My quick take (about to take visitor from Los Angeles, responsible for getting the Expo Light Rail Line built, out about our disaster zone and then feed them).

Best Hopes,

Alan

matt

IMO, the best tactic for Scotland is to harvest the energy from its surrounding seas and restless winds.  

On the face of it, fuel cells make sense for specialized applications -- not for personal, general transportation.

That and 5 groats should get you a cup of coffee but I don't think it will give Scotland 40% of its energy coming from renewable sources by 2020.

The Coinage of James V 1513 - 1539
1 Groat  =  18 pence (at the time)

A silver groat of James V

During this reign groats were valued at 18 pence due to inflation and debasement. A lifelike portrait appears on one side of the coins; the other has the lion rampant and a shield. By this reign all Scottish coins were struck at Edinburgh, although a mint mark was still added to the coins.

Also, the Bawbee was introduced by James V in 1538. But that's off the subject, I think.

Hope this helps!

As an aside, it bothers me that little thought is given as to whether a replacement technology such as H2 will actually be of use in a resource limited world.  The assumption always seems to be that the consumer/growth society will continue in perpetuity which is unlikely.

This paper compares the manufacturing and refueling costs of a Fuel-Cell Vehicle (FCV)and a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) using an automobile model reflecting the largestsegment of light-duty vehicles. We use results from widely-cited government studies to compare the manufacturing and refueling costs of a BEV and a FCV capable of delivering 135 horsepower and driving approximately 300 miles. Our results show that a BEV performs far more favorably in terms of cost, energy efficiency, weight, and volume. The differences are particularly dramatic when we assume that energy is derived from renewable resources.

From:

http://www.metricmind.com/data/bevs_vs_fcvs.pdf

As was pointed out by Hugh Sharman in an article discussed earlier on TOD titled [why wind power works for Denmark www.thomastelford.com/journals/DocumentLibrary/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf ]    Denmark generates by wind power the equivalent of 24% of its domestic consumption. However it gets over the problem of how to balance the enormous intermitancy by exporting nearly all of the electricity to Norway and Sweden using interconnectors to those countries built before the expansion of Denmark's wind energy program to export Norway's and Sweden's large surplus of hydropower to Germany.  Hydro power is ideally suited for this as it can be rapidly turned up and down to even out the power. The Hydro capacity of Norway is 27GW and Sweden 8GW many times the Danish wind powered capacity.

Scotland with an annual electricity consumption of 34.7TWhr is just 11% of England at 311TWhr. If Scotland intends to meet 40% of its consumption by 2010 the vast bulk of this will be wind power. There is little opportunity for more hydro. Photovoltaic is presently several times more expensive and likely to be somewhat more expensive for the next 10 years and Scotland recieves only about 800kWhr/m² on an ideal south facing slope rather than 1200kWhr/m² All other sources are. I suspect there is no great Scotish agricultural surplus for pure biomass fired generation, Wate and tide are still indevelopment stage and not likely to be available in multi gigawatt capacity bt 2020.

If the favorable wind patterns of Scotland allow a 30% load factor 40% of Scotlands 34.7TWhr could be supplied by wind turbines of combined ratings of 5.3GW and indeed 6.8GW of wind capacity is planned for Scotland.

However Scotland's average consumption of 4GW probably means  a peak of 6GW and a minimum of a 2GW if the spread is similar to the UK as a whole.

The output of a wind turbine is very sensitive to wind speed.Most large wind turbines give about 5% of  their rated power at wind speeds of 5m/s and 95% of their power at 12m/s. It is thus not unusual for the output of the wind generation of a wide area such a Scotland to be over 80% of maximum or under 5%. Sharman's figures in the article referenced above for the West Danmark grid in 2003 is that there were three occasions when he output was over 83% of maximum and dozens over 75% and 45 days when it supplied less than 1% of demand and one occasion when the power used to keep the turbines head into the wind exceeded their generation and they became net consumers.

Thus wind generation that averaged over the year meets 40% of Scotland's consumption, could many times  a year be suppling 200% of consumption when this was at a minimum and many times be suppling almost none. This would be a nightmare to balance if Scotland was isolated and with no more storage than the existing 500MW pumped storage it would be only a minor problem if the grid connections to England are strengthened as is planned.

Even at peak the output would be only about 20% of minimum  UK consuption. A study by UKERC shows that up to 20% of UK electricity by wind power the extra standby generating capacity over and above the standby capacity needed to deal with uncertainties  in demand and conventional generation is only about 5-10% of the wind capacity. In other words 5.3GW of Scotish wind power exported to England would require 265 to 530MW of extra conventional plant to balance it.

I suspect Nichol Stephan was thinking of a much more Scottish based means of getting to the figure of 40% but I suspect the economics will mean the adoption of the Danish scheme, export the variability to a much larger nieghbour and let them smooth it out.

If hydrogen is used for large scale energy storage in the short to medium term it will likely be in the form of electrolysis followed by burning in relatively conventional combined cycle gas turbines. Steam electroysis by the "Hot Elly" process is 95% efficient and the best gas turbine plant runs at better than 65% efficiency. Allowing  a bit for losses n storage and auxillary equipmenr this should give a 58% round trip efficiency. Not only does this match the best fuel cell figures but it is availlable now in GW sizes at reasonable prices. The biggest fuel cells comercialy available are 200 kilowatt and very expensive per kilowatt (Wiki quotes a figure of $1000/kW in 2002). They may well improve in time but 14 years is a short time to scalle things up by an order of magnetude get the price down by a factor of several and get it all tested in production and installed in Scotland.

I had intended to write an article for TOD of the effect on the whole of the UK about going beyond the Governments 20% renewables target where we have no much larger nieghbour to export to. Then storage does  become a problem.

The energy-literate scoff at perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion, but what about the hydrogen economy? Before we invest trillions of dollars, let's take a hydrogen car out for a spin. You will discover that hydrogen is the least likely of all the alternative energies to solve our transportation problems. Hydrogen uses more energy than you get out of it. The only winners in the hydrogen scam are large auto companies receiving billions of dollars via the FreedomCAR Initiative to build hydrogen vehicles. And most importantly, the real problem that needs to be solved is how to build hydrogen trucks, so we can plant, harvest, and deliver food and other goods.

Making it

Hydrogen isn't an energy source - it's an energy carrier, like a battery. You have to make it and put energy into it, both of which take energy. Hydrogen has been used commercially for decades, so at least we don't have to figure out how to do this, or what the cheapest, most efficient method is.

Ninety-six percent of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, mainly to refine oil and hydrogenate vegetable oil--the kind that gives you heart attacks (1). In the United States, ninety percent of hydrogen is made from natural gas, with an efficiency of 72% (2). Efficiency is how much energy you get back compared with how much energy you started out with. So an efficiency of seventy-two percent means you've lost 28% of the energy contained in the natural gas to make hydrogen. And that doesn't count the energy it took to extract and deliver the natural gas to the hydrogen plant.

Only four percent of hydrogen is made from water. This is done with electricity, in a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen is only made from water when the hydrogen must be extremely pure. Most electricity is generated from fossil fuel driven plants that are, on average, 30% efficient. Where does the other seventy percent of the energy go? Most is lost as heat, and some as it travels through the power grid.

Electrolysis is 70% efficient. To calculate the overall efficiency of making hydrogen from water, the standard equation is to multiply the efficiency of each step. In this case you would multiply the 30% efficient power plant times the 70% efficient electrolysis to get an overall efficiency of 20%. This means you have used four units of energy to create one unit of hydrogen energy (3).

Obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels as a feedstock or an energy source is a bit perverse, since the whole point is to avoid using fossil fuels. The goal is to use renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis.

Current wind turbines can generate electricity at 30-40% efficiency, producing hydrogen at an overall 25% efficiency (.35 wind electricity * .70 electrolysis of water), or 3 units of wind energy to get 1 unit of hydrogen energy. When the wind is blowing, that is.

The best solar cells available on a large scale have an efficiency of ten percent when the sun is shining, or nine units of energy to get 1 hydrogen unit of energy (.10 * .70). But that's not bad compared to biological hydrogen. If you use algae that make hydrogen as a byproduct, the efficiency is about .1%, or more than 99 units of energy to get one hydrogen unit of energy (4).

No matter how you look at it, producing hydrogen from water is an energy sink. If you don't understand this concept, please mail me ten dollars and I'll send you back a dollar.

Hydrogen can be made from biomass, but then these problems arise (5):

1. Biomass is very seasonal
   
2. Contains a lot of moisture, requiring energy to store and then dry it before gasification
   
3. There are limited supplies
   
4. The quantities are not large or consistent enough for large-scale hydrogen production.
   
5. A huge amount of land would be required, since even cultivated biomass in good soil has a low yield -- 10 tons of biomass per 2.4 acres
   
6. The soil will be degraded from erosion and loss of fertility if stripped of biomass
   
7. Any energy put into the land to grow the biomass, such as fertilizers, planting, and harvesting will add to the energy costs
   
8. Energy and costs to deliver biomass to the central power plant
   
9. It's not suitable for pure hydrogen production

Natural gas is too valuable to make hydrogen with. One use of natural gas is to create fertilizer (as both feedstock and energy source). This has led to a many-fold increase in crop production, allowing an additional 4 billion people to exist who otherwise wouldn't be here (8, 9).

We also don't have enough natural gas left to make a hydrogen economy happen. Extraction of natural gas is declining in North America (10). It will take at least a decade to even begin replacing natural gas with imported LNG (liquified natural gas). Making LNG is so energy intensive that it would be economically and environmentally insane to use natural gas as a source of hydrogen (3).

Putting energy into hydrogen

No matter how it's been made, hydrogen has no energy in it. Hydrogen is the lowest energy dense fuel on earth (5). At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen takes up three thousand more times space than gasoline containing an equivalent amount of energy (3). To put energy into hydrogen, it must be compressed or liquefied. To compress hydrogen to 10,000 psi is a multi-stage process that will lose an additional 15% of the energy contained in the hydrogen.

If you liquefy hydrogen, you will be able to get more hydrogen energy into a smaller container, but you will lose 30-40% of the energy in the process. Handling hydrogen requires extreme precautions because hydrogen is so cold - minus 423 F. Fueling is typically done mechanically with a robot arm (3).

Storage

The more you compress hydrogen, the smaller the tank can be. But as you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the thickness of the steel wall, and hence the weight of the tank. Cost increases with pressure. At 2000 psi, it's $400 per kg. At 8000 psi, it's $2100 per kg (5). And the tank will be huge -- at 5000 psi, the tank could take up ten times the volume of a gasoline tank containing the same energy content.

That's why it would be nice to use liquid hydrogen, which allows you to have a much smaller container. But these storage tanks get cold enough to cause plugged valves and other problems. If you add insulation to prevent this, you will increase the weight of an already very heavy storage tank. There are additional components to control the liquid hydrogen which add extra costs and weight (11).

Here's how a hydrogen tank stacks up against a gas tank in a Honda Accord.
[see article on web, it won't copy formatted here]

According to the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA), "Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful technique for improving fuel economy. Each 10 percent reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design by approximately eight percent".

Fuel cells are also heavy: "A metal hydride storage system that can hold 5 kg of hydrogen, including the alloy, container, and heat exchangers, would weigh approximately 300 kg (661 lbs), which would lower the fuel efficiency of the vehicle," according to Rosa Young, a physicist and vice president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, Michigan (12).

Fuel cells are expensive. In 2003, they cost $1 million or more. At this stage, they have low reliability, need a much less expensive catalyst than platinum, can clog and lose power if there are impurities in the hydrogen, don't last more than 1000 hours, have yet to achieve a driving range of more than 100 miles, and can't compete with electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, which is already more energy efficient and lower in CO2 generation than projected fuel cells. (3)

Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you've gotten it into a container, it wants to get out, and since it's the lightest of all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3-4% per day (3, 13).

Hydrogen also tends to make metal brittle (14). Embrittled metal can create leaks. In a pipeline, it can cause cracking or fissuring, which can result in potentially catastrophic failure (3). Making metal strong enough to withstand hydrogen adds weight and cost.

Leaks also become more likely as the pressure grows higher. It can leak from un-welded connections, fuel lines, and non-metal seals such as gaskets, O-rings, pipe thread compounds, and packings. A heavy-duty fuel cell engine may have thousands of seals (15). Hydrogen has the lowest ignition point of any fuel, 20 times less than gasoline. So if there's a leak, it can be ignited by a cell phone, a storm miles away (16), or the static from sliding on a car seat.

Leaks and the fires that might result are invisible, and because of they high hydrogen pressure, the fire is like a cutting torch with an invisible flame. Unless you walk into a hydrogen flame, sometimes the only way to know there's a leak is poor performance.

In 2002, given the same volume of fuel, a diesel fuel vehicle could go 90 miles, and a hydrogen vehicle at 3600 psi could go 5 miles. But that's nothing compared to the challenges trucks face. I know we're just supposed to only driving a hydrogen car, but it's really hydrogen trucks that are most critical. If we don't figure out how to make them, we won't have a way to distribute food and other goods across the country.

A truck can go a thousand miles with two 84 gallon tanks placed under the cab, which takes up 23 cubic feet. But the equivalent amount of hydrogen at 3600 psi would take up almost 14 times as much space as the gas tanks. It is hard to imagine where you could put the two cylindrical, twelve feet long by four feet wide hydrogen tanks. They can't go in the cargo space because a hydrogen leak in an enclosed area would explode if there were a leak. You can't put the tanks on top or the truck won't fit beneath underpasses and make the truck top-heavy. Nor would these tanks fit beneath the truck. (23).

To redesign trucks and build hundreds of millions of new ones would take too much energy and money. Yet keeping trucks moving after fossil fuels disappear is far more important that figuring out how to keep cars on the road. Trucks deliver food and other essentials we can't live without.

Batteries are smaller, but they're very heavy. In 2002, Lithium-Metal Polymer batteries could take a truck 500 miles. They weighed 42,635 pounds, using up 85% of the trucks weight capacity (23).

Transport

Canister trucks ($250,000 each) can carry enough fuel for 60 cars (3, 13). These trucks weight 40,000 kg but deliver only 400 kg of hydrogen. For a delivery distance of 150 miles, the delivery energy used is nearly 20% of the usable energy in the hydrogen delivered. At 300 miles 40%. The same size truck carrying gasoline delivers 10,000 gallons of fuel, enough to fill about 800 cars (3).

Another alternative is pipelines. The average cost of a natural gas pipeline is one million dollars per mile, and we have 200,000 miles of natural gas pipeline, which we can't re-use because they are composed of metal that would become brittle and leak, as well as the incorrect diameter to maximize hydrogen throughput. If we were to build a similar infrastructure to deliver hydrogen it would cost $200 trillion. The major operating cost of hydrogen pipelines is compressor power and maintenance (3). Compressors in the pipeline keep the gas moving, using hydrogen energy to push the gas forward. After 620 miles, 8% of the hydrogen has been used to move it through the pipeline (17).

Conclusion

At some point along the chain of making, putting energy in, storing, and delivering the hydrogen, you've used more energy than you get back, and this doesn't count the energy used to make fuel cells, storage tanks, delivery systems, and vehicles (17).

The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen's properties require you to spend more energy to do the following than you get out of it later: overcome waters' hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move heavy cars, to prevent leaks and brittle metals, to transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn't matter if all of the problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.

The price of oil and natural gas will go up relentlessly due to geological depletion and political crises in extracting countries. Since the hydrogen infrastructure will be built using the existing oil-based infrastructure (i.e. internal combustion engine vehicles, power plants and factories, plastics, etc), the price of hydrogen will go up as well -- it will never be cheaper than fossil fuels. As depletion continues, factories will be driven out of business by high fuel costs (20, 21, 22) and the parts necessary to build the extremely complex storage tanks and fuel cells might become unavailable. In a society that's looking more and more like Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", hydrogen will be too leaky and explosive to handle.

Any diversion of declining fossil fuels to a hydrogen economy subtracts that energy from other possible uses, such as planting, harvesting, delivering, and cooking food, heating homes, and other essential activities. According to Joseph Romm "The energy and environmental problems facing the nation and the world, especially global warming, are far too serious to risk making major policy mistakes that misallocate scarce resources (3).

When fusion can make cheap hydrogen, reliable long-lasting nanotube fuel cells exist, and light-weight leak-proof carbon-fiber polymer-lined storage tanks / pipelines can be made inexpensively, then let's consider building the hydrogen economy infrastructure. Until then, it's vaporware. All of the technical obstacles must be overcome for any of this to happen (18). Meanwhile, we should stop the FreedomCAR and start setting higher CAFE standards (19).

Sources:

(1) Michael F. Jacobson Waiter, please hold the hydrogen http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/08/EDGRQ8KVR31.DTL

(2) Martin I.Hoffert, et al "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet" SCIENCE VOL 298 1 November 2002

(3) Joseph J. Romm The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact & Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate 2004

(4) Howard Hayden The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World

(5) D.Simbeck and E.Chang Hydrogen Supply: Cost Estimate for Hydrogen Pathways Scoping Analysis, National Renewable Energy Lab http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy03osti/32525.pdf

(6) Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=84

(7) What's in a Gallon of Gas? http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-04/rd/discover-data/

(8) David & Marshall Fisher The Nitrogen Bomb www.discover.com April 2001

(9) Vaclav Smil Scientific American Jul 1997 Global Population & the Nitrogen Cycle

(10) Julian Darley High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis 2004

(11) Rocks in your Gas Tank http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/17apr_zeolite.htm

(12) fill'er up--with hydrogen Mechanical Engineering Magazine http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/feb02/features/fillerup/fillerup.html

(13) Wade A. Amos Costs of Storing and Transporting Hydrogen U.S. Department of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/25106.pdf

(14) Omar A. El kebir, Andrzej Szummer Comparison of hydrogen embrittlement of stainless steels and nickel-base alloys International Journal of Hydrogen Energy Volume: 27, Issue: 7-8 July - August, 2002

(15) Fuel Cell Engine Safety U.S. Department of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy http://www.avt.nrel.gov/pdfs/fcm06r0.pdf

(16) Dr. Joseph Romm Testimony for the Hearing Reviewing the Hydrogen Fuel and FreedomCAR Initiatives Submitted to the House Science Committee http://www.house.gov/science/hearings/full04/mar03/romm.pdf

(17) Ulf Bossel and Baldur Eliasson Energy and the Hydrogen Economy www.methanol.org/pdfFrame.cfm?pdf=HydrogenEconomyReport2003.pdf

(18) National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap Production, Delivery, Storage, Conversion, Applications, Public Education and Outreach http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/national_h2_roadmap.pdf

(19) Dan Neil Rumble Seat : Toyota's spark of genius http://www.latimes.com/la-danneil-101503-pulitzer,0,7911314.story

(20) Jul 02, 2004 Oil prices raising costs of offshoots By Associated Press http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/02/biz/news03.prt

(21) May 24, 2004 Soaring energy prices dog rosy U.S. farm economy http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2004/05/24/rtr1382512.html

(22) March 17, 2004 Chemical Industry in Crisis: Natural Gas Prices Are Up, Factories Are Closing, And Jobs Are Vanishing http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64579-2004Mar16.html

(23) "Fuels of the Future for Cars and Trucks" Dr. James J. Eberhardt Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy 2002 Diesel Engine Emissions Reduction (DEER) Workshop San Diego, California August 25 - 29, 2002 www.osti.gov/fcvt/deer2002/eberhardt.pdf

I haven't read it, I just found it just now.
http://www.oecd.org/document/21/0,2340,en_2649_201185_35798549_1_1_1_1,00.html

     Assessment of Nuclear-Hydrogen
     Synergies with Renewable Energy
     Systems and Coal Liquefaction
     Processes
http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/125102.pdf

Including: Hydrogen Intermediate and Peak Electrical System

50 kWHR / efficiency = 1 kg hydrogen

Perhaps they will fund some wind turbine electrolysers and who knows what else. I find not substance in the article.

So people started wondering how cars would run beyond oil, what energy vector would they use? At that time Nuclear energy really seemed to be the future with an unimaginable mineral resource (U-238, which now doesn't seem that huge) that could feed Earth for some centuries. In this environment Hydrogen emerged as a vector to "easily" distribute the energy generated at Nuclear power plants built offshore, way from major population centers (the Atomic Isles). Cesare Marchetti was one of the pioneers of these ideas.

Then along came Three Mile Island and very sadly Chernobyl. A major campaign against Nuclear followed, which turned this technology to the eyes of public opinion in a monster ready to swallow Humankind.

The funny thing was that almost the same people that alerted for the perils of Nuclear and campaigned against it continued pushing forward Hydrogen as an energy vector. They just forgot to say what the new energy source would be.

Although I don't know much about chemistry, an element with an atomic number of 2 seems a very bad choice for an energy vector - huge volume, impossible to store without considerable losses. If fuel cells come to be (which is nigh on happening for cell phones and tablet PC) it will probably be with a liquid vector like methanol.

It's looking bleak.  In fact, I recall that when Japan's Mazda came out with hydrogen cars the engineers said that it would never be ready for the mass market.  How can Scotland differ?  Strike One!

Here's a site regarding the "Myth of the Hydrogen Economy", where this shows in more detail how odd a material hydrogen is related to the very complicated engineering process that may interest TOD readers:

Myth of Hydrogen Economy

Doesn't really matter if we go hydrogen or not.  There are just not enough resources in the world to justify a "new" replacement economy on every single vehicle and every single fillup station based on such a flimsy and hard to manage substance.  Any worldwide shortage on any needed resources would hit Scotland as well.  Strrrrike Two!

Most of hydrogen is made from natural gas, used at a 60% loss as mentioned in the article.  This is important to note because as gas levels decrease so does available hydrogen.  Scotland and others would have wasted their time and effort and would remain dependent upon GAZPROM for their economy.  Not self-sufficent at all.  Strrrrike Three! You're outta there!

Instead of wishing for an instant replacement to cars to maintain our current way of life we are going to have to rethink our way of life and live smaller.  How about conservation?  Or new close-knit urban designs? And _duh_ stop driving?  All together these would do more for any country and economy than any so-called replacement.  We actually just have to slow down and not expect instant replacement of cars.  

Europe has always had a more village like existence than North America, and because of it Europe will prosper where others cannot.  The shorter haul of food and goods remains manageable.    

Hydrogen can't make plastics as well as any number of other materials that are made from oil, nor can it single-handedly provide the energy needed to make vehicles to begin with.  The sheer scale required to put a car on the road only using hydrogen would waste so much natural gas as to put the ERoEI on a car into a ridiculously massive loss.  

As great the invention of the fuel cell is, this may be the case for smaller scale useage only.  It remains unreal to expect it to replace all our transportation needs without followup changes.  

Since this dreamland psychology is not being addressed I find the claims of any hydrogen economy so obtuse to the point of being deaf and blind at the same time.

Hydrogen as a transport energy is a dead end. If fuel cells are the way to go for cars, then it's to replace the ICE in hybrids. In which case, I suspect that good old petrol or diesel, be they bio-, will turn out to be optimum fuel-cell fuel.

But to get back to Scottish practicalities : Play along with the puppy. Encourage him. Back the electricity-generation projects that will make Scotland an energy exporter, post-oil. And quietly avoid spending money funding hydrogen projects. (Political subsidies to losing technologies, no thanks.) But invest in battery R&D, for the same effect.

THE SHORTEST DISTANCE, OR HOW THE LAW OF GEOMETRY TRUMPS MISQUOTING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

It is interesting that discussion of the Scottish attempt at developing/commercializing hydrogen as a fuel should come up on TOD UK at this time, given that just the other day on TOD I was involved in a discussion concerning renewable hydrogen.
As I recall, I closed the post with the rather assertive sentence, "Pay me now, or pay me later.  What I was referring to in this sentence was my view that we keep going through an endless set of conversions to basically get hydrocarbons, then try to dispose of the carbon side, and make use of the hydrogen side.  Such is the nature of crude oil itself, natural gas, tar sand, ethanol, biofuels in general, shale oil, and on and on.  In all these cases, it is the hydrogen component that we essentially need.

The only thing that makes any of the above seem efficient is if we "externalize" most of the costs, on the input side (fuel production and transportation, military expense to protect the source, etc.) and on output side (CO2 production, pollution and sulfur, and or in the case of certain fuels such as coal, slag or solid material disposal.  This externalizing has always made fossil fuel look much more efficient than it is.

This leads us to the whole argument that hydrogen cannot be efficient in production.  Such was my discussion the other day dismissed out of hand, such as the analysis below by a poster, Starship Trooper,
"This comes out to be the equivalent of  18 x 10^15 BTU/year at current gasoline usage rates (9.5 MMBPD).  Assuming "perfect" adiabatic conditions, this is the equivalent of 605 GW being generated every hour of the 8760 hours in each year.  No one assumes this and at best the energy based conversion efficiency is about 50% whether thermal or electrolytic methods are used.  There's that pesky second law of thermodynamics butting in.

 Total generating capacity in the US is just about 1000 GW.  If we were going to use electrolytic methods (and assuming 50% conversion efficiency) that would require more than 1.2 terawatts of generating capacity to be added to the existing system or more than the current existing capacity.  A similar case is made by a link posted by one of the contenders in the discussion, in which it is argued that producing is not the best use of electricity:

http://www.thewatt.com/article1238.html

Now, we notice a few things that demand attention.  When we have a discussion of how many "terawatts" are required to produce enough hydrogen to replace all of the gasoline in the U.S., we don't mention two important points:
(a) The amount of gasoline used can be modified, and if one accepts anything like "peak oil" occurring, will have to be modified, and very substantially.
(b)  There is conveniently no discussion of how many terrawatts are required to produce all the gasoline in the U.S., just a number assigned to the energy in the gasoline.  We leave out all externalities, as usual, when it comes to getting the crude oil, refining the crude oil, transporting and retailing the crude oil, and then, trying to fix the CO2 climate damage caused by the burning of the crude oil.  Does anyone have a number, what is the "terrawatt" equivalent in climate change, and how would you assign such a number.  What is the "terrawatt" cost of a nuclear carrier group on station 24/7 in the Persian Gulf, and what percent would you assign to the cost of oil source protection?  

Interestingly, neither "Starship Trooper", "www.thewatt.com" article linked, or anyone else seem to give any benefit to hydrogen on the basis of two very large factors, those being (a) no CO2 discharge, and (b) onsite production.

It is obvious that completely avoiding carbon release is an advantage if we accept any concern about climate change as important to the discussion.  However,  the cost of trying to remediate climate change and pollution created by fossil fuels go completely "off book" in it's comparison to hydrogen.  Likewise, the cost of transportation of fossil fuels.  When people discuss hydrogen, they seem to picture a world in which it will be carried about, from here to there, to be retailed and then used by the customer.  This is a clear failure of visualization, because that would be, in most cases, a needless step.  Why do people still think this way?

Most people, when they think of hydrogen, are NOT thinking of the potential of renewable hydrogen.  Hydrogen from natural gas is a waste, and in the end a dead end.  It is at most an intermediate step, to help establish the infrastructure and technology of hydrogen, and is not conceived as the final step in the development chain.  This is of extreme importance to understand:  Hydrogen derived from fossil fuel obviously solves nothing:  Not depletion, not carbon release, not the limiting factors of carrying the source fuel about.  It would be pointless as a goal.  But renewable hydrogen opens up the ability of the renewable energy technologies to create a flexible, controllable, storable portable liquid fuel.  It is NOT intended to compete with electricity, nor with batteries, which many, including the writer of "the watt" article seem to think.  This would merely put hydrogen into what I like to call "the land of 1000 conversions" that all other energy systems face.  The number of conversions when dealing with hydrogen should be kept to the minimum possible, thus it's advantage.

For example,  If we take a simple solar production of hydrogen,
http://www.hydrogensolar.com/power.html
What we see is onsite, direct ability to use a solar set of panels to extract hydrogen from water, store it, and then run it through a fuel cell at time of need.  I am not yet convinced of the advantage of fuel cells, so my preference would be to run it through a IC engine, of the natural gas type.  It could also be burned in a heating furnace in such an installation.

So what's the advantage?  Simply this:  You completely end run the expensive and consumptive infrastructure, and by this, we mean ALL THE INFRASTRUCTURE, from the oil fields of a foreign land, to the nuclear craft protecting them, to the prostitution of foreign policy, to the supertankers plying the seas, to the port facilities, to the refineries, to the highway trucks and rail tanks carrying the fuel, to the retail establishments selling it, the "1000 conversions" that bleed us to death, but are never counted fully in the analysis of fossil fuel.
Thus, fossil fuel is trounced out as "cheap" and magnificent on EROEI.  This of course is in no way correct.  What is being done is to "externalize" almost all costs, and then claiming of a fuel such as hydrogen that it is "inefficient" based on a simple conversion formula, without seeing the benefit of avoiding the thousand conversions.  By the way, did you notice the one big externality that I did not even mention in my fossil fuel vs. hydrogen count?
CARBON.  The complete avoidance of having to deal with the giant externality of carbon release is PRICELESS in the exchange, but almost never counted in favor of onsite renewable hydrogen energy.

The methods of extracting hydrogen are becoming surprisingly simple:

http://www.hydrogensolar.com/construction.html
http://www.hydrogensolar.com/principles.html

The ideas shown here are not the product of some backyard tinker, but are the product of the work of Julian Keable and the Swiss Federal University of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and enabled by an R and D grant from  the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.
http://www.hydrogensolar.com/progress.html

It is with interest that we note that while the posters of TOD seem to understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the technicians and scientists at the best Swiss academies do not!

Of course, the great leap forward will be home power by way of solar energy.  In Europe, work on this has been available for some time:
http://www.ieahia.org/pdfs/chapter2.pdf

Honda has began with a home hydrogen by natural gas system, but we know this is not the goal.  How?

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2004/11/hsub2sub_genera.html

First, Honda's recent announcement that they intend to enter the advanced thin film solar business in a big way gives us an indication of the direction they intend to go.  But, in fact, for those of us who have been watching, we have already seen it:
http://www.ieahia.org/pdfs/honda.pdf

So this leaves us with an intriguing question, doesn't it?  If hydrogen is an absolutely unworkable option as usable energy, why are some of the best minds in the world attempting to make it a usable option?

It is to be noted that the two nations at the front of this effort have virtually NO home energy available to them.  Except for sunlight and water, they cannot, as we seem to think we can in America, waste money on endless conversions of alcohol, tar sand, oil shale, coal, and on and on and on, and they do not accept the carbon release nightmare that will come from these endless conversions.  Their view seems to be the same as the one I have arrived at, after years doubting the hydrogen/solar option:  We just do not have the time for these endless diversions.

The time is now.  Go past the diversions, past the endless conversions, past the billions paid in dead ends which will leave junk scattered around the world, and be collecting dust and rust in only a couple of decades.  Decentralized, renewable, clean, and DIRECT is the only path that will work in the long run.  End the "depletion tail chase", end the "carbon" burden once and for all, and count fairly all the externalities of the other options, the carbon burden, the military burden, the political burden, the drilling and refining and transporting burden, and then the 50% of sunlight that is falling on the land anyway that may be given up in the extraction of hydrogen will seem tine compared to the fantastical loses we are giving up every single day in the production of fossil fuels.  

Many quote, or I should say, misquote, the laws of entropy and thermodynamics, in a fight to stop going the shortest route that frankly leaves me perplexed, unless they wish to see a catastrophe.  I quote one law of geometry:
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Take it.

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout

Proton Energy Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Distributed Energy Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: DESC), announced today that its hydrogen technology group has signed a contract with Shell Hydrogen LLC, part of Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE: RDS-B) to install a hydrogen fueling system in the New York City metropolitan area. The contract will showcase Proton's onsite hydrogen generation technology for vehicle fueling.

This is the insanity of hydrogen in today's world.  Let's "showcase" a system that can fill maybe one car per day:

Proton Energy Systems is providing its hydrogen experience and expertise to the project and will supply the fueling system with a Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) electrolyzer capable of producing 12 kilograms of hydrogen per day. The electrolyzer is expected to represent in part the future of on-site hydrogen generation for fueling stations with a retail-centric focus.

... at least it isn't another natural gas system.

Sounds to me like the H2 Fuel Group have simply got out the acdemic begging bowl, if you can be certain that £2 MN now will generate 10,000 jobs in 10 years you have found the economic equivalent of the perpetual motion machine.

Pound to a pinch of snuff they get the money ...and then piss it up against the wall on conferences in sunny seaside cities.

A possible way forward may be for wind farms to overbuild capacity compared with the transmission capacity but then put in a hydrogen plant, H2 storage and a CCGT. Then, when the wind is blowing hard and the transmission capacity is used up, H2 would be produced and stored to await a low wind period. The export of the power in the low wind period uses the transmission lines that are already in place, meaning no additional transmission infrastructure is needed.

Effectively this would be similar to balancing the wind capacity with a local pumped storage scheme or a big battery etc. The economics of each particular location would decide which option is best. However, I am sure an H2/CCGT package could easily be developed.

In UK I could see a system of "local balancing" like this may work, as the spot price of power is likely to increase in low wind periods, making the power produced by an H2 run CCGT profitable. The other advantage is that the power transmission lines need not be matched to the maximum output of the facility. I am unsure of the economics, but I am sure increasing the capacity of long distance transmission lines to match peak output does not come cheap.

Popular Mechanics has an article on Hydrogen.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4199381.html

And new Scientist has a special report on Energy (Some articles behind the paywall, some free)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/energy-fuels/dn9984

20% wind power not feasible ?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/energy-fuels/mg18825253.400-uk-wind-power-takes-a-batterin g.html

Fallouts in the environmentalist camp.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/06/small-is-useless/

The International Energy Agency's MARKAL model gives a cost per tonne of carbon saved by solar electricity in 2020 of between £2200 and £3300.