Hydrogen's Dirty Secret

Hydrogen's Dirty Secret

President Bush promises that fuel-cell cars will be free of pollution.
But if he has his way, the cars of tomorrow will run on hydrogen made
from fossil fuels.
By Barry C. Lynn
May/June 2003 Issue

Hydrogen's Dirty Secret

President Bush promises that fuel-cell cars will be free of pollution.
But if he has his way, the cars of tomorrow will run on hydrogen made
from fossil fuels.
By Barry C. Lynn
May/June 2003 Issue



When President Bush unveiled his plans for a hydrogen-powered car in
his State of the Union address in January, he proposed $1.2 billion in
spending to develop a revolutionary automobile that will be
"pollution-free." The new vehicle, he declared, will rely on "a simple
chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen" to power a car
"producing only water, not exhaust fumes." Within 20 years, the
president vowed, fuel-cell cars will "make our air significantly
cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of
oil."

By launching an ambitious program to develop what he calls the
"Freedom Car," Bush seemed determined to realize the kind of future
that hydrogen-car supporters have envisioned for years. Using existing
technology, hydrogen can be easily and cleanly extracted from water.
Electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines is used to
split the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atoms. The hydrogen
is then recombined with oxygen in fuel cells, where it releases
electrons that drive an electric motor in a car. What Bush didn't
reveal in his nationwide address, however, is that his administration
has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce
hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent -- and potentially as dirty
-- as the one that fuels today's SUVs. According to the
administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year
in concert with the energy industry, up to 90 percent of all hydrogen
will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels -- in a
process using energy generated by burning oil, coal, and natural gas.
The remaining 10 percent will be cracked from water using nuclear
energy.

Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the
benefits offered by hydrogen. Although the fuel-cell cars themselves
may emit nothing but water vapor, the process of producing the fuel
cells from hydrocarbons will continue America's dependence on fossil
fuels and leave behind carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global
warming.

Mike Nicklas, chair of the American Solar Energy Society, was one of
224 energy experts invited by the Department of Energy to develop the
government's Roadmap last spring. The sessions, environmentalists
quickly discovered, were dominated by representatives from the oil,
coal, and nuclear industries. "All the emphasis was on how the process
would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Nicklas, who sat
on a committee chaired by an executive from ChevronTexaco. "The whole
meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan
to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables." The
plan does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power
generated by the sun or the wind, concluding that such technologies
"need further development for hydrogen production to be more cost
competitive."

But instead of investing in developing those sources, the budget that
Bush submitted to Congress pays scant attention to renewable methods
of producing hydrogen. More than half of all hydrogen funding is
earmarked for automakers and the energy industry. Under the
president's plan, more than $22 million of hydrogen research for 2004
will be devoted to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, compared with
$17 million for renewable sources. Overall funding for renewable
research and energy conservation, meanwhile, will be slashed by more
than $86 million. "Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing
them with fossil and nuclear doesn't make for a sustainable approach,"
says Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union
of Concerned Scientists.

The oil and chemical industries already produce 9 million tons of
hydrogen each year, most of it from natural gas, and transport it
through hundreds of miles of pipelines to fuel the space shuttle and
to remove sulfur from petroleum refineries. The administration's plan
lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure -- guaranteeing that
oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen.
Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it
succinctly: "We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas
business."

To protect its fuel franchise, the energy industry has moved swiftly
in recent years to shape government policy toward hydrogen. In 1999,
oil companies and automakers began attending the meetings of an
obscure group called the National Hydrogen Association. Founded in
1989 by scientists from government labs and universities, the
association was a haven for many of the small companies -- fuel-cell
designers, electrolyzer makers -- that were dabbling in hydrogen
power. The group promoted the use of hydrogen but was careful not to
take any position on who would make the fuel or how.

All that changed once the energy industry got involved. "All of a
sudden Shell joined our board, and then the interest grew very
quickly," says Karen Miller, the association's vice president. "Our
chair last year was from BP; this year our chair is from
ChevronTexaco." The companies quickly began to use the association as
a platform to lobby for more federal funding for research, and to push
the government to emphasize fossil fuels in the national energy plan
for hydrogen. Along with the big automakers, energy companies also
formed a consortium called the International Hydrogen Infrastructure
Group to monitor federal officials charged with developing fuel cells.
"Basically," says Neil Rossmeissl, a hydrogen standards expert at the
Department of Energy, "what they do is look over our shoulder at doe
to make sure we are doing what they think is the right thing."

As hydrogen gained momentum, the oil companies rushed to buy up
interests in technology companies developing ways to refine and store
the new fuel. Texaco has invested $82 million in a firm called Energy
Conversion Devices, and Shell now owns half of Hydrogen Source. BP,
Chevron-Texaco, ExxonMobil, Ford, and General Electric have also
locked up the services of many of America's top energy scientists,
devoting more than $270 million to hydrogen research at MIT,
Princeton, and Stanford.

Such funding will help ensure that oil and gas producers continue to
profit even if automakers manage to put millions of fuel-cell cars on
the road. "The major energy companies have several hundred billions of
dollars, at the least, invested in their businesses, and there is a
real interest in keeping and utilizing that infrastructure in the
future," says Frank Ingriselli, former president of Texaco Technology
Ventures. "And these companies certainly have the balance sheets and
wherewithal to make it happen."

The stakes in the current battle over hydrogen are high. Devoting the
bulk of federal research funding to making hydrogen from fossil fuels
rather than water will enable oil and gas companies to provide
lower-priced hydrogen. That, in turn, means that pipelines built to
transport hydrogen will stretch to, say, a BP gas field in Canada,
rather than an independent wind farm in North Dakota. Even if the rest
of the world switches to hydrogen manufactured from water, says
Nicklas, "Americans may end up dependent on fossil fuels for
generations."

The administration's plans to manufacture hydrogen from fossil fuels
could also contribute to global warming by leaving behind carbon
dioxide. Oil and coal companies insist they will be able to
"sequester" the carbon permanently by pumping it deep into the ocean
or underground. But the doe calls such approaches "very high risk,"
and no one knows how much that would cost, how much other
environmental disruption that might cause, or whether that would
actually work. "Which path we take will have a huge effect one way or
the other on the total amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere
over the next century," says James MacKenzie, a physicist with the
World Resources Institute.

Even if industry manages to safely contain the carbon left behind, the
Bush administration's plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels will
wind up wasting energy. John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan
Automotive Lab, says a system that extracts hydrogen from oil and
natural gas and stores it in fuel cells would actually be no more
energy efficient than America's present gasoline- based system.

"If the hydrogen does not come from renewable sources," Heywood says,
"then it is simply not worth doing, environmentally or economically."

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