Let's just put it simple. Hydrogen takes 3 times as much energy to make as fuel for the car than any other source. If GM wanted to reduce our dependence on oil,imediately, how about offering cars like the Zafira here in the USA. I drove one through Europe and got 35 MPG. It was a desiel stick shift. I went and looked at a Mazda 5, the closest car in size and function and it gets 17/23 MPG. Zafira is a mini- mini van, sits up to seven. As for being desiel, it is a low emissions vehicule that conforms to Europe's rigid standards.

Another thing is GM could have continued their electric line of cars. No... GM continues to bait us with promisses of a fuel that is at least 20 years away and sells us American's gas guzzlers.

Let's get real.

I enjoyed reading your article Mr David, even though, after reading the comments posted by others your information doesn't seem to be quite correct. I am just a high-school student and don't know a whole lot about fuel-cell technology, fossil fuels or the production of either, but I do know that it's people like you Mr David who have a vision for our society. Yes, the by-products and what have you may be twice the amount of what gasoline produces or however much it is (as I stated before, not a real specialist on this subject!), but at least we have a backup plan for the future. This fuel-cell technology may be our last resort once other energy sources run out.

What is going to happen when we run out of oil? Because we all know that it's going to happen.

I guess what I'm getting at is, so the idea of hydrogen fuel-cell technology isn't the brightest idea ever, but at least it's a start. Being 16 years old I don't know much about the world, but I do realise that something needs to be done to protect our future. So hydrogen fuel-cell technology is a bad idea, but at least it is an idea. I mean, just think back to when the first automobile was invented! It needed tweaking but the idea was pushed and we now have cars! wow!

You guys are the ones thinking about safe, cheap and easy alternatives for fuel, but my generation and every generation after will be the ones who have to live with whatever decision you decide is best for us.

Carry on with the good work fellas! I have confidence that someone will come up with a good idea sooner or later...Good luck

Thanks for the article on fuel cell cars. I have a particular interest in all things fuel cell since I am working with a start-up to put fuel cells in the marine environment. The one thing that bothered me about the article is that, even though you mention “well-to-wheel”, you make a statement about cars that don’t emit greenhouse gases without mentioning that (with THIS administration) the hydrogen will likely be made from petroleum lquid or gas, and greenhouse gases will be released. After all efficiencies are considered, the total greenhouse gases should be lower than for ICE, but not zero.

The title of this editorial, "Breaking the Fossil-Fuel Addiction: GM Readies Fuel Cells For The Masses," continues the mis-education of the public regarding hydrogen and fuel cells. Where does that hydrogen come from? Guess what: fossil fuels. The dominant industrial process for hydrogen production is steam-reformed natural gas. Given the reckless use of natural gas for baseload power generation generation, we now have record-high natural gas prices. Unless you are using nuclear (or hydro) for electricity generation, even electrolysis will be tying you back to a fossil fuel source. In California, having black-outs and paying between between 11-20 cents/KWhr is not leading in my view.

You don't say where the hydrogen will come from? Where is the non-polluting, non carbon producing hydrogen source? Nuclear? Many don't like that. Wind, Solar Cell? Renewable but can these produce enough to be really useful? Straight to the grid seems better, saving the conversion loss in electric to hydrogen, then hydrogen back to electricity.

Again where is the large scale hydrogen source, or is this just another feel good but essentially useless project?

Dear Mr. David:

I just got around to reading your 3/30/06 subject article. For a technical publication, I suggest editorials ought to have a more factual, technical angle than political.

While President Bush did say the USA is addicted to oil, a more accurate analysis reveals the USA is addicted to energy ? more specifically, economical energy. Energy density ? the driving factor in most power systems, especially for those who work embedded systems with batteries and ultracapacitors ? also applies to sourcing automotive fuels. Consider: On distance per tankful, who would want to have a hydrogen car that can at most go only 180 miles versus a gasoline or hybrid-electric car that can go 400 or more miles?

Grade school chemistry teaches us hydrocarbons will always have much more hydrogen per molecule than water. Methane alone has twice as much, yet the hydrogen concentration increases as the crude oil is refined ? ethane, propane, pentane, hexane, septane, octane, etc. Only the refining process would differ by adding another step to strip these carbon chains of their hydrogen.

The resulting carbon still has its uses. It can be burned in coal-fired power plants. It can be used in developing ultra-strong, carbon composite building materials (think: lighter frames for all those automobiles = increased mileage), certain electronics, etc. The whole process has the potential advantage of less waste. Yet even these processes still require energy, economic incentive and infrastructure to drive them, regardless of the source. If one wants to forego chemical reactions, that leaves solar, wind, tidal harnesses and nuclear power.

The bottom line: Energy-hungry nations will never lose their appetite for oil. Even for extracting hydrogen, oil remains the most economical source with infrastructure already humming ? and more oil is needed to bring energy supplies more in line with demand. Yet oil is not necessarily a fossil fuel anymore considering thermal depolymerization (TDP) of an organic biomass will quickly yield something approaching what the oil industry calls "light sweet crude" (Source: www.discover.com, title "Anything to Oil"). Further, modern oil drilling and extraction methods are cleaner than most media editors like to believe ? so much so that wildlife congregates near Alaska's oil infrastructure and shrimp grow abundantly around the Gulf of Mexico's offshore oil rigs. So please ? stop parroting the mass media myth that oil per se is inherently dirty or environmentally hostile when you know such conditions depend heavily on handling and usage. (FYI: My brother-in-law works in oil exploration for Exxon-Mobil. He holds a Ph.D in engineering from MIT.)

A second bottom line challenging automotive engineers globally: When are these people going to make hybrid-electric and other alternative fuel vehicles affordable ? purchase price AND maintenance? As much as I like the new technology, my family can't abide the luxury price sticker shock versus the comparable internal combustion model costing thousands less, but still $20K and up. Neither is my idea of a true "economy model." And with gasoline climbing above $3 per gallon as I write, rising every year, I can see many an SUV being traded in real soon.

Mr. David,

Your 3/30/06 ED editorial was interesting, but is focusing on the wrong technology. I suggest you Google "Mark Holtzapple", a Texas A&M Professor of Chemical Engineering. He has developed the MixAlco (mixed alcohol) process that converts biomass to primarily isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol. Unlike hydrogen or ethanol, isopropyl alcohol is fairly similar to gasoline in terms of vapor pressure and energy density, so it can replace gasoline and diesel fuels with relatively little modification to the existing infrastructure. In contrast, a hydrogen infrastructure would have to be all new, and all its fundamental problems (e.g. generation, distribution, storage) lack good solutions.

Dr. Holtzapple and colleagues has been developing the mixed alcohol technology for the last 15 years, and have an experimental plant running. His detailed calculations show that by using existing biowaste or a reasonable amount of land area growing sweet sorghum or energy cane (switch grass is a loser, no better than corn), he can meet US liquid fuel needs at prices cheaper than gasoline. In contrast to high-priced corn-to-ethanol farmer welfare programs with a 1.3x net energy gain, his process has a 15x energy gain.

Of course a biomass to alcohol process does not involve any electrical or computer engineering. But sometimes ECE isn't the solution to a problem.

Just remember to be careful when you "taste freedom from fossil fuels", It may be tasting like crow. The majority of hydrogen in this country is made from natural gas. If it is made with the electrolysis process, which by the way is more expensive, you have a 75% chance it was made with fossil fuels also. Neither way would reduce our carbon footprint, of greenhouse emissions. The Japanese are way ahead of the U.S., they are developing High Temperature Gas Nuclear reactors, which can chemically extract the hydrogen right from water ! (which the U.S. stopped all work on in the 1980's) Now that tastes more like freedom ! Thanks for your current update on fuel cells.

Alex

Gosh Mark, dandy article March 30, 2006 in Electronic Design on the GM fuel cells and hydrogen and all, but you're going hate yourself in the morning when you find out the truth. Hydrogen for fuel isn't going to save any energy at all. In fact, it's going to increase fossil fuel consumption, and pollution.

I'm going to summarize an excellent reference on this subject from California's own Donald Anthrop of San Jose State Univ:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp90.pdf

Here's the trouble. First, there aren't any pools of hydrogen laying around that we can just collect. Hydrogen loves everything and everything loves hydrogen. It's all in a happy marriage with some other atom or molecule. So in order to get the hydrogen, it has to be "divorced" from something it doesn't want to leave. That takes energy. If you split water using electrolysis with a coal fired powerplant and compress the hydrogen to 4000 psi, it takes 140.8 kW-hrs to produce 17.4 kW-hrs from a hydrogen fuel cell. That's an efficiency of 12%. As you pointed out in your article, GM is compressing to 10,000 psi, which reduces efficiency even further. And if you think you might want to liquefy the hydrogen to get even more fuel density, that gobbles up more than 40% of hydrogen's energy content. Is a picture emerging yet? By Anthrop's calculations, converting all of the 2.526 billion miles driven in the U.S. in 2000 to fuel cell power, you'll need 32 quads of coal, about twice the energy consumed in gasoline in 2000. Using hydrogen from coal instead of gasoline would produce a 2.7-fold increase in carbon emissions This is obviously disastrous.

Of course, you can creatively think of other ways to get the energy to "make" hydrogen, but everything you can come up with ends up consuming more energy than we now consume. That's because hydrogen is not an energy source, it's an energy storage medium. All you can do with it is store energy from some other energy resource, and the energy conversion is never 100% efficient. And I know you mentioned the "efficiency gain" in your article, an apparent reference to the much higher efficiency of electric motors vs. internal combustion. But it's never enough to make up for lost power in converting energy to hydrogen fuel. Virtually all of the hydrogen produced today comes from natural gas in a process called steam reforming, which is only about 30% efficient. That's much less than if you just burned the natural gas as fuel in a powerplant.

Why is hydrogen getting so much attention? It's political. That's why President Bush likes it, that's why GM likes it, that's why California government likes it. That's probably why you like it. It sounds so wonderful to be able to drive a car that has no visible pollution. It sort of removes the driver from the energy and pollution "crime", so that it happens somewhere else where nobody sees it. But the excessive energy usage and pollution resulting from making the hydrogen still happens. Saying it's pollutionless doesn't make it so. A lot of people think that, if you just wish hard enough, if everyone would just want it bad enough, we could just make it happen. But the laws of physics don't care about wishes. Appearance. That's what the hydrogen energy movement boils down to. Hydrogen offers you the ability to appear morally and socially responsible while you go about your business. And there's lots of popular activist rhetoric to protect you from criticism on anything related to hydrogen. It's ironic, though, that I might actually be doing a better job of "saving the planet" by driving my gasoline powered Honda. On the show circuit that's a tough sell, because everyone wishes there really was something like the popular concept hydrogen represents. It doesn't matter if it really works, what matters is if you THINK it really works. As Billy Crystal said, it's better to look good than to feel good, my friend.

And the California government you gave kudos to: they sure do put on a good show, don't they!

But hey, it's just more work for us electricals, right? We can get paid to design and build more electrical circuits AND enjoy the rewards of being socially and politically correct (which we don't often get). With enough emotional momentum in our population, and their insatiable need to find a socially significant cause with which to associate themselves, we could be in business for quite some time. The idea that hydrogen saves energy or reduces pollution is a ruse, but it might be something we just want to afford for ourselves because we like it. Kind of like buying a Hummer. It's just something you want because you think it's cool.

Oh yes, almost forgot. There is one thing that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen with great efficiency. It's called the leaf. That's right, plants do it. They take in carbon dioxide from the air plus water and nutrients from the ground, driven by solar emissions, split off the hydrogen for use in making hydrocarbons, and throw away the oxygen as waste. Biologists apparently don't understand the process well enough to duplicate it synthetically. When we learn how to do what leaves do, then we'll have a primary energy resource from hydrogen.

As Jeremy Willden comments, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is more like a battery. You have to extract energy from somewhere else to store it as hydrogen. But hydrogen is not a nice battery. It is safer than gasoline and has more energy per kilogram than gasoline. Problem is, a kilogram of hydrogen at one atmosphere is about the volume of a medium room. It is not an easy gas to compress (needing more energy) and it readily leaks.

Since the energy is not sourced from the hydrogen, I suspect we will find much better energy storage methods than hydrogen.

Mark, As with almost all articles on the transition to a "Hydrogen Economy," you fail to mention the necessity to produce the hydrogen fuel. The energy has to come from somewhere, and that is either Nuclear or Fossil fuels, unless we plan to cover the country with solar and wind farms. (Keep in mind that solar and wind plants have their own problems -- the toxic by-products of manufacturing them, like anything else, or the birds that fly into wind turbines.) It's deceptive to claim that any hydrogen powered device creates emissions of "only water," heat, and electricity, because the hydrogen fuel had to be produced by something -- and that something produced waste by-products.

Don't misunderstand my comments, however, I am not against Hydrogen technology, in fact I'm all for it. We just better start building Nuclear power plants and find better ways to store (and reduce) the toxic by-products, or our "Fossil-Fuel Addiction" will never end. In the short term we should also use the oil resources we have rather than depend on other countries for them. I hope to enjoy the opportunity to drive a Hydrogen vehicle myself someday soon.

Jeremy Willden Senior Engineer MaxStream, Inc.