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Environmentalists have touted hydrogen as the panacea for world energy challenges for decades, and as is common with populist environmentalist causes, their focus on hydrogen has caused more harm than good. This isn’t the first time thoughtful critics inside and outside the environmentalist movement have called the hydrogen future a hoax, but unfortunately the hydrogen zealots still aren’t listening.

First of all, hydrogen isn’t a primary fuel. It has to be produced from something else, either from electricity via electrolysis, or refined from fossil fuel, or distilled from biomass. In all these cases, using the source fuel directly would be far more efficient than converting this energy into hydrogen.

Obviously refining hydrogen from fossil fuel isn’t going to solve any energy shortages. Distilling hydrogen from biomass is equally problematic; it has the same problems all biofuels have; there isn’t enough land or water on earth to yield anywhere near the quantities of energy necessary to replace petroleum. Read Will Biodiesel Replace Crude Oil, for a chart showing the relationship between land consumption and biofuel production. Moreover, if you are going to refine hydrogen from biofuel crops that truly make economic sense to grow, such as sugar cane, why not just burn the ethanol directly and save the energy losses from the conversion process?

Theoretically, electrolyzing hydrogen from renewable electricity and water is a way for hydrogen to make economic and ecological good sense. But this analysis neglects to consider where the electricity will come from, and more importantly, the significant conversion losses incurred when electricity is electrolysed into hydrogen. The hydrogen resulting from a process of electrolysis will have at best about 65% of the energy that was in the electricity used to make it.

If electrolysed hydrogen is then used to power a fuel cell automobile, the absurdity of its practicality becomes very clear. A fuel cell is necessary to turn the hydrogen back into electricity, and the electrical output of the fuel cell is at best only about 65% of the energy that was in the hydrogen used to make it. The compounding problem here – electricity from the grid made hydrogen via electrolysis at a 65% efficiency (best case), then hydrogen processed through a fuel cell made electricity at a 65% efficiency (best case) – means the electric motor providing traction for your fuel cell car will only be able to use about 40% of the electrical energy drawn from the grid for that purpose. Read The 100% Electric Car, for an in-depth explanation of conversion losses using fuel cell cars.

By contrast, a simple onboard battery can be charged and discharged at greater than 90% efficiency – a plug-in hybrid, available today, will use grid electricity twice as efficiently as a fuel cell car. Furthermore, fuel cells cost $4,000 per kilowatt (a kilowatt is about 1.3 horsepower), they use expensive materials, they degrade quickly, they take several minutes to start, they can’t tolerate cold, and vibration makes their membranes rupture. Meanwhile, batteries are cheap and getting cheaper. If you’ve got cheap renewable electricity, there are better ways to exploit that electricity than by producing hydrogen.

Let’s not forget that nobody’s figured out how to store hydrogen. It is the lightest substance in the universe, so storing a meaningful amount of hydrogen requires pressurization up to 10,000 PSI. Even under these densities, the hydrogen equivalent of only a few gallons of gasoline could be carried on an automobile since otherwise the pressure vessel would weigh far too much. A natural gas vehicle, by contrast, requires the gas to be stored at only 300 PSI, a vast difference. The tanks, fittings and hoses to safely store usable amounts of pressurized hydrogen haven’t been invented yet. Maybe someday hydrogen can be stored via cryogenics, or in metal substrates using nanotechnology. Don’t hold your breath.

Will scientists figure out someday how to store hydrogen in practical, economical ways? Will they ever figure out how to build cheap, safe and durable fuel cells? The answer to these questions is yes, but probably not before they figure out how to develop ultra-capacitors or cheap batteries with extremely high energy densities.

The biggest problem with hydrogen is the opportunity cost of spending billions of dollars in research on this technology and lobbying for this technology when so many alternatives exist. Use more efficiently exploited feedstocks for hydrogen to power ultra-efficient clean diesel cars, serial hybrid cars, and battery powered cars. These technologies are here now, and they are being neglected. Hoax is not too strong a word to describe the environmentalist fixation on hydrogen, a technology that will be eclipsed by better solutions long before it ever becomes practical.

Around 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 11th, 2005, in open water just east of the California’s Farallon Islands, a crab fisherman spotted a large female humpback whale entangled in crab lines. The 45 foot, 50 ton whale was exhausted from attempts to free herself, and barely had strength enough to keep her blowhole above water. What followed is an inspiring story of how quickly people were able to rescue this animal.

By early afternoon, a team of rescue divers from Sausalito’s Marine Mammal Center were already beginning to treat the animal, which was being strangled and slowly dragged under by over 20 crab-pot ropes, which are 240 feet long with weights every 60 feet.

Eight divers surrounded the animal, using curved knives to hook and sever the lines, many of which encircled the whale several times. The delicate and dangerous work took two hours. At any time the whale might have panicked by diving or thrashing about, and in either case the divers could have easily been killed. But as soon as the rescue divers approached, the whale stopped struggling and stayed perfectly still. As one of the rescuers cut the lines away that had dug into her mouth, her eyes followed his every move.

When the whale realized it was free, it swam in circles around the divers several times, and then, in an unforgettable moment, swam up to each diver one at a time, nuzzling each of them gently. It was clear this highly intelligent mammal was thanking them for setting her free.

It is easy to romanticize the beauty of nature, but along with saving the condors, this is a story from the world of animals that can’t help but touch the human heart. Environmentalists may go too far; sometimes their methods may be misplaced and their priorities misguided. But without them, there would be no more condors, and there would be no more whales, and the world would be poorer for their loss. To deride environmentalists for going too far is appropriate – but at the same time thank them, for cleaner air, cleaner water, and wilderness and wildlife that endures.

There is an excellent website on the business of photovoltaics, SolarBuzz (http://www.solarbuzz.com/) which provides information on corporations, products, and people associated with the photovoltaic industry. On their home page they have a perpetually updated report on the price per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of photovoltaic electricity. Currently they show the price for photovoltaic electricity to be 21.7 cents per kWh.

If you compare this price to the cost of electricity from many conventional sources, especially coal, but even natural gas and oil burning power plants – even at today’s higher energy prices – at 21.6 cents per kWh, photovoltaic electricity isn’t even close. Coal generated electric power can be sold retail for $.04 per kWh, if not less.

As shown by the table in “Photovoltaics, the Ultimate Renewable,” however, it may be a fallacy to base kWh prices of photovoltaic electricity on the installation price. This is because the installation price might be compared to the externalities associated with other forms of electric power. What is the cost of transmission lines, which photovoltaics don’t need? What is the cost of actually building the coal mines, and the railroads, to serve coal-fired power plants? What is the cost to build a dam for hydroelectric power, or a facility to store nuclear waste?

The installation price of photovoltaics, similarly, is an externality. Moreover, the high initial installation cost is a sunk cost, not an ongoing cost like many externalities. Does anyone take into account the cost of building the entire drilling, shipping, storage and refining infrastructure for crude oil, when analysing the price of gasoline? These costs are long-ago amortized, and are no longer reflected in the price we pay at the pump. The economic problem with photovoltaics isn’t their ongoing replacement cost, which is minimal, it is the cost of building the entire photovoltaic infrastructure – the installed base – from scratch.

On a replacement basis, photovoltaic power is dirt cheap. Once you’ve installed a photovoltaic array, assume you replace 5% of the array each year. That would mean every twenty years the entire array would be replaced. Such a program would guarantee level electrical output forever. And what would the cost be in this scenario? Only 5% of installation costs, or less than one cent per kWh! That is why photovoltaic electricity is a compelling long-term investment, and the reason they are being purchased faster than manufacturers can make them.

Finally, look for production of photovoltaics to ramp up significantly in the next few years. As we discuss in “The Coming Boom in Photovoltaic Power,” the supply bottleneck of polysilicon raw material is about to be broken.

If you live in the midwestern United States, it’s getting pretty easy to find gasoline-ethanol blends. “E85″ is a gasoline-ethanol blend that is 85% ethanol, with the ethanol typically refined from corn. This fuel can run in most automobiles with only minor alterations. Some new vehicles are designed now to run interchangeably on either an 85% ethanol-gasoline blend, or 100% gasoline. Want to find out more? Visit this collection of online resources:

National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition

Illinois Green Fleets

Iowa Corn

Wikipedia – definition of E85

Nebraska Ethanol Board

How to modify your car to run on ethanol

Alternative Fuels Data Center – US DOE

Ethanol Today

American Coalition for Ethanol

Data on “Energy Balance” of Ethanol

Data on Clean Air Benefits of Ethanol

The attempts to save the California Condor have been derided by critics who claim the money could have been better spent. They call the California Condor a “welfare species,” unable to survive without ongoing – and very expensive – assistance from humans.

Well what has actually happened is one of the greatest success stories in the history of protecting endangered species. If you review the population history of the condor, you will see that in 1982 when wildlife biologists first began capturing Condors to breed them in captivity, there were only 25 birds left in the wild.

From this low point of 25 birds, for over 20 years wildlife biologists have patiently worked to breed Condors and reintroduce them to the wild. For many of these years people questioned, often with ridicule, the wisdom of this program. But in early 2004 there were 215 living Condors, with 89 of them in the wild and 25 more about to be released. There are now dozens of breeding pairs in the wild and these birds are surviving on their own.

It’s easy to claim the millions that were spent – and are still being spent – to protect and save the Condor might have been better spent elsewhere. But if you see one of these ancient birds riding the updrafts along Central California’s wild coastline, with their 10 foot wingspans, you will probably be grateful, like I am, that enough people cared enough to keep this species alive.

There are many people who think environmentalism has gone too far, and often they are right – read “Ten Environmentalist Myths” for our take on this topic. But when it comes to the California Condor, the environmentalists were right. Read “Condor: To the Brink and Back” to learn more about this magnificant bird.

Guest Blog by Robert Ovetz of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project:

It’s common knowledge that we are running out of cheap oil. What’s not so well known is that we are also running out of big fish.

The harsh reality is that catches of big fish – marlin, sharks, swordfish and tuna – are all declining rapidly. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations considers about 75 percent of all fish fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted.

The crisis can be seen most in the Pacific, the world’s largest source of tuna, where catches are shrinking along with the average size of the fish. Today a 70 pound swordfish – which is too young to have even reproduced – is considered “a good sized fish” and can be legally landed in the US. Just a few short decades ago the same fish averaged 300-400 pounds and could be caught close to shore with a harpoon.

In the past two years, the Pacific has seen quotas, restrictions and freezes on catches, and even moratoriums. The US longline fleet had to shut down for the second half of 2005 in the Eastern Pacific. Japan and China were not far behind.

Just last December, the new international body with the unwieldy name Western and Central Pacific Fishery Commission imposed a freeze on further efforts to catch bigeye and albacore. Throughout the Pacific, it is widely documented that these two species have recently joined the lucrative southern bluefin tuna on the overfished list. In fact, southern bluefin already has a step up on its cousins and is considered an endangered species by the World Conservation Union. Shameful shark finning has also caused numerous shark species to plummet as well and a few sharks such as the great white to be considered vulnerable to extinction.

All told, recent scientific reports document that the biomass of these large fish have declined by about 90 percent in the Pacific since 1950 – about the time that new technologies allowed us to fish further from shore for longer and catch more fish. Since then, technology has eviscerated those last areas of the ocean safe from us only because we were unable to reach them and stay there.

The recent announcement last month by the US government that yellowfin tuna is also being overfished in Pacific will undoubtedly send a shockwave throughout the US and the Pacific.

We are now faced with incontrovertible evidence that the lions and tigers of the sea – the ones we feed our children for lunch – are disappearing fast.

Imagine the day when cans of tuna, a staple food source for millions of Americans, can no longer be found. According to the warning signs that day may already be here.

That’s bad news for the dozens of impoverished Pacific island nations that have leased their national waters for pennies on the dollar to foreign industrial longline vessels to catch and export their fish primarily to the US, Japan and the EU. For some of these nations, these meager licensing fees contribute as much as 70 percent of their GDP. When greed and waste finally leads to collapse of these fish, millions of people throughout the Pacific will sink even further into poverty. Canneries are already cutting their hours or even shutting down for want of fish. Stories of crews mutinying or being abandoned in foreign countries by captains who couldn’t pay them abound.

The way out of this crisis is to catch less and pay more while staying out of critical areas of the ocean. It only seems fair that the countries with the resources should receive a far larger share of their $2 billion a year resource and still have some of the big fish around to attract far more lucrative game fishing tourism. The US has taken the right step by restricting longline fishing for tuna in the Eastern Pacific and banning it on the West Coast. Now it’s time to put the pressure on other countries to do the same.

Otherwise we may start having to add these fish to the endangered species list.

Robert Ovetz, PhD, is the Save the Leatherback Campaign Coordinator with the US-based Sea Turtle Restoration Project.

Increasing prices for gasoline are having the welcome side effect of increasing the supply of alternative fuels. Unfortunately, alternative vehicle fuels are kind of like alternative energy in general – rapid percentage growth sounds impressive until you remember what a small base exists. While there are 685 filling stations in the U.S. offering “E85″ bioethanol, for example, this is a minute fraction of America’s 165,000 gas stations.

If you want to know where to buy bioethanol, or any alternative fuel, a good source for information is the U.S. Dept. of Energy, which has a table showing “alternative fueling station counts by state and by type.”

Eventually E85, which is a mixture of 85% gasoline and 15% ethanol – usually grown from corn – will be widely available. Right now, however, unless you live in certain locales in Illinois, Iowa, or Minnesota, you will only find this fuel in very select places.

Often E85 is cheaper than ordinary gasoline, and if you drive a flexfuel vehicle, it doesn’t matter if this fuel is only available here and there. You can fill your car with gasoline most of the time, and when you find a filling station offering E85, go ahead. GM’s Flexfuel technology will allow ethanol fuel blends to proliferate into areas where it makes economic sense to sell them, without the “chicken-egg” dilemna that has plagued adoption of more exotic alternative fuels.

In the not-too-distant future it is likely no particular vehicle design will dominate. Read “Greener Cars are Coming” for more about this. A recent report in St. Louis Today (no longer archived online) notes some utilitites are permitting homeowners to attach filling devices to their home gas supplies so they can fill the tanks in their natural gas powered vehicles at home! At home refueling is also developing with the advent of “plug-in” hybrids.

Look for far more diversity in automobile fuels and automobile power-trains, and expect more decentralization – all the way to each home – of places to refuel.

We’ve been skeptical about ultracapacitors. They are devices that could, theoretically, store electricity (expressed as kilowatts per kilogram) at ten or even twenty times the density that even the best batteries currently achieve.

Today, however, a blogger by the name of Michael Urlocker, of Northern Technology & Telecom Research, published on the superblog website AlwaysOn a post where he notes evidence that a startup funded by Kleiner Perkins could be on the verge of a breakthrough.

Here is his evidence, based on an obscure regulatory filing dated Jan 19 by Feel Good Cars Corp., which has an exclusive on the technology for small cars:

Regulatory filings (search for Feel Good Cars Filing statement of jan 19, 2006):

http://www.sedar.com/search/search_form_pc_en.htm

Or an easier place is to go here, where Urlocker has compiled summary charts and downloads of the regulatory filings and other resources:
www.ondisruption.typepad.com

Urlocker’s findings indicate a car using these ultracapacitors could do the following:

• 250-300 mile range
• Half the price of conventional lead-acid batteries
• One-tenth the volume, roughly one-tenth the weight
• Less than one-hour charge time on household current
• 3-6 min charge time from charging infrastructure

Up till now, the challenge to store electric power has been addressed, at least according to conventional “enlightened” wisdom, by throwing billions of dollars at fuel cells. The reality is even a lead-acid battery – taking economics into account alongside engineering – can store electricity more efficiently than hydrogen fuel cells.

A good lithium ion battery can now get up to 300 watt-hours per kilogram, much improved over the 100 watt-hours per kg that was used in Ford’s legendary EV-1 that could go over 100 miles on a charge and had a top speed of 180 MPH (no typo there). That car, with a 1,600 lb. battery pack, had limited applications, but it was an excellent vehicle for commuters, and they were cheap to produce.

A hydrogen fuel cell system (including hydrogen storage) can get perhaps 1,000 watt-hours per kilogram, enough theoretically to provide a viable range without the recharging headaches – but fuel cell membranes break, their catalysts degrade, and nobody’s figured out how to store the hydrogen. Moreover, they currently cost about $4,000 per kilowatt. By comparison, a standard internal combustion engine and gas tank can generate around 10,000 watt-hours per kilogram – something a functional ultracapacitor system might just approach.

The inevitability of 100% electricity powered cars is confirmed by the emergence not only of hybrids, but “strong” hybrids where the battery packs are augmented with extra batteries, and drivers use grid electricity to drive around instead of gasoline. And at $.10 per kilowatt-hour, that translates to around $.03 per mile! Is that disruptive?

If a breakthrough in ultra-capacitors is really going to happen, throw out the window any thoughts of a “hydrogen highway,” and prepare to see all electric cars dominate the roads using power directly from the grid. To learn more read The 100% Electric Car.