The Hydrogen Future

By Antonio C. Abaya
Written on June 11, 2008
For the Standard Today,
June 12 issue

According to a recent story from Agence France Presse (AFP), published in the June 04 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, some 3,000 households in Japan, including the official residence of the Prime Minister, are now equipped with hydrogen fuel cells – the size of a cupboard, according to AFP - to light, heat and energize the homes.

Ever since I was invited to a demonstration and briefing on fuel cells in 1995, at the Hyatt Jamboree Hotel in Irvine, southern California – by the company that supplies NASA with fuel cells for its space ships - I have been the number one advocate of hydrogen fuel cells in this country. I wrote then, as I write now, that hydrogen is the fuel of the future. And the future is now. (See my article Hydrogen Economy, Dec. 26, 2004).

In an operating fuel cell, oxygen from the air and hydrogen (from natural gas or from water) are combined in an acidic solution to produce electricity. There is no noise, virtually no pollution, and the exhaust is nothing more noxious than water vapor.

If the hydrogen is extracted (by electrolysis) from water, as I have also been advocating, there is no pollution at all.

In the Hyatt Jamboree Hotel, the fuel cell is less than half the size of a tennis court, and its exhaust of water vapor is condensed as hot water, which is used by the hotel's laundry.

In 1995, the price of oil was probably around $20 a barrel. The per kilowatt price of power generated by fuel cells then was about ten times that of power generated by coal or diesel fuel.

But with the price of oil now at $134 a barrel and climbing, the price differential is becoming minimal, especially if one were to factor in the medical and hospitalization expenses incurred by millions of people from the pollution, plus the damage to the environment in the way of more extreme floods, droughts and desertification blamed on global warming .

In 2002, the government of Iceland was the first in the world to declare an official policy to move away from a carbon to a hydrogen economy. Iceland is lucky because it has substantial geothermal resources that it uses to energize the homes and commercial and industrial enterprises of its 300,000 people. But it needs and is using hydrogen fuel cells to power its fleet of buses, lorries and automobiles, as well as its vital fishing industry. (See my article Learn from Iceland, Aug. 14, 2005)

Since then, the governments of Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Costa Rica have declared an official policy of achieving a "carbon-neutral" economy. By this, I surmise, these countries scrutinize their carbon-energy usages and balance those with non-carbon initiatives, until they reach a level of equilibrium between the two energy sources. And to achieve that, they have to increase the use of non-carbon energy alternatives such as hydro-electric, geothermal, wind, solar and hydrogen fuel cells.

Again, it can be said that Norway, Sweden and New Zealand have vast hydro-electric resources - New Zealand also has substantial geothermal assets - so it is relatively easy for them to reduce dependency on carbon fuels.

But Israel – which has no oil, and very meager hydro resources – announced about two weeks ago that it was building a network of hydrogen service stations around the country. This is obviously in preparation for the coming of automobiles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, and the logical assumption is that few people will buy hydrogen cars if there are no hydrogen service stations where they can conveniently re-fuel their vehicles.

As far as I know, three major automakers – Honda of Japan, and BMW and Daimler of Germany – have announced that they will start mass-producing hydrogen fuel-cell-powered cars in the next three years. Can the other automakers be far behind? (See my article High on Hydrogen, Jan. 23, 2007)

(Whenever I wrote an article on hydrogen, a Filipino reader would always douse my enthusiasm, saying that hydrogen was only what he called a "storage medium" and can never be a primary source of energy. And I would always argue back that hydrogen was the most abundant element in the universe and was the mother of all energies.

(It is the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms that is the source of the heat and light of the Sun and other stars. It is, in turn, the heat and radiation of the Sun that creates the solar and wind energies that we know. The Sun also evaporates sea water into the atmosphere which comes down as rain and turns the turbines of hydro-electric power plants. The oil and gas that we extract are residues of plant life that existed hundreds of million years ago, thanks to the photosynthesis provided by the Sun. What can be more primary than that? But he never accepted my argument. Nor I his.)

By far the most ambitious hydrogen project that I am aware of is Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This city, intended for 75,000 residents, is taking shape in the desert, designed by a British architect, and the most notable thing about it is that it will be totally energized by hydrogen, despite the fact that it sits on a sea of oil and gas.

All its residences and office towers will be energized by hydrogen fuel cells. All its industries will be powered by hydrogen fuel-cells. All its motor vehicles will run on hydrogen fuel cells. It will truly be the City of the Future, and the fact that it will be turning its back, almost, on its own abundant natural resource makes it doubly significant. (More about Masdar City in a future article.)

I say 'almost' because it will use its vast reserves of natural gas to supply the hydrogen that it will feed into its fuel cells. So there will still be some pollution, but it will be only a fraction of the pollution that is generated when burning carbonl fuels directly.

(Natural gas is mainly methane, butane and propane, which are hydrocarbons rich in hydrogen. The methane molecule, for example, has one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; propane, three atoms of carbon and eight atoms of hydrogen; butane, four atoms of carbon and 10 atoms of hydrogen.. To extract the hydrogen, it is necessary to tie down the carbon with oxygen, hence the inevitable by-product of carbon dioxide.)

Countries with very little or no gas deposits can still use hydrogen fuel cells. The hydrogen can be extracted from water – rainwater, tap water, river water – by electrolysis, using either solar energy or wind energy to electrolyze the water, meaning to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, which is one the first experiments that we perform in high school Science class.

I am in touch with two entrepreneurs in the US - one in New Jersey, the other in Washington state – who do precisely that. One uses wind energy, the other uses solar energy, to extract hydrogen from water through electrolysis. They then feed the hydrogen into their fuel cells, which energize their entire houses, including the air-conditioners during summer, as well as their motor vehicles. These are really the houses of the future, just as Masdar City will be the City of the Future.

In the Hydrogen Future, there will be no big power plants anywhere, connected to millions of users by miles and miles of transmission lines. Instead, there will be thousands of stand-alone hydrogen fuel cells generating power for neighborhoods, communities, residential condos, office condos, industrial complexes, university campuses, government offices, military camps, shopping malls, hospitals, hotels, etc.. In 1995, fuel cells had a maximum capacity of 250 kw, stackable up to one mw. In the Hydrogen Future, there will be little or no use for TransCo.

What about the Philippines? In 1995, after I wrote my first articles on hydrogen fuel cells (in my column in the Philippine Star), I received an unsolicited letter from the Department of Energy informing me that the DoE was forming an eight-man group to visit manufacturers of fuel cells. But that was the last I heard of it. I do not know if that group ever took off or, if they did, what their recommendations were to President Ramos.

I doubt if President Estrada or President Arroyo, or their bureaucrats, were/are even aware of fuel cells and what they mean for the future. In the recently concluded Energy Summit, not a word seems to have been spoken about hydrogen fuel cells.

It is our continuing misfortune that the leaders whom we elect, and the bureaucrats whom they appoint, cannot see the future beyond the next elections. *****