They’re GRRRRRRREAT!

Tiffany GreiderJeff WoodsAlaina Pomeroy

Shannon PaytonRobert JonesKatherine Costello

The Rise of the Hydrocarbon Infrastructure

• Way back when, people used horses for transportation

• Pro side argues that shift in infrastructure from horses to cars can be analogous to the shift from hydrocarbon to hydrogen cars

• Two fundamental flaws with this line of argumentation:

– No existence of a “horse” infrastructure– Does not scale linearly

• Compare 6 million cars in the U.S. and 30,000 miles of oil pipelines in 1920, to 228 million passenger vehicles and almost 1.5 million miles of gasoline pipelines in 2003

• Due to exponential growth, compare the U.S. population in 1920 (76 million) to the population in 2003 (almost 300 million)

• Globalization

Methods of Hydrogen Production

• What is hydrogen? Hydrogen is a method of storage; it only generates inefficiencies between energy generation and consumption

• The amount of energy necessary to produce hydrogen is less than the condensation energy produced

• Irony: we currently produce 95% of our hydrogen from fossil fuel combustion

Some Important Facts…• By the year 2035, we will need

21.7828 million barrels of oil per day• This corresponds to 126,340,240

million BTU per year of energy for our transportation needs

• The internal combustion engine operates at 17.15% efficiency, therefore providing 21,667,351 million BTU of energy to the wheels

• Compare to hydrogen: total efficiency for hydrogen is roughly 26%; thus, we need 26% of total hydrogen production to provide transportation energy

• Total production at the hydrogen plant should be enough to supply 83,335,965.38 million BTU per year

Cont.• How much electricity for

electrolysis would you need to make this much hydrogen? Assuming an electrolysis efficiency of 70%, you’d need 119,051,379.1 million BTU per year

• To generate this electricity, you need 382 gigawatts of power

• Using wind power that operates at a capacity of factor of 35% of the rated capacity, you would need a 1091 GW facility

• According to the EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2006, the entire US electric capacity in 2025 will be 1057GW; thus, powering all our vehicles with hydrogen would require doubling our total capacity when factoring in energy not related to transportation

Alternative Sources

• As the numbers show, generating energy is far more important than storing energy

• We need to focus on investing more in clean, renewable sources of energy generation

• Wind and solar represent the best present solutions to this problem

• It is pointless to focus on storage technologies when the generation technology does not exist

Grid Technology

• Responsible persons would agree that if a large investment in energy generation is made, an equally large investment to maximize returns should be made as well

• Total efficiency of hydrogen is only about 35%

• This compares poorly to total efficiency of 81% of grid transmission to Lithium-ion batteries

• The use of batteries uses an already existing infrastructure President Bush vows to work with

Congress to develop hydrogen fuel technologies…enough said.

The Viability of Hydrogen• Hydrogen has a poor energy density

per unit volume• Although hydrogen can be

compressed, this requires energy• As a comparison, hydrogen in its liquid

form has only ¼ the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons

• The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that by 2040 cars and light trucks powered by fuel cells will require 150 megatons per year of hydrogen. Currently, the U.S. produces only 9 megatons

• Total building energy usage in the U.S. nationally is 40%, while transportation accounts for 28% of total usage. An infrastructure facelift for transportation would be a baby step compared to the total work needed for a hydrogen system implementation for building energy use

• Hydrogen is about three times “bulkier” in volume than natural gas for the same energy delivered

• Hydrogen accelerates the cracking of steel, which increases maintenance costs, leakage rates, and material costs

• A 40 ton truck can deliver 26 tons of gasoline to a filling station; one daily delivery is sufficient for a busy station. A 40 ton truck carrying compressed hydrogen can deliver only 400 kilograms

The Economics of a Hydrogen Economy

• The average price of a hydrogen car is $100,000 more than the original price of a car, or about $125,000 per car. Multiply this by 600 million vehicles=$75 trillion. This is 25 times the size of the entire US budget for the year 2006

• In order for a hydrogen delivery infrastructure to serve 40% of the light duty fleet, it would cost over $500 billion

• Replacing one-half of U.S. ground transportation fuels in 2025 with hydrogen from electrolysis would require about as much electricity as is sold in the United States today

• In order to be economically competitive, production of fuel cells must be lowered by a factor of 10 and the production of hydrogen by a factor of four

Economics of a Hydrogen Economy cont.

• A hydrogen economy would be stabilizing to the rest of the world, most notably the Middle East

• Iranian oil exports represent nearly 10% of their GDP for a population that already has 40% living in poverty

• Companies will be faced with enormous costs in infrastructure changes

• The burden falls most squarely on those who cannot afford it: the lower and middle classes

• With $1 billion spent daily on gasoline in the U.S., and hydrogen costs of 5-7 times more than gasoline, we would be spending $2.55 trillion per year to replace the gasoline we use. Compare this to the total U.S. budget of $2.7 trillion for 2006

Environmental Effects• 48% of hydrogen gas is created

through the natural gas steam reforming/water gas shift reaction method: its byproduct is carbon dioxide

• Burning a gallon of gasoline releases 20 pounds of CO2. Producing 1 kg of hydrogen by electrolysis would generate, on average, around 70 pounds of CO2

• Hydrogen has the potential to accelerate the depletion of the ozone

• Finally, over 1 billion people globally lack access to reliable, safe drinking water