President Obama has been clawing at the government throughout his presidential run and now about the need for America to withdraw itself from foreign oil and find cleaner and safer energy sources to invest in. Even in his speech to the joint session of Congress he stressed that the country which harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will “lead the 21st century.” However, the more he talks about his plans for converting the United States into a Green Zone, the further away the country seems to be from this goal. 

Presidents as far back as Jimmy Carter have been pushing the idea of a thriving clean energy economy, and still we continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate. The Department of Energy projects the nation’s consumption of fossil fuels will continue to rise ­— increasing at least 34 percent by 2030. So where will America’s sanctuary come from? Currently, all the chips are falling into hydrogen and hydrogen-based technology. But what is the government doing to accomplish this goal?

The top priority in Washington lately has been creating jobs for the millions of Americans who are unemployed, and giving our economy a jumpstart before it hemorrhages any more money. According to the “Obama/Biden: New Energy for America” plan, the administration wants to create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. Although $787 billion has just been signed over to accomplish the same effects, it appears that Washington has other things on its agenda.

At the moment, the stimulus bill will be mostly used to avert fiscal catastrophe. A third of it goes towards tax cuts. Billions will go into a new stabilization fund for states, most of which must be spent on education, and billions more are aimed at states’ skyrocketing Medicaid costs to free up money that may be useful elsewhere. In general terms, the stimulus is a band-aid for an economy that has a massive lesion. While Obama did repeat his pledge that the United States would invest $15 billion annually to develop technologies such as wind and solar power, next-wave biofuels, “clean coal,” and more efficient cars, the only thing he has pushed for is legislation that would place a market-based cap on carbon pollution. Not the Gung-ho approach we expected.

So why didn’t Obama just  divert a little stimulus money towards building more hydrogen filling stations across the country to promote a steady conversion? The truth is, America is still a long way away from going green in transportation, mostly due to four hurdles concerning hydrogen technology: how to produce it, how to store it, how to distribute it, and how to get people to use it. It all comes down to the classic chicken-and-egg problem — how do you get millions of Americans to buy hydrogen-powered vehicles before there’s an infrastructure in place to refuel them, and how do you get energy companies to build that infrastructure before there’s a potential customer base?

Hydrogen is currently produced by two ways, the electrolysis of water, which splits the molecules to create pure hydrogen and carbon, and through reforming fossil fuels using a fuel processor, which splits the hydrocarbons releasing pure hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Since the idea is to avoid fossil fuels and our dependency on them, the best idea would be to use the electrolysis method.The only problem here is the fact that 70 percent of the nation’s electrical power comes from burning fossil fuels. If continued on this path, the air might clean up a bit, but nothing will be solving the greenhouse gas problem (because carbon will still be going into the atmosphere). Using dirty energy to make clean energy just moves the problem around.

At present, 95 percent of America’s hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which still releases CO2 emissions. The only three renewable energy sources that would stop CO2 emissions are nuclear, solar, and wind. Former President Bush’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, which called for replacing fossil fuels used in passenger cars by 2040, estimated that America would have to produce 150 million tons of hydrogen annually in order to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels. In order to build on one of these resources, Americans will have to pay dearly.

When you add together the price of the raw materials required and the infrastructure in order to expand these resources, the total far exceeds any stimulus package you could imagine. To produce 150 million tons annually from nuclear energy, a series of 600-megawatt next-generation nuclear power plants would need to be built at a cost of about $840 billion. If wind technology were chosen, one million 2-megawatt wind turbines covering 5 percent of 120 million acres (an area larger than California) would need to be built for about $3 trillion. And for solar energy, 113 million 40-kilowatt systems covering 50 percent of more than 300 million acres (an area three times the size of Nevada) would need to be built at an unbelievable $22 trillion. Unfortunately, this is just the first step.

Before the idea of building more hydrogen filling stations is underway, better methods of storage need to be examined because storing hydrogen is still considered tricky. At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen’s density is so low that it contains less 1/300th the energy in an equivalent volume of gasoline. In order to fit hydrogen into a reasonably sized storage tank, it has to be somehow squeezed into a denser form. NASA has proven through experiments with the space shuttle that hydrogen chilled to near absolute zero (which turns the gas into a liquid) contains one-fourth the energy in an equivalent volume of gasoline. The problem here is that the process requires a lot of energy and the storage tanks used are bulky, heavy and expensive.

Currently, Chrysler is testing hydrogen’s solid form, sodium borohydride, a chemical created from borax that is a common ingredient in some detergents, to solve the storage issue. The main barrier here might be the technological sorting-out process. Hydrogen stations will not develop quickly until there is a storage technology that dominates the marketplace. If history is any guide to this kind of process, than this sort of standardization is unlikely to rapidly happen. And there is also the question of how hydrogen will be distributed.

Currently, most hydrogen is transported either in liquid form by tankers or as compressed gas in cylinders by trailers, which is inefficient. Trucking compressed hydrogen a distance of 150 miles burns diesel equivalent to 11 percent of the energy the hydrogen stores, and requires a lot of round trips. According to a study done by Popular Mechanics, a 44-ton vehicle that can carry enough gasoline to refuel 800 cars could only carry enough hydrogen to fuel 80 vehicles.

The cheapest way to deliver high volumes of hydrogen appears to be through the use of pipelines. About 700 miles of hydrogen pipelines now operate in the States, generally near large users such as oil refineries. However, even in portable form, hydrogen is a tough substance to move from place to place because it can embrittle steel and other metals that can weaken them to the point of fracture. Treating pipelines to protect them from these effects is expensive at about $1 million per mile. Even still, the hydrogen flowing through these pipelines comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

Scientists are currently working on ways to create local and on-board production of hydrogen. In 2003, Honda designed a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station, which has been operating at the company’s California lab since 2001, and Daimler Chrysler’s NECAR 3 has been trying to develop a methanol based automobile that will produce hydrogen right in the car itself. Researchers are also experimenting with more futuristic technologies that would combine ordinary water with reagents like boron or aluminum to produce hydrogen, oxygen and a metal oxide residue. These ideas however are still a long ways off from becoming reality.

When all of these facts are brought into the spotlight, the idea of a pure hydrogen economy seems further away from America’s grasp. Even if President Obama had used a majority of the recent stimulus package for promoting a hydrogen economy, the fact remains that the whole concept is still on the drawing board. But instead we have the AIG bonus fiasco and billions in other bailouts. The one man with the power and pulpit to lead us from our dependence on fossil fuelsis instead making plans to weatherize homes and existing infrastructures.

So has Obama blown it? The Obama/Biden: New Energy for America plan calls for mandating that 10 percent of electricity come from renewable sources by 2012. If the country is to convert to hydrogen, it is going to take a lot juice more than that. There's still time, but unless Obama focuses the cause, he is just going to be another president who did nothing.

 The Hydrogen Economy Wheel

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Whatever happened to the 'hydrogen highway' Schwarzenegger promised California?

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