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Die Wundervolle Welt des Wasserstoffs... Or, Is It?
Part 2
By Twisted Rhodes
Plug Power's and Honda's prototype of a Home Energy Station. Source: Honda
Copyright: Honda |
My last column was on Hydrogen as the next big thing for our beloved Bimmers, it ended in the middle of the topic of reforming. Instead of limiting the information that I’ve found since then to a column, the information has been expanded to an article.
You may recall that Hydrogen makes a pretty strong case for the fuel of the 21st Century. It’s the most plentiful element in the Universe and it burns very cleanly. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest to get it into a state that can be used as a fuel. The energy required to liberate Hydrogen from water is greater than the return of energy when it combusts. Reformation of hydrocarbons presents a good option if you only look at the energy equation; you get more than you use. It doesn’t do anything to reduce the generation of greenhouse gases, so chemistry-savvy environmentalists aren’t too keen on that process.
Obviously, using clean sources of energy (like hydroelec-tric, wind or photovoltaic power) to reduce water into Hydro-gen and Oxygen would be ideal. The use of hydrocarbons doesn’t substantially reduce our dependency on petroleum, but it does leverage the existing infrastructure for our main source of energy. It is possible to use reformation as a way to help us transition off of oil.
Then there is the storage problem. BMW and other auto makers have decided to use the simplest technology—high-pressure storage tanks—to store Hydrogen, whether it’s for direct combustion or for fuel cells. The other methods (like metal hydrides, carbon nanotubes, and glass microspheres) are too new and complex for any practical use in the near term. Several problems make compressed Hydrogen not very ideal.
The first problem is that the amount of energy available for a given volume of compressed Hydrogen is quite limited. You just can’t get all that much Hydrogen in an automobile tank without slowing the atoms way down. That makes it very cold, which would be liquid Hydrogen (twenty degrees above absolute zero or -253 degrees F). Besides, cooling and compressing to that temperature results in a net 30% loss in energy that the liquid Hydrogen is storing. You would need a tank 3,000 times the size of your current gasoline tank to store the same amount of energy using Hydrogen.
The second big issue with storing compressed Hydrogen is that it’s the smallest possible atom in nature, which makes it really good at not being held in place. Hydrogen tanks leak about ten percent per day. Don’t expect to park your Hydro-gen-powered Bimmer for very long without refilling it before you can go anywhere.
The third problem relates to the second. Hydrogen is very volatile; it has the widest range of temperatures where combustion can occur of any gas. Do you know what is the most common tool found at industrial gas production plants where Hydrogen is involved? Brooms—straw brooms, to be exact. Workers carry straw brooms in front of them as they walk around the area so they won’t get burned by Hydrogen fires. Hydrogen burns without a visible flame. The straw bursts into flames before the worker can get burned by the fire.
As bad as all these problems seem, they are all solvable given enough time. In researching this topic, I’ve learned some things that tell me we may not have the luxury of waiting for scientists to make Hydrogen-powered vehicles cost-effective and pervasive. So what’s the hurry? To answer that, we need to take a look at the number one source of energy today: oil.
Let’s start with some numbers on the consumption side:
- The U.S. currently accounts for 3% of worldwide energy supply.
- The U.S. consumes 28% of the total worldwide supply.
- The U.S. imports 53% of her oil.
- The world uses 27,740,000,000 barrels of oil a year (76,000,000 barrels a day).
- In 2020, projected world demand is 40,880,000,000 barrels a year (112,000,000 barrels a day).
First hydrogen filling station in Sweden (Malmö), opened in September 2003.
Source: Stuart Energy
Copyright: Stuart Energy |
The U.S. may be the number one consumer, but think about the economy of China compared to the U.S. China has about 1.63 billion people (1,260,000,000 people using estimates from the year 2000 with a nine percent annual growth rate); the U.S. has about 280,000,000 people. The Chinese economy is growing about 30% and despite Communist social policies, they have capitalist-style economy. According to data from the International Energy Agency, published in the LA Times on November 14, 2003, China will pass Japan next year in oil consumption. Demand and subsequent consumption is accelerating as a function of population growth and economic development.
We’ve all been hearing for years that we are going to run out of oil eventually, but most of the time frames given are 35 to 50 years and most people can’t think past next year. As I was researching the use of Hydrogen as the replacement for oil, I ran across an interesting term that petroleum geologists call “Peak Oil” that paints quite a different picture of our future.
Peak oil refers to the point at which production from a given source of oil starts to decline. If you graph oil production over time, no matter what the source (wells, oil field, etc), it follows a bell curve. The peak is where one half of the oil has been extracted. A Shell Oil geophysicist, M. King Hubbert discovered this so it’s sometimes called the “Hubbert Curve.” Peak discovery refers to the point where finding new sources of oil starts to decline. Peak oil follows some time after peak discovery.
How many of you remember that the U.S. used to be a major exporter of oil? The numbers above obviously show a significant reversal. In turns out that the peak discovery point for the U.S. was in the 1930’s. In 1956, Hubbert predicted that the U.S. would experience peak oil in 1970. Most of you over the age of 40 remember the OPEC Oil Embargo in 1973. It happened because the peak of oil production in the U.S. occurred in 1970 which caused the U.S. to become an importer of oil. OPEC saw it as a chance to punish us mainly because of our foreign policies at the time. It was a very painful experience that forced our government to mandate increases in automobile fuel economy and encourage everyone to conserve. It also helped that countries like Venezuela wasn’t a member of OPEC and decided to help us out by selling cheap oil.
So, it took 40 years for the U.S. to reach Peak Oil after peak discovery. Another large source, the North Sea fields, reached peak production just 27 years after its discovery. A report called “The World Oil Supply 1930-2050” was published in 1995 by Dr. Colin J. Campbell for Petroconsultants (now called IHS Energy which is the largest consulting firm to the oil industry). It stated that the global peak would come in the first decade of the 21st Century. The current debate is whether global Peak Oil will come in 2004, 2010, or 2015. Some people believe it already happened in 2000 because worldwide production has decreased each of the last three years but consumption has not.
Regardless of when the global Peak Oil occurs, if we’ve reached the half-way point in our global supplies, how long do we have before we run out? There have been no significant discoveries of oil reserves in the last 30 years meaning the global peak discovery happened about 30 years ago. So, if peak production has either just happened or is right around the corner, we have about 30 years before we are tapped out, right? Wrong. A recent study by a group from the University of Uppsala in Sweden determined the world’s total reserve of crude oil is actually 80% less than previously estimated! In other words, we may be closer to running out than anyone thought.
Dubai, an oil-producing member state of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf, is closely examining the idea of producing hydrogen as an environmentally benign, zero-emission automotive fuel in cooperation with BMW.
Source: BMW World
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In reality, the wells won’t totally be dry. Oil companies operate at different levels of the food chain. The company that finds and drills for the oil gets the easy return when it flows easily out of the well. When it has to be pumped, it becomes less profitable, so secondary companies buy the wells and work them until the amount of oil pumped drops to a trickle (one to two barrels a day). When oil wells are tapped out, there’s still about 40% of the oil left in the ground. At that point, the cost to extract the remaining oil measured in energy expended exceeds the amount of energy yielded.
On November 27, 2003 the British government approved development of the biggest oil find in their territory within the last ten years. How big is that North Sea field? 400,000,000 barrels, or five days of world wide supply at today’s consumption rates. Canada has a large expanse of what is called Tar Sands. It’s basically sand impregnated with heavy oil. It’s not easy to separate the two and the process is more like strip mining than drilling for it in rocks. Recent announcements of a process to get the oil seemed to be promising until you read the yield—about 300, 000 barrels a day. Surely these “finds” wouldn’t have even been considered for production 30 years ago.
The North Sea is a very hostile place to be and the cost to get even flowing oil is high. Even for the Canadian Tar Sand fields, it’s estimated that it would take two barrels of oil in energy consumption to yield one barrel of oil that can be refined. At that point, it doesn’t make economic sense to get it. It’s not even logical to get it. Someone once said that “the Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of rocks.” The evidence tells us that end of the Oil Age is coming very quickly.
Canadian investigative journalist Stephen James Kerr wrote, “Oil is capitalism’s crack cocaine….” What happens when it gets too expensive to support the economic growth we expect? The recent recession may be just a taste of what lies ahead. What if that point happens sooner than we are prepared to deal with? Oil is such a large part of daily living, what will happen if we keep going with the throttle wide open and don’t seriously develop alternatives? Think about where your food really comes from, and how little of it isn’t grown or raised locally. It won’t just be economic disaster if we don’t act with some desperation now .*
* Think about this: there are a lot of oil industry people in Washington. Would it be a stretch to presume they had access to the reports on Peak Oil? Not really since it’s easy to find executives from oil and energy companies quoted on this topic in articles easily found by searching the Internet. These are the very same people who participated in the still secret energy policy meetings with the Vice President. What if you knew about the predictions of production declines and where most of the remaining and really viable reserves are located? What would you do to prevent the U.S. economy from a sudden collapse?
Who really knows what will be the likely fuel of the future. Hydrogen has a lot of benefits, but conversion on the scale needed to avert catastrophe will likely take more time than we have oil reserves. Reforming hydrocarbons to produce isn’t the answer since it still depends on oil and its byproducts. Is Hydrogen really the answer? It may not be. According to the Chairman of Daimler-Chrysler, developing the technologies and infrastructure for Hydrogen power could take more than fifteen years. According to petroleum geologists, we don’t have that much time.
750hl4
Source: BMW World
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So what do we do? This may be a worldwide problem, but the data about U.S. consumption shows that we must take the lead. We have to keep the lights on so the power grid has to be considered.
There’s wind power. According to one report, we would need to install 20,000 wind turbines a year to replace the diminishing petroleum supply. There’s a lot of hard-to-mine coal in the ground (something like trillions of cubic meters) but the process to extract it is very dirty and it’s high sulfur. Its use would make the current global warming problem into a global cooking problem. Nuclear may make a comeback if we can deal with the toxic waste. There’s evidence that natural gas reserves are pretty significant, about 80 years worth at the current rate of consumption. But, a large switch to natural gas would shorten that supply to almost nothing, and we’d be back to where we started. Solar cells installed on buildings to generate localized power for tenants is another option.
Conservation is the easiest place to start. The experts estimate the U.S. needs to cut total energy consumption by five percent per year to just keep pace with the expected decline in production. Californians managed to reduce electric use by ten percent to prevent rolling blackouts in 2002, so we’ve proven it’s possible. Unfortunately, we’d also have to give up SUVs en masse to reduce gasoline consumption (the number one use for oil). It doesn’t even have to be for a Toyota Prius—even switching to a 323i would decrease your consumption 40% over some of these behemoths. It’s obvious that Congress won’t act to force automakers to increase CAFÉ numbers, so the average Joe Driver needs to take the lead. Conservation doesn’t require massive investments and it saves money too.
I do know that We The People must force our government to treat us like adults and publicly open the discussion. This is a matter of national and global security, and time is not on our side. We need to take responsibility for our actions on an individual and national level. One of my favorite bumper sticker reads: “When the people lead, the politicians will follow.” We’ve forgotten the power we have as citizens. It’s time to remember and act.
At least there’s a good side to all of this for all you environmentalists out there: there may not be enough oil left to continue global warming from internal combustion engines.
I leave you with a quote from Dr. Colin J. Campbell, “All of this is so incredibly obvious, being clearly revealed by even the simplest analysis of discovery and production trends. The inexplicable part is our great reluctance to look reality in the face and at least make some plans for what promises to be one of the greatest economic and political discontinuities of all time. Time is of the essence. It is later than you think.”
TwistedRhodes@ggc-bmw-cca.org
Copyrights -Die Flüsternde Bombe newsletter of the Golden Gate Chapter, BMW CCA 
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