If only it were that simple!

Hydrogen. The first element in the Periodic Table and the most abundant element in the Universe. It is also the simplest element—the most common isotope has only one proton and one electron. It has been called the “Future of Energy”; after all, the Sun relies on hydrogen to keep emitting light and, if it is good enough for our Sun, why isn’t it good enough for us?

No doubt you have heard all the clamor associated with a hydrogen-based energy economy. Jeremy Rifkin published a book entitled The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth. He claimed that “globalization represents the end stage of the fossil-fuel era” and that turning “toward hydrogen is a promissory note for a safer world.”

In his State of the Union Address, the President stated that “with a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles” to taking hydrogen-fueled automobiles “from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.” The Administration then announced a collaborative effort with the European Union to develop a hydrogen economy, including the technologies “needed for mass production of safe and affordable hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles,” and stated that this would “improve America’s energy security by significantly reducing the need for imported oil.”

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a story that proclaimed, “The first steps toward what proponents call the hydrogen economy are [now] being taken.” And the US House of Representatives held the first of two “investigative hearings on the subject of hydrogen—its production, utilization, and potential effects on our energy economy of the future.” The chairman of the hearing claimed hydrogen “has the potential of playing the same kind of role in our energy system as electricity does today.”

Thus, hydrogen is poised to be the silver bullet that solves the climate crisis and removes us from a fossil fuel-based energy supply.

But wait. You don’t remember all of this? Well, the Rifkin book was published in 2003. The Administration was not the second Trump Presidency, the Joe Biden Presidency, the first Trump Presidency, or the first or second Obama Presidency. It was George W. Bush’s State of the Union that same year. The Chicago Sun-Times article came out in 1996. And the Congressional Hearing? Well, that was held on June 10, 1975.

But doesn’t the Sun run on hydrogen? Yes, but not in the same way.

In the Sun, through fusion, hydrogen atoms are merged to produce helium with lots of energy given off in the process. Each second, about six-hundred-billion kilograms of hydrogen are fused into helium and about four-billion kilograms of matter are converted to energy. On Earth, that process would have to be ‘cold’ fusion—or fusion at temperatures far below that of our Sun. Solar fusion would run so hot that there isn’t anything capable of containing it. Cold fusion is about twenty years off and, as the meme goes, always will be. And apparently, so too will hydrogen as a fuel source.

How Do We Get Hydrogen?

Is mining or drilling for hydrogen the problem? No. That isn’t how we get hydrogen.

Hydrogen is produced by separating it from other elements in various compounds. The most common methods are electrolysis—where water is split to form hydrogen and oxygen gases—and steam-methane reforming, where hydrogen atoms are separated from the carbon atoms in methane. The former is generally how hydrogen is produced in high school chemistry classes but has recently been touted as the only “clean” way to produce hydrogen; the latter is the process by which hydrogen currently is produced commercially in the United States.

But steam-methane reforming requires high temperatures (about thirteen-hundred to eighteen-hundred degrees Fahrenheit) and high pressures (between three and twenty-five times that of atmospheric pressure). This allows engineers to use steam as a catalyst to produce hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. Thus, the production of hydrogen through steam-methane reforming uses methane, a fossil fuel, and generates carbon dioxide (the supposedly evil gas) and carbon monoxide (a truly deadly gas).

But there is something interesting about the laws of physics. Namely, there is no free lunch. We often talk about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and that a system becomes more disordered with time unless energy is added to it from outside. We say the entropy of the closed system increases over time. But there are other ways of saying this. For example, we can say one cannot create a heat engine which extracts heat and converts all of it to useful work. Interpreting this for our discussion, the energy contained in the steam and methane cannot be entirely transferred to the hydrogen—some of it goes to the production of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and some is lost as heat.

This means the production of hydrogen from methane results in less energy in the hydrogen molecules than existed in the original methane molecule. How much less?

This is the first hurdle associated with hydrogen energy—hydrogen is, as Robert Bryce puts it, “insanely expensive, in energy terms, to manufacture.” To get enough hydrogen to produce two megawatts of energy, a total of three megawatts of electricity is required. This doesn’t include the loss of energy—or the intervention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics—in the production of this electricity from other sources.

So, why aren’t we just sending these three megawatts of electricity down the power lines to heat and cool homes, cook food, and perform other tasks that make our lives better? Because hydrogen is supposedly a clean fuel source, even though the energy to extract it is usually produced by methane and yields our supposedly evil gas, carbon dioxide, as a byproduct. Moreover, hydrogen is green—not in the environmental sense, but rather, subsidies abound for companies that wish to pursue the hydrogen panacea.

Storage Problems

The second hurdle associated with hydrogen as an energy source is that it is hard to handle and difficult to store. Hydrogen gas does not play well with metals and something called “hydrogen embrittlement” occurs. As the name implies, hydrogen embrittlement causes metals to become brittle and crack over time, especially when the metal is stressed. Being a small molecule, hydrogen easily escapes from the smallest of cracks. In general, hydrogen embrittlement does not occur at temperatures above about three-hundred degrees Fahrenheit; however, it is not feasible to heat pipes and storage tanks to this temperature. At ambient temperatures and pressures found on Earth, hydrogen embrittlement is a significant problem for many metals, such as steel, iron, nickel, titanium, cobalt, copper, and aluminum, plus alloys that contain them.

Proponents argue that hydrogen can be stored as a liquid. While true, that would require compression to seven-hundred times atmospheric pressure and refrigeration to minus-four-hundred-twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. And, of course, even more energy would be required to reach and maintain that level of compression and cooling.

If we cannot transport and store hydrogen in existing trucks, tanks, and pipes, how is hydrogen best used as an energy source? It can be blended with natural gas and consumed by turbines and reciprocating engines. But that involves two disadvantages. One is that we lose energy by storing it in the production of hydrogen—why not simply use the methane in the turbine rather than wasting energy by converting it to hydrogen? There is simply no advantage to that, and it costs us energy. The second is that by mixing in methane, activists are no longer able to tout the hydrogen source as “clean and green renewable energy,” because methane is still in the mixture. Sigh. Virtue signaling rears its ugly head again.

The best way to use hydrogen is probably as the fuel source in a fuel cell. But fuel cells already run on methane, and the loss of energy in converting methane to hydrogen precludes any utility that the use of hydrogen would provide. Except, of course, that activists and those in the hydrogen-production industry would not be able to tout their fuel cell as being “clean and green renewable energy.” In my home state of Delaware, however, the state legislature has declared that methane consumed by a Bloom Energy fuel cell is renewable energy. Ah, the all-powerful legislature that can simply alter physics by majority vote!

Dangers in Use

A third hurdle with using hydrogen as a fuel source is that it is dangerous to use. Like methane, it is colorless and odorless, and no doubt, for hydrogen to become a widely used fuel source, it would have to be mixed with a smelly gas—just as smelly mercaptan is mixed with methane so a leak can be detected. And, yes, hydrogen is highly explosive. It is why the early twentieth-century dirigible fleet in the United States was built using helium for buoyancy, not hydrogen, even though helium is more expensive to produce and provides less buoyancy. If you don’t understand the explosive potential of hydrogen, the Hindenburg disaster should tell you all you need to know.

Hydrogen’s Not Cheap

Finally, the fourth hurdle should now be obvious. The use of hydrogen as a fuel source is expensive—in terms of production cost, expensive storage, and energy required to produce. Hydrogen as a fuel source will allow virtue signalers to claim they have developed and are using a “clean and green” fuel source that is “saving the planet from the evils of fossil fuels.” But in reality, it is only going to make energy more expensive and send a larger proportion of the planet back below the poverty line. As we have often stated here at the Cornwall Alliance, inexpensive energy has been the solution to raising billions of people above the poverty line and increasing their standard of living. Hydrogen energy will cease to become viable when the subsidies provided to it by governments of the world dry up. Hopefully, the new Administration will recognize that hydrogen embrittlement applies not just to metals, but to our economy as well.

Featured image adapted from the National Energy Education Project (public domain).