|
|
NOWMASS, Colo.-- President Bush's State of the Union address called for appropriating $1.2 billion over the next five years to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cells to power cars, trucks, homes, and businesses. Combined with the administration's FreedomCAR Initiative proposed last year, this amounts to $1.7 billion in federal money for emerging fuel-cell technologies.
Done right, this is a good idea. Hydrogen fuel cells are a safe, clean, and economically promising way to maintain our mobile lifestyle, slow climate change, cut the public-health costs of air pollution, cope with the ultimate depletion of petroleum, and achieve the security of energy independence.
Hydrogen vehicles are driven by electric motors powered by a fuel cell, a sort of battery that chemically combines hydrogen and oxygen atoms to make electricity, pure hot water, and nothing else.
In 2001, the Federal Highway Administration says 138 million cars were driven 1.6 trillion miles and 84 million light trucks and SUVs were driven 0.9 trillion miles. The average personal vehicle releases about one pound of carbon dioxide per mile. Vehicles emit about one-fifth of total U.S. carbon dioxide--believed to be the main contributor to climate change--and much unhealthful air pollution.
In 2001, Americans also paid $95 billion to import oil for our 97 percent oil-fueled transportation system, plus about $50 billion in taxes for the peacetime readiness costs of military forces earmarked to intervene in the Persian Gulf.
The best immediate response is the hybrid-electric cars already on the market. These and other conventional technologies can save half our vehicular fuel at a profit. We'll then save the other half with a hydrogen transition that can work even better and cost less.
It's not a pipe dream: The needed technology for safely making, storing, and using hydrogen already exists. Uncompromised, cost-competitive hydrogen cars have been designed (see hypercar.com). But we can't deploy them without widely available hydrogen refueling infrastructure, which we can't finance without lots of customers for hydrogen.
The Rocky Mountain Institute published in 1999 a five-step market-based solution to this chicken-and-egg problem (rmi.org/images/other/HC-StrategyHCTrans.pdf).
First, stationary fuel cells power, heat, and cool certain buildings, using hydrogen extracted from natural gas (a more efficient way to use the gas).
Second, fuel-cell cars are leased to drivers who work in or near those buildings. When parked, those cars "plug in" as power-plants-on-wheels, fueled by the building's surplus hydrogen and selling back to the utility grid enough electricity to repay most of the cars' cost while profitably displacing coal and nuclear plants.
Third, as more natural-gas-to-hydrogen conversion equipment is made, it gets cheaper, so filling stations install it. Fourth, wind- and solar-generated electricity starts to compete to make even cheaper hydrogen for the growing market.
Finally, further competition can support making hydrogen centrally and pipelining it from other climate-safe sources, such as converting natural gas at the wellhead and profitably storing the carbon dioxide underground.
Such a hydrogen transition can be profitable at each step, especially for companies and countries that start early.
A second, more interventionist path to hydrogen has also been proposed. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, former Shell planner Peter Schwartz, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman have all called for a major government effort to cut U.S. oil dependence by promoting hydrogen and renewable energy with an urgency similar to World War II atomic-bomb development.
Of course, $1.2 billion isn't enough for such a massive but essential change, especially in the trillion-dollar auto industry, which often spends more than $1.2 billion for a single new model. But the hydrogen transition need not cost $100-plus billion, as often assumed. Most automakers have already pumped billions of their own dollars into hydrogen fuel-cell cars.
Honda and Toyota are already test-leasing them, and at least six other automakers plan to do so by 2005. Making fuel-cell cars cost-competitive requires both making many copies and designing them better. Hypercar, Inc. has shown how making cars much lighter, but at least equally safe and comfortable--as in a 99-mpg midsize SUV--can make the fuel cells two-thirds smaller, so they'll become affordable many years sooner.
Moreover, natural-gas-to-hydrogen fueling infrastructure needs about $600 less investment per car than sustaining today's gasoline fueling infrastructure (see h2gen.com), saving about $1 trillion of global investment in the next 40 years. And the amount of hydrogen needed to displace the world's gasoline is only about 1.5 times the world's current industrial hydrogen production--much of it now used to make gasoline.
A dozen years ago, the United States spent $61 billion to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Allies repaid all but $6 billion, equivalent to what a one-dollar-per-barrel price hike costs us in less than a year. But for less than $6 billion, we could have bought enough energy efficiency to save more oil than the United States imports from the Persian Gulf.
Similarly today, for far less than, say, the estimated cost of stabilizing the Middle East, the United States could switch road vehicles to hydrogen fuel that cleans the air, can protect the climate, relies on inexhaustible domestic resources, and makes oil forever irrelevant to American mobility.
AMORY B. LOVINS is CEO and JEREMY HEIMAN is editor-writer at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research and consulting organization.