Proponents of the hydrogen economy insist that hydrogen is the straightest path to the promised land of sustainable energy. But hydrogen has its opponents too, more than any other of the prominent renewable strategies.
For starters, hydrogen is not a source of energy — H2 is a carrier. Nor is it natural, like, say, the sun, or the wind, or the power of a waterfall. The beauty of hydrogen energy is that its byproduct is clean, drinkable water. Can’t beat that. But its inefficiency – current technology often uses more energy to create hydrogen-based energy systems than the system yields – still needs to be resolved.
An upstate New York hydrogen fuel cell company that seeks to penetrate the residential market – that is, equip homes with individual hydrogen fuel cell systems – relies on natural gas to unleash the hydrogen. That seems like two steps back for one step forward. It might be. In fact, if the market was to take off today, it the company’s wildest dreams were realized and they sold millions of hydrogen fuel cells to millions of residents and commercial buildings, well, then, we just might end up using more fossil-fueled natural gas than we do now. Maybe not, but it’s certainly not a road we should be going down given that it looks a lot like the road we’re trying to exit.
However, it’s not a mission we should entirely abort. Particularly since there is science that might be able to resolve the most troubling part of the hydrogen equation. For example, we can build renewable systems to harness the energy to produce the hydrogen. Still sounds like we’re chasing our tail, and we kind of are, but this tail-chasing has a potentially promising outcome.
MIT researchers have worked out a way to use sunlight to pull hydrogen out of water. They separate H2 from water using solar panels. So H2 gets created during the day and stored in a fuel cell. At night, the electricity is created from H2 running through a fuel cell, combined with the oxygen “waste” created during the day, which creates a byproduct of water. The water is now the feedstock that starts the process all over again when the sun rises. This closed loop – energy tail-wagging – is an exciting prospect.
What we need to keep in mind is that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It’s a constant. It changes states, or transforms, but it doesn’t disappear. Take oil and natural gas for example: when these fuels are burned during the combustion process to make electricity, it produces heat to turn a turbine. The energy byproduct, or the transformed material, is carbon dioxide plus a few other poisonous gasses. We only recently learned – last 30 years or so — that these carbon-based fuels have consequences. And now we find ourselves in a climate and energy crisis, with few people understanding the severity of the crises. And even if they did: we know smoking causes cancer, but that hasn’t stopped the western world from lighting up. It’s all too addicting to suddenly stop now.
