ten amperes passing
through the electrolyte (more is not really desirable because the electrical resistance causes
heating in the electrolyte liquid and therefore evaporation and secondary problems.), we would
then need 4,400,000 seconds of the process to generate one pound of hydrogen. This is around
FIFTY DAYS of using up a constant ten amps of electrical power, just to generate one pound of
hydrogen gas. (And this calculation is counting on perfect equipment and not the REAL 20%
efficient devices discussed above!) See one of the big problems that everyone seems to try to
ignore? Why can't people actually be HONEST with the public about such things? (You might
also guess that you would have to pay actual money for all that electricity you needed!)

There is a more technical name for this relationship. It is called the Electrochemical Equivalent.
For hydrogen, one can look up that value in many reference books, as being 12,062.183 ampere-
hours per pound. One can easily see that at a rate of ten amps, the 1206 hours is slightly over 50
days, as noted just above. With actual existing equipment, around 250 days of continuous use
and consumption of a lot of electricity, just to produce that one pound of Hydrogen.

People who promote hydrogen seem to imply that by simply snapping one's fingers, all sorts of
hydrogen can be obtained! Note that many of these comments and calculations just above had
assumed that all equipment was perfectly efficient, which is never even close to being true in real
life. YES, they are technically correct that you could take a glass of water from your kitchen tap
and generate hydrogen gas from it by electrolysis, which might then be used as fuel in a vehicle.
But see that they have sort of left a LOT of important details out?

In principle, they could also have said that that same glass of water could provide most of the
power needed by the entire United States if it was processed in a Fusion Reactor (the way the
Sun operates, but which appears to be far beyond anything we can build). Such statements are
technically true, but incredibly misleading because of the many practical matters which were not
mentioned!

Environmental Impact
There are a couple minor environmental issues. Our Earth's atmosphere is not pure Oxygen, but
it is a mixture of gases, with around 4/5 of it being Nitrogen and around 1/5 being Oxygen, and a
lot of other gases in small amounts. When Hydrogen (or any other fuel) burns in our atmosphere,
a lot of heat is generated (which is sort of the whole point!) The Nitrogen near it in the air is
greatly heated , and it also can oxidize. It can combine with the nearby Oxygen atoms in a variety
of ways, such as NO2, NO3, N2O5, and many others. These new compounds are collectively
referred to as NOx, and they generally are considered to cause an assortment of health problems
in people and other living things.

In addition to NOx production, if the device in which the burning occurs has any lubricants, like oil,
there are also oxidation products of the Carbon in them, which can contain CO, carbon monoxide.
When Hydrogen is burned in a decently designed (laboratory) device, these environmental
problems are fairly minor and they are rarely considered to be any great danger.

I said laboratory here because the great difficulty and expense of generating significant amounts
of hydrogen seems to have limited such experiments to laboratories so far. I am not aware of any
actual products that use Hydrogen as the primary energy source, and it seems unlikely that any
will exist until Fuel Cells are fully refined, probably decades from now.

Logistics
Hydrogen does have some more significant drawbacks. One of the most difficult to deal with is
that it is such a light gas! A pound of Hydrogen contains around 61,000 Btus of latent energy in it,
which seems like a lot! For comparison, a pound of regular gasoline only contains around 20,500
Btus in it! Sounds good!

However, a pound of gaseous Hydrogen is HUGE! At standard atmospheric pressure and

temperature, it takes up around 190 cubic feet of space. In contrast, that pound of gasoline only
takes up about 1/45 of a cubic foot. Hydrogen gas takes up around 9,000 times the space that the
same weight of gasoline does!

For the record, we are NOT suggesting that gasoline is any great fuel source. It IS convenient,
and compact, true. But it causes pollution of many sorts, including adding large amounts of
carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which directly contributes to global warming. So this is NOT a
fan letter for gasoline! It is instead intended to present an accurate scientific discussion of
Hydrogen as a fuel, where all the press reports we hear in the news seem to always leave some
really important stuff out!

Consider a mid-sized car, traveling at 60 mph down an Interstate Highway. It is well known (and
easy to calculate) that roughly 40 actual horsepower is needed to maintain a constant speed. A
horsepower is equal to 2544 Btu/hr, so we are talking about 102,000 Btu/hr of "actual"
energy/work. For an hour's driving, we would therefore need 102,000 Btu of output energy, to
ACTUALLY MOVE THE CAR THROUGH THE AIR AND WITH TIRE RESISTANCE. (A gasoline
engine would use maybe 3 gallons of gasoline during that hour's driving [20 miles/gallon] which
actually contained about 378,000 Btu of energy, but the engine/car efficiency is only roughly 25%
to create the 102,000 Btu of output work.)

Consider now that a cubic foot of Hydrogen (not compressed) only contains 319 Btu per cubic
foot. That hour of driving would therefore require (102,000 / 319) over 300 cubic feet of the
Hydrogen! Notice that this does NOT refer at all to any engine or drive system, and is instead
simply considering the Aerodynamic Drag of the vehicle pushing its way through the air at 60 mph
and the Tire Resistance Drag due to the tire sidewalls flexing each time the tires rotate. The
ACTUAL efficiency of existing vehicles being around 21% means that IF Hydrogen was burned
as fuel in a vehicle, we would need to duplicate that actual 378,000 Btu of source chemical
energy, and we would therefore need to use up (378,000 / 319) around 1200 cubic feet of
Hydrogen for that hour trip. In case you are curious, a 10 foot by 15 foot living room, with an 8-
foot ceiling, contains around 1200 cubic feet. THAT much Hydrogen would be necessary to be
consumed for that single hour of driving!

We can say this same thing in terms of "gallons". A gallon of gasoline contains around 6 pounds,
and has 126,000 Btus of energy in it. A "gallon" of hydrogen (gas) only contains around 40 Btus
in it. Quite a difference! Instead of a two cubic foot gasoline tank (15 gallons) in your car, you
would need a tank more than 3,000 times bigger, over 6,000 cubic feet, for the equivalent
Hydrogen! That's a little more than TWO standard semi trailers (8'wide x 8'high x 45' long or 2900
cubic feet each). Pretty big gas tank!

Well, that is obviously not going to happen! So, the many ongoing explorations into using
Hydrogen as a fuel always involve carrying HIGHLY COMPRESSED Hydrogen in very thick,
heavy tanks. If you have ever seen the kinds of tanks used for the Oxygen for a worker's
oxyacetylene cutting torch, that's the kind. Such tanks can hold Hydrogen at around 200 times
atmospheric pressure, or 3,000 PSI, an extremely high pressure. When Industrial Hydrogen is
purchased, it is bought in tanks like that.

Well, at 3,000 PSI, or 200 times atmospheric pressure, the Ideal Gas Law tells us that the
Hydrogen (equivalent to a 15 gallon gasoline tank) would now only take up 6000/200 or 30 cubic
feet. That works out to around 30 of those (fairly large) high pressure storage tanks (again, to
match the effective capacity of the 15 gallon gasoline tank.) Each of those tanks (called K tanks)
actually contain a maximum of about one pound of Hydrogen gas. Each tank is very massive to
withstand the extremely high pressure, and each weighs nearly 100 pounds empty. (And around
1 pound more when filled with Hydrogen!) So the normal American car which presently weighs
around 2800 pounds would have to have around an extra 3,000 pounds of those 30 high-
pressure tanks added, so the vehicle would now weigh more than twice as much as current cars!
(This tremendously affects acceleration, handling and other performance, and it would be like that
car forever pulling a huge 3,000 pound trailer behind it.

Safety Considerations
There are obvious safety considerations in trying to drive a 6,000 pound vehicle down the road.
Handling and stopping would be very seriously affected. But there is a bigger concern.

Those 30 very high pressure tanks present another complication. If industrial workers ignore
proper safety rules when working with a high pressure Oxygen tank (at 1500 PSI pressure), it
could fall over. As the hundred-pound tank falls over, it quickly develops a lot of momentum. If
there should happen to be something in the way on the floor, where the neck and valve of the
tank hit it, the neck and/or valve has been found to tend to just snap off. Suddenly, 1500 PSI of
compressed gas has an easy way out, and it all goes out almost immediately. Isaac Newton told
us about the Law of Action and equal Reaction. The hundred pound body of the tank then zooms
off like a rocket at extremely high speed in the other direction. There have been many industrial
accidents where such Oxygen tanks flew many hundreds of feet through the air and passed
completely through concrete walls!

Most suppliers of compressed industrial gases display photographs of vehicles where ONE such
compressed gas tank had not been strapped down properly and the neck wound up snapping off.
Usually, the vehicles shown in those pictures are hard to tell as being vehicles, except for maybe
a tire somewhere in the picture. The results of that carcass of a hundred-pound oxygen tank
zooming off like a rocket pretty much passes through whatever had been in its way. If the vehicle
had been traveling at highway speed, it suddenly no longer has enough parts to continue as a
vehicle!

Get the point? Imagine having 30 such tanks in a car. If even ONE vibrates loose from its clamps,
or the guy who last replaced them didn't strap them all down properly, or an accident occurs
where you hit another vehicle or a tree? If even one of those tanks ruptures, REALLY bad things
would result. Given that Hydrogen tanks contain TWICE the pressure of Oxygen tanks, the
effects of a tank neck snapping off is both more likely and also potentially more destructive. And
have you ever even seen what happens to any NORMAL car when a semi hits it? Imagine if that
target car had 30 tanks inside it which each were simply waiting to become unguided missiles!

Notice that this issue is not actually related to any hazard of Hydrogen itself, but rather the fact
that it would have to be stored at extremely high pressures due to its very low density. Whether it
was a high-pressure Oxygen tank or an even higher-pressure Hydrogen tank, this danger is
virtually the same, and is entirely due to the pressure that the gas is compressed to.

Because of this extraordinary safety hazard, which is only due to the very high pressures involved
and really has nothing to do with the Hydrogen itself, there is no imaginable way that the US
Government would ever allow such vehicles to be generally licensed. It would conceivably be a
lot safer to drive a dynamite truck!

Cost Considerations
It would be wonderful if massive amounts of compressed Hydrogen were easily available. In that
case, except for the safety and size considerations just discussed, Hydrogen would be a nearly
ideal fuel for vehicles. However, no compressed gas of any kind exists naturally and so
mechanical compression is required. An air compressor that can commonly be bought for $300
can compress air to around 100 PSI, around seven times natural atmospheric pressure.
However, compressors that are capable of 3000 psi or 200 times atmospheric pressure are very
large, very complex, and VERY expensive. In addition, every pipe and every fitting used must
also be able to safely withstand such pressures. (Normal pipes would just burst.) In addition,
whoever operated such a compressor would have to be very extensively trained, to keep all of its
parts from bursting from the pressure and killing someone. The point: People are not ever likely to
have their own Hydrogen compressors, and so they would certainly always have to buy the
Hydrogen from some large corporation. Logically, it figures that that corporation will be the very
same ones that now own all the oil and gasoline companies!

Such equipment is difficult enough to operate when the gas being compressed is Nitrogen or
Oxygen or Carbon Dioxide. But when it is also a potentially explosive gas such as Hydrogen,
safety issues multiply. Imagine having the necessary compressor and pipes and tanks in a
garage, and a tiny leak appears in one of the pipes. A spark or someone with a cigarette? Poof,
no garage! Ever seen the Hindenburg disaster movie?

However, even if there was some way to do all that compression, it takes a good amount of
electricity for the compressor motor to drive the compressor. A significant cost would be involved
for that compression, even if you somehow had your own compressor.

In addition, free Hydrogen does not exist. All of the Hydrogen that might be collected is now in
various compounds. The simplest to deal with is water. If you had Chemistry in High School, then
you hooked up some electricity to an apparatus that contained water, and you saw little bubbles
of Hydrogen form in one upside down test tube and Oxygen form in the other. That is called
Electrolysis, or the Dissociation of water. It is obviously pretty easy to do.
But those are just little bubbles of Hydrogen that you collect. After a minute or two of such an
experiment, you had a half-finger-sized bubble of Hydrogen gas in a test tube. A spark or flame,
and POP, it exploded! And everyone laughed! But remember now that you are going to need an
amount of Hydrogen that would more than completely fill two semi trailers, to just equal one tank
of gasoline! It is possible to calculate the amount of electricity needed for that, but you must get
the idea that it is a LOT of electricity! (We discussed some of that up above) So, you get to pay
your electric company for that, too.

So, you would wind up paying for the electricity to Dissociate the water in the first place, plus the
cost of the electricity needed for the extreme compression. Of course, all of this would be after
you bought the necessary equipment! We discussed above that this will increase your electric bill
by at least $30 (and likely much more) for the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline. Also, roughly
36 pounds of coal have to be burned at a distant electric power plant to produce that same
energy that a single gallon of gasoline contains. Which causes roughly SIX TIMES the amount of
global warming carbon dioxide (107 pounds) to be produced at that power plant than if you had
simply kept driving the gasoline powered vehicle (18 pounds)! (See the Battery-powered vehicle
presentation linked at the bottom of this page for the complete details on that.)

An alternative, of course, would be to buy (rent actually) tanks of industrial Hydrogen that is
already compressed. Current prices (2003) for Industrial Hydrogen (the lowest purity available)
are around $42 for a standard K cylinder, a very high pressure tank which contains 197 standard
cubic feet of Hydrogen, plus a monthly rental fee for the tank. The 6,000 cubic feet that we had
earlier determined were equal to one 15 gallon tank of gasoline, would therefore be around 30 of
these tanks, which would cost around $1260 for (one gasoline tankfull!) the compressed
Hydrogen PLUS the monthly rental of at least $300 for the tanks themselves. (Using the single
gallon of gasoline scale we discussed above, you would need to buy/rent only two K-sized tanks,
for around $85 plus cylinder rental costs, for the equivalent to that single gallon of gasoline.)

We complain today at paying $3 per gallon for gasoline, which would be $45 for our 15 gallon
tank. How many people would be willing to pay $1260 and more for the same driving distance,
using bought Hydrogen?

Flame Speed
Even if all the other hurdles are overcome regarding using Hydrogen as a fuel, it seems to have
yet another disadvantage, one that it shares with most other gaseous fuels: the speed at which a
flame front travels is fairly slow for the purposes of conventional engines. With an ideal Hydrogen-
air mixture, a flame front can travel at around 8 feet/second (at standard atmospheric pressure).
Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 7, Gaseous Fuels, graph For
comparison, a gasoline-air mixture (compressed) creates a flame front speed that ranges from
around 70 feet/second up to around 170 feet/second in normal engines. Mark's Standard
Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 9, Internal Combustion Engines, Flame Speed.

(NOTE: There does not appear to be available any data regarding flame-front speed for
Hydrogen gas when compressed as in a car engine. Therefore, we add the following discussion,
which also shows the sort of far more comprehensive Physics research that is the basis for
essentially all the statements made in this presentation.)

First, everyone is taught in school that Hydrogen "simply" combines with Oxygen in the familiar
(2) H2 + O2 ↔ (2) H2O. That turns out to be an enormous simplification! There are actually 19
different chemical reactions that can and do happen! Each releases different amounts of energy
(with two of them even REQUIRING energy to occur!). In general, two or more of these reactions
occur in rapid succession, with the end result of the familiar reaction. Physicists and Chemists
analyze ALL of those 19 unique reactions, in order to better understand exactly what is going on
and why. In fact, the overall reaction of Hydrogen with Oxygen can occur in two VERY different
ways! The DESIRED one is by burning (conflagration) which has the flame-front speed indicated,
around 8 feet/second in the atmosphere. The UNDESIRED one is by explosion (detonation)
which has a flame-front speed of 2,821 meters/second or 9,255 feet/second! That is around
EIGHT TIMES the speed of sound and many times faster than the fastest rifle bullet travels! It is
incredibly dangerous when Hydrogen decides to detonate, and science does not yet have a very
complete understanding of why it sometimes does! Our discussion here will be about the
DESIRED laminar flame-front process.

Next, the velocity of the (laminar) flame-front is known to be very dependent on many different
variables. Here is an equation that gives the flame-front velocity (speed):

(There are actually three different theories which exist to explain the motion of flame-front travel
and this equation happens to be from the one that seems to be the best. Many of the equations
involved are far more complex than this one. They were generally developed during the 1980s.)

If a number of reasonable assumptions are made, this can be greatly simplified into:

The exponents are different for each type of fuel gas, and for Hydrogen they have been
experimentally determined (Milton and Keck 1984) to be a is 1.26 and b is 0.26

Note that all of this is based on ideal conditions; the perfect proportion of fuel and oxygen; perfect
mixing; etc, and that real conditions are often not ideal.

If we assume that an engine has an (actual) compression ratio of 8:1, the pressure increase
factor therefore would be 80.26 which is 1.717. The natural flame-front speed of 8 feet/second
would therefore increase to 8 * 1.717 or 13.7 feet/second. We note that some 2004 research in
Bergen, Norway shows a maximum atmospheric flame-front speed for Hydrogen as 2.8
meters/second, which is slightly higher than the 8 ft/sec cited above at 9.2 ft/second.

This is still far slower than the measured flame-front speeds inside gasoline-fired internal
combustion engines (which is generally at least 90 feet/second during most driving). However,
the dependence on temperature causes some improvement in this situation. Hydrogen burns at
2,755°C or 4,991°F. The heating of the gas occurs gradually during the process of the
combustion, but if we assumed that the hydrogen got up to that temperature, the temperature
dependence factor in the equation above would be around 18 to one. This implies that the
COMBINATION of the higher pressure and the higher temperature MIGHT cause a flame-front
speed which is comparable to that known to be in gasoline-fired internal combustion engines. But
it does not appear that anyone has yet actually done such experiments to validate that statement.

Consider the inside of an engine cylinder in a normal car engine traveling down the highway. The
engine may be rotating at 2,000 rpm, or 33 revolutions per second. The piston must therefore
move upward and downward 33 times every second, and its (maximum) speed in the middle of its
stroke is around 45 feet/second. If a fuel burning in the cylinder is to actually push down on the
piston, in order to do actual work in propelling the vehicle, the fuel-air mixture needs to burn at a
speed FASTER than the piston is moving! Otherwise, the slow-burning mixture would actually act
to SLOW DOWN the piston! It would not only not do productive work, but it would require work
FROM the piston.

The ACTUAL flame-front speed inside an ICE might be sufficient for conventional burning as in
current ICE engines, but someone needs to do the experiments to confirm that! But it suggests
that yet another hurdle might lie in front of Hydrogen ever becoming a common motor fuel.

By the way, the INTENDED usage of Hydrogen in vehicles is quite different from this! The much-
publicized Fuel Cell is a device which converts the energy in a fuel like Hydrogen DIRECTLY
INTO ELECTRICITY. The premise for future vehicles is that they might use Fuel Cells to provide
electricity for electric motor drive systems. Which means that Mortuary Services will soon be
appropriate for the Internal Combustion Engine! But it may be another ten or twenty years before
fuel-cell technology has developed to the point of that becoming realistic.
As an additional note here, when you see impressive demos on TV or in a video regarding
Hydrogen being used as a fuel for a vehicle, try to check to see the source of that Hydrogen! In
general, such demos use LIQUID Hydrogen (which is necessarily refrigerated to incredibly cold
temperature, within a few degrees of Absolute Zero!) LIQUID Hydrogen does not have the
problem of the huge volume of Hydrogen as a gas (where one pound takes up around 200 cubic
feet) (one pound of liquid hydrogen takes up less than 1/4 cubic foot, almost 1,000 times smaller).
Where we have discussed that one cubic foot of Hydrogen gas only contains around 360 Btus of
chemical energy, one cubic foot of Liquid Hydrogen contains around 300,000 Btus of chemical
energy in it, relatively comparable to the energy concentration of gasoline (about half of it). So, for
demonstration purposes, a fairly small amount of LIQUID Hydrogen contains spectacular
amounts of energy in it! Which then gives impressive performance by the demo vehicle. However,
IF they used LIQUID Hydrogen, that (small) amount for the demo quite possibly cost them tens of
thousands of dollars to buy!

There IS a reason that NASA uses LIQUID HYDROGEN as the fuel for nearly all their liquid-fuel
space rockets. But they also are very aware of the bad memories when such rockets have blown
up in the launch pad! And then there was the Hindenburg disaster in the 1930s that ended the
popularity of Dirigibles. NASA never admits the enormous cost involved in producing and
refrigerating that massive amount of hydrogen for a launch! Check it out! It is a spectacular
expense!

OK. Finally, there are all kinds of hucksters who are trying to sell all manner of products that they
claim will give you tremendous improvements in the gas mileage of your vehicle by somehow
injecting Hydrogen into the engine. This is really sad regarding how deceptive their presentations
are. Again, if you would inject LIQUID hydrogen into any engine, you COULD add a large amount
of additional CHEMICAL ENERGY into the engine to be burned. However, what they try to sell
are tiny devices which they claim are hydrogen generators. You should realize from this
presentation that even if you could generate one cubic foot of hydrogen each minute (which is
extremely difficult to do AND would require many horsepower from the engine to generate the
needed electricity to do it), that would only be adding around 360 Btus of chemical energy in the
hydrogen into the engine (where a gallon of gasoline contains 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in
it). A demo where LIQUID hydrogen was injected COULD show measurable improvement, but
any device that tries to generate GASEOUS hydrogen to be injected is simply an expensive joke!

Scale of the Need

The people who aggressively promote alternative energy sources seem to have one or the other
of two viewpoints: They are either REALLY optimistic and are unaware of the scale of the
problems; or they are trying to promote (sell for big profits) whatever it is that they are describing!
Hydrogen is a good example of this. Yes, there have been wonderful demonstrations where 10 or
100 cubic feet of Hydrogen was produced, as by the new and interesting algae approach. (I
mention that because it is one of the only methods that uses less electricity energy than it will
eventually provide, being based on biological capture of sunlight. Unfortunately, plants tend to
only be roughly 1% efficient regarding capturing that sunlight and converting it into (chemical)
energy!)

It seems that the wild enthusiasm that Ethanol was going to be "the total energy solution for the
future" has faded. And I think that people are starting to realize that Fuel Cells that would be
affordable and practical for vehicle propulsion are probably still 50 or more years in the future.
And battery power had a brief public excitement recently, as it had earlier done during the 1980s.
Tower windmills are starting to be seen as only around 1/10 the devices they were promoted as
being. So the "breakthrough of the month" lately is algae. As with all the others, it is pretty easy to
set up an impressive demo of a few minutes' usage for a few reporters, which gets the public
excited about the latest fad energy supply. But like all the others, algae has some major obstacles
to overcome. And like all the others, the biggest of the obstacles is the SCALE of our needs.
Yes, with a few million dollars of equipment, it IS possible to grow algae and then extract either
hydrogen gas or power directly. But the unspoken detail is that the amounts of equipment which
would actually be needed would be comparable with the surface area of the Earth! Do you know
how large an acre is? Imagine growing algae in ponds all year, where greenhouse heating will be
needed much of the year. But that acre receives around 22,000 kiloWatt-hours of sunlight on a
nice sunny day. But the algae, like virtually all other plants, can only absorb certain colors of that
incoming sunlight and there are many other losses, where the overall conversion efficiency is
generally only around 1%. That means that the full acre of algae farming will only capture about
220 kWh per day as glucose.

The known chemical processes to extract hydrogen from that are generally no better than around
50% efficient, so at best, we could hope to capture around 110 kWh of energy per sunny day per
acre. In comparison, one gallon of gasoline contains around 37 kWh of energy in it. So all the
equipment and that full acre of algae farming, at best, might someday be able to produce energy
comparable to about three gallons of gasoline! The people doing the demos today are merely
getting the public excited so that the government will fund billions of dollars into their hands for
future research, which will guarantee their personal employment and prosperity.

No one ever seems to be in a position to cast an analytical eye upon such things! Whenever
some spokesperson announces that they have found the ultimate solution to all energy crises,
everyone seems to immediately accept all claims made, without reservation! Wow! The brief and
crude calculations just presented suggest the BEST production from that acre of algae. On days
that were overcast or during winter when heating power was required to preserve the algae from
cold, far less can be expected. However, clearly, no spokesperson is going to admit that the
FUTURE CAPABILITY may be three gallons equivalent of gasoline per acre of algae per sunny
day! Even if gasoline rises to a thousand dollars per gallon, it would have to be cheaper than
energy from such an algae farm.

Yes, there will be many claims of breakthroughs, each of which will guarantee funding for some
new business venture! And there will be spectacular claims made all the time. But isn't the proof
in the pudding? Not in any prior claims about how perfect the pudding will be? And the sad part is
that there really is no free lunch available. Everyone WANTS TO BELIEVE that some magical
source of massive amounts of energy will allow all people to continue to be as wasteful as we
Americans have learned to be for decades. The fact that the public has so little understanding of
such matters makes it very easy for some slippery person to deceive a lot of people. If you are
very familiar with Hydrogen then you probably have heard of Brown's Gas. A guy who had never
had any science education, and not much education at all, declared himself to have a Doctorate
Degree, around 30 years ago, and he started telling people that he had discovered the ultimate
energy solution, which he called Brown's Gas (after himself). He claimed that his gas was a
combination of Hydrogen gas and Oxygen gas, together! His claims were so convincing that he
got many people to give him large amounts of money. As a result, he was convicted of cheating
people many times and would up spending most of his life in various prisons! But even though his
claims were immediately known as false, and all his convictions, there are STILL people today
actively promoting that silly concept! I am sure that the web-sites trick a lot of people into sending
money in, so I guess it accomplishes their goal of getting rich! It's just that the concept has no
value whatever, and it is simply a scam to cheat people.

Sadly, most actual demos of Hydrogen always use BOUGHT tanks of compressed hydrogen gas,
which thereby bypasses many of the difficulties of the technology. And we have already noted
that 95% of all the industrial hydrogen produced in the US is made from a catalytic conversion of
methane gas, consuming a lot of heat and other energy in the process! It is NOT the lily-white
clean fuel that everyone seems to believe!

So, even ignoring the problems discussed above regarding having to compress the Hydrogen to
actually be able to use it, we now have somehow created maybe 100 cubic feet of Hydrogen.
(That is a volume of five feet by five feet by four feet.) We noted above that each cubic foot
contains 319 Btu of chemical energy. So we have 31,900 Btu of energy available. Maybe that
sounds good, but your house furnace probably uses up 125,000 Btu/hr in the winter, so that
amount of Hydrogen gas would only provide heat for a single house for around 15 minutes! But if
we look at the energy consumption of the whole United States, each year, it is a little over
100,000,000,000,000,000 Btu.

Our energy amount above (the 100 cubic feet of Hydrogen gas) is equivalent to around 31 cubic
feet of natural gas (at a little over 1,000 Btu/cubic foot). But each year, the US consumes around
30,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas!

See the problem? Even if the Hydrogen technology could be scaled up by a factor of a MILLION
(extremely hard to do!), it would then still only represent one one-millionth of our gaseous energy
needs! (We have another web-page in this Domain that presents government and industry data
on energy supplies and consumption rates, and it shows that, without imports, the US would
completely run out of natural gas in a little over EIGHT years!) So that NEED for a gaseous fuel
will certainly exist. But it is hard to see how Hydrogen could provide but the tiniest amount of that
need.

Yes, I realize that the public and politicians seem fascinated with Hydrogen as the "answer to all
the energy problems", but it is really hard to see how that could realistically happen. We humans
have gotten spoiled by being able to consume and waste unbelievable amounts of coal, oil,
natural gas and uranium. There seems to be no care at all regarding what people of 20 years
from now will do! Some people say that "science will find solutions" but I ask that you note that I
AM a Nuclear Physicist! If the US is not able to rely on friendly countries for Uranium, oil, and
natural gas, we may all wind up in a Medieval United States! We already used essentially all the
Uranium that was under the US, nearly all the oil (4.3 years supply left), and nearly all the natural
gas (8+ years supply left). This is bad. Very, very bad. But I truly doubt that Hydrogen can provide
any significant alternate source, mostly because our total energy consumption has been so
amazingly high!

Another politically popular "energy solution", wind-generating of electricity, has many problems of
its own, primarily transporting the electricity hundreds or thousands of miles, because very little
actually gets to the end of those very long lines! Even with impressive government funding of
wind-generation, it seems very unlikely that such systems can realistically provide more than the
tiniest part of the US electricity usage. But it seems likely that politicians will go crazy and
authorize a thousand times as many windmills than already exist. And the windmills will soon
after be discovered to cause weather changes in the climate, because so much wind is slowed
down such that normal weather patterns cannot occur.

The amount of power in wind energy seems impressive during hurricanes and tornadoes, true.
But in NORMAL winds, which tend to average around 10 or 11 mph in many areas, the actual
amount of electricity which can be produced from wind is not remotely comparable to our
amazing consumption of electricity and other energy. Yes, when demonstration projects build
hundreds of giant wind turbines (for billions of taxpayer or investor dollars!), it CAN be shown to
(sometimes, when the winds blow) produce the electricity needed by some SMALL local town.
And everyone celebrates as though they have found magical solutions! But they haven't! If we
were in 1890, where there was extremely minimal usage of electricity, yes, those wind farms
would be great! But our current usage of electricity is so many millions of times larger than what
such tower windmills could provide, it turns out to just be a "wonderful idea&quotl which will not
pan out as needed.

So the rather casual comments that "our technology will find ecologically sound ways to make
electricity in the future" as the future source of the power to drive Hydrogen generation, is pretty
close to Easter Bunny and Santa Claus sort of stuff.

It is really hard to see how the US will be anything other than a total-coal powered country within
a few decades. We DO have a lot of coal!

Conclusion
Yes, fuel cells, which are effective mechanisms for converting Hydrogen and Oxygen into water
vapor and releasing a lot of energy, certainly seem to be fascinating potential sources of energy
conversion devices for vehicles. However, it certainly seems that sufficient Hydrogen cannot be
stored in a car for any length of trip without compressing it to extremely high pressures. THAT
fact causes both cost and safety considerations which seem to make practical use of Hydrogen
remain a fascinating dream which will probably never become reality.

Yes, Hydrogen can be demonstrated in experimental vehicles, and they can have impressive
acceleration and speed. But that's with a rather small (BOUGHT!) Hydrogen tank aboard. If you
ever see an impressive demonstration like that of a Hydrogen-powered vehicle, make sure to ask
how long that vehicle could continue to perform like that. The answer is certain to be no more
than a few minutes at most. So, as a demonstration, Hydrogen can seem quite impressive,
because it is! But in actual practical applications, the details probably make it never to be usable
in our vehicles.

One of the most amazing things about the fanatic fervor to develop Hydrogen as a fuel for
vehicles is the fact that we have long had a fuel that is actually better in several important ways!
That fuel is methane, essentially what we call Natural Gas. It IS commonly available, and in fact it
has long been made and collected on many farms from anaerobic decomposition of cow manure
and other things. It chemically is CH4. It is also rather easily generated from many different
common chemicals. (Even the human body creates it, anti-socially!) So large supplies of methane
would not be that hard or that expensive to collect. A cubic foot of methane contains more than
three times the energy as hydrogen, so it does not have to be compressed anywhere near as
much, although the storage tanks in vehicles tend to be at the same high pressure as hydrogen,
to store a lot more gas in them. There have long been many vehicles on the road that operate on
CNG, compressed natural gas. Yes, there is ONE disadvantage as compared to hydrogen. The
methane chemically oxidizes (burns) by the chemical reaction:
CH4 + [2] O2 gives CO2 + [2] H2O

In other words, one of the resulting products is the carbon dioxide that is blamed for much of
global warming. But that is really NOT a fault IF the methane is PRODUCED as on a farm, as in
that case both the production and oxidation of the methane is part of the natural Carbon Cycle. It
is ONLY if the methane being burned had been brought up from being stored underground for
millions of years. In THAT case, when it is burned, it releases NEW carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere that had been removed millions of years ago.

It sure seems to me that methane is a FAR more attractive possibility regarding solving future
energy needs than Hydrogen has any chance of accomplishing.

One downside to Methane / Natural Gas: As glowing a potential solution as it might be, we in the
US already use up amazing amounts of it! In fact, government and industry official published
documents from 2002 show that we were already having to IMPORT enormous amounts of
(compressed) natural gas just to provide what we were already using up! For any possible future
based on a "Methane economy", it would be necessary to STOP using up methane that had been
buried for millions of years as fossil fuel and instead MAKE IT, to end the increase of adding new
carbon dioxide to the atmosphere!

By the way, chemically, Methane is CH4. Another immensely popular concept (but an incredibly
expensive and foolish idea!) these days is Ethanol (or Ethyl Alcohol or Grain Alcohol) which is
C2H5OH. Methane (gas) and Methanol (CH3OH) (liquid) and Ethane (C2H6 (gas) and Ethanol
(or wood alcohol) (liquid) are therefore similar chemically, all simple hydrocarbons, where a
Hydrogen atom is in an (-ane) is replaced by an Hydroxyl ion in the (-anol). Some uses benefit
from a gaseous fuel, while others benefit from a liquid fuel.
(Ethanol requires not only immense amounts of corn to be grown, at the expense of food crops,
which has already [2007] caused grocery prices to rise tremendously, but it requires the heating
and fermentation processes of a still and some other processes, and then has to be trucked
around, together USING UP about as much (fossil fuel) energy that the Ethanol can eventually
provide! AT BEST, we are simply WASTING all those millions of acres of corn crops! Interesting,
huh?

Many people rely in the articles in Wikipedia, and elsewhere on the Internet, to be absolutely and
unquestionably true and precisely accurate. Up to about four years ago (2005) that was
essentially true. But the Wikipedia concept allows ANYONE to edit any presentation. Where the
early entries were (nearly) all provided by actual Researchers and Scholars, many of the
Wikipedia presentations have now become contaminated by editing by uneducated people. It is
mentioned here because I just noticed that the Wiki presentation on CNG (Compressed Natural
Gas) contains an interesting problem! Near the very start, a Researcher states the true fact that
burning natural gas causes INCREASED pollution of a specific type, called NOx (nitrous oxides).
But a later section that had been edited states that burning natural gas causes REDUCED NOx
pollution! The same presentation claims both sides of that coin! (The first statement is the true
one). The point here is just that one must be very careful regarding the source of any information
provided, and Wikipedia never mentions the original authors or all those that edited it. How can
anyone know whether the current text is correct or not? Trust Wiki staff to monitor their billions of
web-pages, having complete Engineering education to understand all the nuances of every
article?

Footnotes
.
Combustion of Gasoline
We can also consider gasoline by the gallon instead of the pound. One gallon of gasoline weighs
around 6 pounds. Around 5.0 pounds of that is due to the carbon atoms in the complex
carbohydrate molecules. When the Carbon atoms oxidize/burn they combine with oxygen from
the air to form carbon dioxide. The ratios of the amounts are 12 grams of carbon combines with 2
* 16 grams of oxygen to form 44 grams of carbon dioxide. This means that we end up with 44/12
times as much carbon dioxide as we had carbon to start with (if the combustion is complete). In
our case, starting with 5.0 pounds of carbon, the gallon of gasoline therefore forms about 5.0 *
44/12 or about 18.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.