Focus 580; The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate

Good morning and welcome to focus 580. This is our morning talk program my name is David Inge. Glad to have you with us. There are a lot of people who are excited about the possibility that in the future hydrogen and hydrogen power will meet some of our energy needs. People have talked about using hydrogen to power vehicles like automobiles and also to provide energy for buildings big ones and residences. Even the president in his State of the Union address last year talked about the potential for hydrogen and the importance for doing research in that area. Our guest this morning says that that's good it's a good thing to think about alternative fuel sources. However he says that perhaps some of the promises of hydrogen have been a little overstated and that we ought to be realistic about what hydrogen can and can't do. Our guest is Joseph Romm. He helped oversee hydrogen and transportation fuel cell research in various positions in the department of energy during the Clinton administration. At the moment he is executive director of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions.

This is an organization that aims to help businesses and states adopt high leverage strategies for saving energy and cutting pollution. He is the author of a recently published a book that will be talking about this morning in this part of focus 580 the title of his book is the hype about hydrogen. It is published by the Island Press. The subtitle of the book is fact and fiction and the race to save the climate. If you're interested you can head out to the bookstore and find the book. Let me tell you just a bit more about our guest. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He's written and lectured widely on advanced transportation technologies on hydrogen fuel cells and other energy issues. He's contributed articles to a number of publications including Technology Review Forbes Foreign Affairs New York Times others and has been often quoted in the media on energy technology matter since joining us this morning by telephone. And as we talk of course questions are welcome the only thing we ask callers is that people are brief and we ask that

so that we can accommodate as many callers as possible. Keep the program moving. Anybody though who is interested can call in. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 is the number for Champaign Urbana and we do also have the toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us. And that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 w. Wilde toll free 800 1:58 WFLA. Dr. rom Hello. Hello. Thanks very much for talking with us today. My pleasure. We preach it just to make sure that people understand where you're coming from here right up front. You you are among those who are concerned about our burning fossil fuels. What that has meant for the environment and certainly would advocate moving towards other kinds of energy sources that are less polluting. And if possible renewable all of all those things you would say yes. That's that's right. Absolutely. We you know our soaring level of imported

oil makes us dependent on the Persian Gulf. And I think everyone can see every time they go to the pump just the dangers of over reliance on oil from other sources. And obviously the environment and particularly one of the focuses of the book is the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions particularly carbon dioxide which is heating up the planet. And the number one offender there is is vehicles the transportation sector has been the fastest growing so large of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States for the last two decades. Well in in a moment here I think probably we ought to talk or I'll ask you to talk in basic terms about the hydrogen fuel cell because I'm exterior that there are probably a lot of people who still not quite sure what it is and how it works but let me take a step back from that and and ask because it certainly does seem to be that within the last couple of years there's been an awful lot written about and discussed about hydrogen and a lot of people have

gotten really excited and have made these predictions about how the fact that there will be a day in the future when as today our economy rests on oil in the future it will rest on and run on hydrogen. Why is there so much excitement about hydrogen as an energy generator. Well I think there is a couple of reasons One reason is that hydrogen can be made from a lot of sources. It's not a primary energy source like coal or oil or even a wind that you can tap directly you've got to make it from something but I think people are probably excited because you. Content potentially make hydrogen from renewable sources of energy like solar energy or wind power and you can potentially run a vehicle on hydrogen so you could imagine someday replacing imported oil with some domestically generated hydrogen that might be pollution free. And it is the think all of us would like

to you know replace imported oil with some domestic source and I think all of us would love to have pollution free cars. So those two goals together have created excitement I think for for hydrogen cars and the second piece of it for the car is what. Well on your car would run on hydrogen and that is where you get to these fuel cells which we can come back to but they are basically pollution free devices that take in hydrogen and oxygen and put out electricity and water. And in fact they're only emission is water so there you've got about it's pollution free. An engine as you can imagine. Well there I guess you've explained as centrally what hydrogen fuel cell is what it is is it's a device that takes advantage of the fact that if you take hydrogen oxygen and put it together you get energy. And the only byproduct is water which is not a problem not a problem like a lot of other

bi products would be. And it seems like it sounds like it's a pretty simple device it doesn't have moving parts and sounds like a fairly elegant solution to the problem although then the big question as you have said comes down to where are we going to get the hydrogen. I'm sure that there are people think well hydrogen is just floating around isn't it. You know like oxygen and carbon dioxide a lot of other things. But it's a little bit more difficult than just somehow grabbing it out of the atmosphere there. So that's where that's the big question of where are you going to get the hydrogen. Indeed Well I think that that is from an environmental perspective. Is the rub hydrogen is lighter than air so if it floats away it there's no real sources of pure hydrogen on the earth you have to make it from something. Ninety five percent of all hydrogen in the United States is made from natural gas because natural gas is methane. It's one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. So

basically you extract the hydrogen from natural gas and you generate pollution in the process in fact you basically generate a lot of carbon dioxide which is a greenhouse gas. So as of today virtually all carbon hydrogen in the United States and around the world is generated in prophecies that produce a lot of pollution but happen to be quite cheap. So that's a guess the problem if now you're thinking about building a hydrogen fuel cell powered car. The question is well where are you going to get that hydrogen. You could in fact get it from well you could get it from natural gas if you had some way to distribute it in pump and in storage you could even build a fuel cell and I think fuel cells have been built that use gasoline that get their hydrogen from gasoline. So but the problem right now is that the the apparently the best way that we have to do it is to use a non renewable

source for the hydrogen which then also gets us some pollution in the bargain so that's really not the ideal. That's not the ideal that seems to present itself when you talk about this wonderful source non polluting energy source. Well absolutely and I think that you know we've all gotten used to driving cars that are very expensive that that can be fuel rapidly and have a long range. You know these are features that are easy to do with a liquid fuel like gasoline because liquid liquids are easy to transport they're easy to store. They store a lot of energy and they give up that energy very quickly. We don't run very many vehicles on the planet on a guy. Past gases are very diffuse it's very hard to get a lot of gas in a tank to run your car obviously I don't think people want to buy cars that can only go 100 miles before refueling.

Particularly given that you know in the early stages of any transition you're going to have a shortage of fueling stations. You know we have a hundred eighty thousand gasoline stations in this country it would take a considerable amount of money to build you know tens of thousands of hydrogen fueling stations. So you are really limited by the fact that hydrogen is a gas and gases are hard to transport and store. Right now there's no good way to store hydrogen on board a car. And that remains sort of one of the biggest technical obstacles to making hydrogen cars. What I think has said in the book that you think that a significant number of hydrogen. To get to the point where we'd have a significant number of hydrogen powered vehicles on the road we're looking at maybe as long as 30 years from now. Yeah I mean I I I think that I mean I called the book the hype about

hydrogen because I really think that the near-term prospects for hydrogen cars have been very overhyped. I think it would be unlikely if very many people in your listening or listening audience purchased a hydrogen car in the next three decades in part because the technical challenge of making a car that would be comparable to your existing car is so difficult and in part because existing cars. Keep getting better. I mean that's that's been the case for all you know all alternative fuel vehicles the federal government and many private companies have tried over the last two decades to promote electric cars and natural gas vehicles and ethanol vehicles and methanol vehicles. And it's tough it's tough to get a car that is desirable from a consumer point of view. It's hard to get the fuel providers to build the fueling stations. Until people buy the cars. But it's

hard to get people to buy the cars if there's no fuel available that the famous chicken and egg problem. And at the same time regular cars keep getting better they get cleaner and these new hybrid vehicles that are generating a lot of excitement the Toyota Prius and soon the Ford Escape these really raise the bar for cars because there are these are cars that cut pollution and gasoline consumption directly but they don't they run on regular fuel that you can get anywhere and they don't cost any more. I mean they cost a little more but nothing like what most what a hydrogen car would cost. So you know I think realistically if people you know want to take action over the next 10 15 years to reduce the environmental impact of their car and to reduce their gasoline bill they're going to be buying a hybrid. Well just to make sure that I understand you. It sounds as if you're

saying that even if we could deal with all the technical challenges of building the vehicle figuring out how on the vehicle to store the fuel putting in a system of fueling stations so that people could go out and get hydrogen to put into the car it still wouldn't really make sense unless we also had a way of producing that hydrogen without without having to resort to non renewable sources for the hydrogen that is we'd have to figure out some way to either use solar power or wind or some something else something that we could use to power the process to generate that hydrogen that we then put. Into the system in that way that put in a vehicle. Exactly no you said it exactly right. The I don't think you know most of your listeners would get very excited about buying this expensive car which might have a limited range and limited fueling options all so that they could repel replace you know their current car running on imported

oil with a car that would run on hydrogen from natural gas which itself is increasingly going to be imported. It's not going to say you know it's not going to be that much superior from an environmental point of view you're still running on fossil fuels. So I don't think that that's you know I don't think that's going to generate a lot of sales and unfortunately hydrogen from renewable sources of energy is just very expensive eye. It would be very hard to. That you know renewable hydrogen for under $8 a gallon of gasoline equivalent. We're talking very expensive and I think you know people are pretty unhappy with gasoline at current levels you know of $2 $2 and 50 cents a gallon. Hydrogen is considerably more expensive even even what I would call dirty hydrogen from natural gas is going to be $4 a gallon

equivalent. But like I said if you if you want a green hydrogen environmentally benign hydrogen it is just very very expensive. Which sort of brings me to the one of the major points of the book. Is that it's not even a very good use of renewable energy. If you've got a wind turban if you've got a solar power plant what you should do with that electricity is replace coal plant with it because that would save a lot of pollution directly to to go to all the trouble of taking your renewable power and converting it to hydrogen and building the infrastructure to ship the hydrogen and then buying a fuel cell car just to replace a new fuel efficient car. The environmental benefits are small and you've spent a lot of money when you could have taken Like I said that renewable power directly and replaced a coal plant and saved a lot of pollution for not a lot of money. So you know I think that those of us who care about the

environment are top priority in the vehicle arena is fuel efficiency things like hybrid vehicles. And our top priority in the power sector is to see more renewable power and not new coal plants. We have a caller here to bring into the conversation and I would certainly welcome others. Let me introduce Again our guest Joseph Romm worked in the department of energy during the Clinton administration. He helped run the government's program on hydrogen and fuel cells. He's the author of a newly published book titled The hype about hydrogen fact and fiction in the race to save the climate it's published by the Island Press which puts out a lot of books on environmental topics. You can head out to the bookstore and look for it if you're interested. Also questions are welcome here. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Also we have a toll free line that's good. Anywhere that you can hear us that's eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5. First caller up is in the civil way on line 1.

Well hi how you doing. Hi I worked on a project one time too. There was a problem with transporting natural gas from Algeria over to the United States. And one of the things that we looked at was converting that you know instead of liquefying it and shipping a cryogenic way. We looked at converting the amount funnel and then shipping it over and then flipping it back to methane and a reformer. And I did. I just wonder you know has anyone you know why doesn't anyone look seriously at converting coal in the methanol because that's a good way of transporting the hydrogen essentially all the hydrogen comes from. Whenever you do that you have to add steam in the reformer and so you're converting the hydrogen from from water or steam and using the carbon as the carrier. Plus you have a mole of oxygen that comes along too. So you have a you know from an emission point of view

you have a very benign fuel that has good energy density and so on and so forth and I just think coal has been mean mouth so much you know that you know it's been overlooked as a as a good answer to our problem. Plus it's a strategic answer too. Well you have some thoughts about that. Absolutely. I think Cole obviously United States has a great deal of coal and we use it for about half of our electricity in the future because of global warming. We're going to have to do something about the CO2 emissions from coal. I think the caller is correct. You can make liquid fuels or even hydrogen from coal. And if we could figure out a way to take the CO2 that came out of that the carbon dioxide that came out of that process and store it underground what's called carbon sequestration if that

technical problem can be solved then I think we could continue to use coal without harming the cause of the climate. So I that is a very high priority and I I talk about that in the book. The U.S. government and other companies are working very hard to see if carbon capture and storage will work. It is not you know a technologically easy thing to do but it's certainly possible. And it might ultimately be practical someday when carbon dioxide has a price. I think there's no question by the way that. You know the price of gasoline is getting pretty high and a lot of people are concerned that we're running out of you know conventional oil and I think if the price of oil stays high like this people will look at alternatives you can certainly turn coal into various liquid fuels you could turn it into methanol You can also turn it into various

synthetic diesel fuel and you could turn it into hydrogen. So you know I think in the future we may get you know transportation fuel from lots of different sources. I would not be in favor of doing it from coal unless we can solve the problem of what to do with the carbon dioxide. You know we worked on another problem it was it was that one you mentioned CO2 sequence you know sequestering CO2 underground. Yeah. Every look at the material balance on even a small power plant like 75 megawatts. Oh you're talking unbelievable amounts of CO2 you have to remove and whenever you look at just the power that's needed to and the energy to remove the CO2 and concentrate it it goes and it sucks the efficiency of the power plant down by another 25 percent. It's bad. Yeah there's no question about that I think you know for me global warming is a problem that will ultimately be driving all

major energy decisions. We're not at that point yet but you know I think if you study the science as I have the United States is in great danger of being 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer at the end of the century than it is. Today Yeah that's an interesting problem. It is. And I think that what you will eventually see I think it's entirely possible is there will be a price for carbon dioxide much as there is already a price for sulfur dioxide emitted by power plants and that will encourage you know various strategies. You definitely lose efficiency when you sequester on the other hand if you do. If we can solve the problem of gasify in coal into you know as I'm sure you know a syn gas that's very rich in hydrogen you can now run a turban and you can make your coal plants more efficient so you you will lose some efficiencies in the Seaquest ration process but you'll gain some efficiency because you're now basically have

a high energy gas rather than coal right now. Tell you what want to look at your book. Well thanks for the call. We are already at our midpoint here and we will continue to talk with our guest Joseph Romm in just a moment however one thing we need to do first as it is the first Tuesday of the month we need to do this. This is a test of the Emergency Alert System. This message was instituted by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. This they have participating at a required monthly cap of the Illinois emergency like this that this is the most developed to provide information to the public during emergencies. There wasn't that. And this is Focus 580 here I am 583 morning talk program My name's David

Inge. Glad to have you with us again we're talking this morning with Joseph Romm about hydrogen and its potential to supply energy for us here in the future. He's authored a book on this it's titled The hype about hydrogen fact and fiction in the race to save the climate it's published by the Island Press. And we have a number of other callers here so we'll go next to a caller in champagne I believe here line number two. Two Ls thank you I very recently was a local GM dealerships looking at new cars and I asked them you know well are you guys going to be coming out with you know various hybrid vehicles in the near future and I was told that you know they were really looking that they were focusing on the fuel cell as you know the way they were going to go and when they said you know well and then they're going to do that in the next five years and I said Well from what I've heard that sounds pretty unrealistic but they were unfazed. No no no we're.

GM is really putting themselves into this and they're going to have it in the next five years and I just would like to get your you're thinking about that. Yes well certainly GM has been steadfast in claiming that they are going to have a fuel cell car by 2010. I think to be honest with you I've spoken to a great many people in and out of the auto industry and it's really only General Motors that continues to believe that fuel cell cars are going to be available in that timeframe. And I you know in the book I actually criticize them. I think it's increasingly obvious that hydrogen is not the strategy that is going to succeed in the marketplace in the next two decades in part just because there's not going to be any hydrogen fueling stations and hybrids on the other hand are becoming incredibly

popular. And you know you see Ford is going to be introducing an SUV hybrid I think. I think you know they're flying off of the dealer room floors. I mean here's a car that gives you reduced gasoline bill and increased range. You got to go to the fueling station as often reduce tailpipe emissions and. It can be fueled everywhere and you know compare that to a hydrogen car which is going to have difficulty with range and fueling options. Let me just read something that was in the May issue of Scientific American fuel cell cars. In contrast the hybrids are expected on about the same schedule as NASA's manned trip to Mars and have about the same level of likelihood. You know I think that GM is just making a huge mistake here giving a six year headstart to its major competitor Toyota

and and even giving you know a few year head start to Ford I personally think and I think this will become increasingly clear that the hybrid platform is the platform that will take over the vehicle market because not only because it's more efficient but it allows you to do much more sophisticated things much more vehicle control vehicle stability control much more efficient use of the onboard power. You have an electric motor on board so you can even accelerate and have HALL You can have the Excel aeration and hauling power of a diesel because electric motors are so you know so good at torque. So what I think will happen is that you know GM is going to be. Either come around quickly to realize that hybrids are the future and not hydrogen or they're going to lose market share across the board.

Well unfortunately I think you're probably right about that but they they seem pretty committed and people of the dealership you know they just you know they were they seemed confident about it. Yeah and the weird thing about it is that to me is that whether hydrogen cars can succeed or not. Partly that's in the hands of the auto makers can they build a car that you would want to buy but partly it's totally out of their hands. Is our PR the fueling companies going to take the gamble to build fueling stations because after all even if GM could deliver the world's greatest hydrogen car I doubt you would buy it unless you were very confident that you could find fuel for it everywhere you wanted to go. So you know I don't I don't think it's good business strategy to sort of bet your company or to invest so much into a technology whose success is to a large extent

completely out of your hands. All right well thank you. Thanks for the go. Well I wonder you know I think that there has been some criticism of the automakers for their enthusiasm and they're hyping hydrogen. Along these lines saying that what they're doing is they're talking about the benefits of hydrogen and saying that's going to be the next big thing and that they're then they don't actually have to put the money and the time into improving the technology that exists. And it seems like that the next big leap is going to be the hybrid which is going to continue to people are going to use the same filling stations are going to go they're going to they're going to put gasoline in the car. The but it's a because of the way this designed you'll get greater fuel efficiency and it will pollute less. No it seems that at least some automakers are really getting into the hybrid business and we ought to see more and more of them. But is that other criticism still good. The fact that that may be one

reason that automakers would want to talk so much about the hydra. Powered car is that it somehow allows them to defer making improvements in the existing car. Yes I mean that is a criticism that has certainly been been made. You know General Motors I mean no company likes to be regulated. And the car companies don't like fuel efficiency regulations and they have lobbied hard in the past 25 years and as I'm sure you know people realize we have not increased fuel economy standards in this country in 25 years. In fact we've opened up these loopholes so that you know sport utility vehicles don't even have to have the same fuel economy as cars. And then there's another loophole that vehicles that weigh over 80 500 pounds like the Ford Excursion and the Hummer aren't even counted in anybody's fuel economy averages so. Yes. Particularly General Motors has been trying very hard to convince people that

we shouldn't increase fuel efficiency standards for new cars and part of their argument has been hey hydrogen cars are right around the corner so don't make us build you know hybrids when hydrogen is just the silver bullet right around the corner and I think one of the points of the book and I think it's an increasing consensus in the technical community is that hydrogen cars are not right around the corner and I think that you know from an environmental point of view we can't wait for hydrogen cars to solve to address problems like oil imports and global warming. Those need to be addressed now with hybrids. And you know if you give fuel cells and hydrogen ultimately work you'll want to put those engines into hybrid vehicles anyway. I mean the thing about hybrids is that they capture the energy that otherwise lost when you break your car. And that's a lot of energy that's about 20 percent of the entire you

know driving cycle energy is lost in braking so that is a tremendous amount of energy to throw away and I think ultimately efficiency tends to win in the marketplace. So I do think most car companies are going to move towards hybrid certainly Toyota is going to and I think Conda has said so. And you know William Clay Ford has more and more started talking up hybrids. So I think you know I think hybrids are the wave of the next 25 years. We should keep doing the R&D on I just I'm not against that we should keep doing the R&D on biofuels and other technologies like that but we can't sit around waiting hoping that R and D solves our problem 25 years from now to be so large we won't be able to solve it. Well let's talk with some of the folks here the next caller is Atlanta Illinois Georgia.

You're on the line number four. Hello. Good morning Jeff. Congratulations on your book. You know I hear all the time about this hydrogen hype even from even people that should know better that it's going to be you know the Savior of our transportation system and obviously since you made it you're right. From a technical point of view why in the short term it isn't. Usually when I call in on these energy things you know the one thing that I hype as conservation as far as less right now in the short term anyway let's practice extreme conservation that maybe through education we could teach people the importance of. But I like your idea that the hybrid car that you know eventually hopefully will take over. Let's take this one step further I want to ask you a question. What do you think about completely changing our chance. Petition system maybe part of it would include cars like the hybrid car that we could use some other kind of transportation system that is really efficient and hand you know driving down the interstate in a hybrid car in a kind of car for long distance. To me is about the

most boring thing in the world. I think in the long term if we completely change our transportation system if we took the advertising angle of the freedom of the road which on the interstate you obviously don't have an I suppose a considerable amount of driving is done on the interstate. What about what do you think about completely changing our transportation system to something much more efficient maybe including several forms of ground transportation to get you to your point your point including you know including the hybrid car. I take it you mean some particularly doing what Europe does a lot more use of trains. Well of course I mean there's no question the trains are you know much more efficient way of getting people from point A to Point B. Americans have you know embraced cars to an amazing extent and in part that's because the government has spent so much money you know subsidizing car transportation and highways. My feeling is is that

at current gasoline prices and current levels of concern about the environment people aren't going to change their behavior a lot. 20 30 years from now I do expect the world will be a very different place. I think that come the 2020s it will sort of become increasingly clear that we are running out of conventional oil and gasoline prices could well be higher than they are today. And I also think that. People will see just how radically the climate starts to change over the next couple of decades and they're going to understand that driving you know driving down a highway in an SUV has very severe consequences for everyone on the planet. So you know I'm not expecting a lot of change in the modes of travel in this country for the next two decades. But I I have no doubt that let's say come the year

2050 people are not going to be driving the kinds of vehicles they are today. And I I would not be surprised if we see you know a greater use of train travel as the the full impact of burning oil becomes clear to everybody. Well yeah I think you know I think you're probably right just talking to people generally you know I have friends in the south don't care what gasoline prices are I'm going to drive or I want to go on. To me that's ludicrous I mean obviously the high prices are kind of a rationing tool. But as far as other you know the train as we know it today. I don't necessarily mean that but it seems like on a larger scale transportation like that you know Europe still basically in most cases a train like we do here. But it seems like their technology could really move to the forefront and. But. Education particularly if you have you know the pleasures of reading

or watching a movie or whatever you do on on a longer travel and things like the car the main thing about the car that is that is the field of American psyche is the advertising you know the freedom of the road and control but really you know driving a car is pretty gruesome. I mean particularly if you're going long distance the sun going up I agree with you I hope it happens before 2050 but you're probably right it probably won't. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the call. Let's go on here to battle for another color line one. Hello. Oh I thank you for pulling all this hydrogen bubble. I wonder if there isn't a similar problem with with ethanol people around here are very interested in ethanol claiming it's renewable. But if you look at the figures you see that three quarters of the energy that you get out of it that you get from ethanol is used in the production that it's split about one third with

petroleum and one third with natural gas. We're through with coal and so given that how how can you consider ethanol a renewable fuel even though you are you are. You're absolutely correct. That you know the way we make ethanol today we make it from corn from the the starchy the edible part of corn and clearly agriculture is very energy intensive and to go to all the trouble of growing corn just take out the part that we could eat and turn it into fuel that that is not a very efficient process. The hope has been and when I was at the Department of Energy we pursued ethanol that would be made from biomass from any plant matter not just sort of the edible part. And in fact ultimately might be made from dedicated crops that were you know switch grass or fast growing

trees that were designated for that use where the energy intensity of the process is far lower. And so indeed in this country a tremendous amount of work has been growing into this so it's called sometimes called cellulosic ethanol as opposed to the corn based ethanol. There is not yet a commercial plant to make such cellulosic ethanol but you will see I think over the next few years they will start to sprout up some certainly. By 2010 I think you'll see these plants. The fuel is still a bit pricey but with the price of gasoline it's certainly getting close. The goal though is you're quite right is a ethanol whose energy input to energy takes to make the ethanol has got to be a lot less than the energy to grow corn. If this is going to be something that makes sense.

Well if if you're going to use this material to make ethanol I just don't quite understand it because when are the. My impression is that making methanol is more efficient than you get just as good of a liquid fuel through a lot of methanol. Yes. And you know the methanol. A lot of people have tried very hard with methanol as I'm sure you know there's a lot of concern about the toxicity. If you talk to the fuel companies the shelves in the BP in the Exxon they're not that thrilled with methanol because they feel that you know you look at what happened in California and with all the issues around environmental regulations they they don't think that the public is going to embrace methanol the the main nice feature about ethanol is that you can blend it straight into gasoline

and you even up to like 10 percent you don't have to modify your car at all you're any car in the country can run on a blend of 10 percent ethanol 90 percent gasoline. And there are many flexible fuel vehicles on the road they can actually run on an 85 percent ethanol mixture. So might My guess is that although what you say is true about methanol it has proven to be a very hard sell to a lot of companies in the alternative fuel of the coal market. Well thank you very much. Thanks for the call we have about 10. Minutes left let me introduce Again our guest Joseph Romm. He helped oversee hydrogen in transportation fuel cell research in various positions in the department of energy during the Clinton administration. He's the author of a book titled The hype about hydrogen fact and fiction in the race to save the climate it's published by Island Press is in bookstores now if you want to look at it. We have some other callers here and next someone in urban Oh lie number three.

Well first I'd like to say to her a for the guy who is pushing public transportation that is just so much better than driving long distances which is just horrifically boring. But I think people have to drive because they have no other choice. And it's not because we want to drive it's just that we have no choice. I mean if I want to go to Indianapolis two hours away from here and I want to take public transportation it takes about 10 hours or so. If he gets out first and anyway. But my question is coming from a place of extreme ignorance here I. I realize that hydrogen to me sounds like something extremely explosive not on you could get into more specifics about how it is that it works and how it is that your car doesn't burst into flames if you get into that crash. Sure no good question I'd talk about the safety issue. You know in the book all fuels that could run a car are explosive. They burn gasoline obviously burns and causes a lot

of fires. Hydrogen is an exceedingly flammable gas it is probably the most flammable of all gases and it's particularly dangerous because it's invisible and it burns invisibly. So you can have these invisible fires and that's why when hydrogen is used in industrial settings there are very strict codes and standards about how you work and operate around hydrogen in cars I think the safety issue is quite legitimate. What. Most people talk about these days is very high pressure canisters canisters that are like those big metal tanks that you see in hospitals or universities that carry gases under high pressure. In this case we're talking about very high pressure like 5000 pounds per square inch presumably these canisters would be very very strong and they would not break or burst during an accident. Personally

I think that the wind and the more people learn about hydrogen as a fuel. They're probably not going to be that comfortable with you know having high pressure canisters in their cars and at their fueling stations. And I've many most of the automakers have said that they don't think that that way of storing hydrogen is something they want to expose the public to. So most people think we need a major breakthrough in hydrogen storage that storing hydrogen under high pressure is not practical and that we're going to need some some whole new material that will store. Hydrogen very safely but I think you're absolutely correct in that there are there are legitimate safety concerns around hydrogen just as there are there as you know with natural gas and and gasoline. But we've gotten used to gasoline. I think hydrogen introduces other problems that that may take that may cause some concern. So no more explosives in gasoline car.

Well it's very different than gasoline gasoline. You know one of the biggest problems with gasoline is that in an accident gasoline can splatter and it can pool. So if there's a leak you know it can pool on the floor and it can catch fire or it could splatter on you. Hydrogen of course being a gas it would it would if there were an accident it would tend to go up and. Dissipate though some people consider that to be an advantage has its disadvantage is that it's very leaky so that if you had it in a garage it might leak out and collect in your garage and then because it it could be trapped in your garage and it might get easily ignited it's incredibly It can be ignited by things like a cell phone. So it's very easy to ignite. That's why an industry wherever you've got a lot of hydrogen you have to have massive ventilation. So it can't get caught in a bubble. A My concern is that would

be Get it would be expensive and difficult to enforce those regulations with millions of people and millions of people's garages you know how would you guarantee that there's massive ventilation though. I think you know there are many practical issues that that will complicate any transition to any any fuel frankly. I can't thank you. Let's go to Charleston for for someone else here. Hello. Yes hi to praise the idea of safe. Simply public transport again. We had it once but it's gone. In any case my question is about the emissions both from the hybrids and from ethanol I've read a piece a little time back about the pollution from the combination of gasoline ethanol is a new sort of situation which is more polluting more Blois in the span of

gasoline. Holland let him ring off and wait for your answer. Thank All right. Thank you. Yeah I mean ethanol. Well let me just talk about gasoline hybrids first the the newest hybrids like the Toyota Prius and the Ford Escape are designated partial zero emission vehicles and that means if they run low sulfur gasoline which will be mandatory nationwide in two years. These are very low polluting vehicles. They literally have about one tenth the tailpipe emissions of existing cars and for instance the the air coming out of those cars is cleaner than Los Angeles air. So that's a very good thing and I think. People who care about the environment should should look not only for hybrids but for these partial they're called Peace and partial zero emission vehicles ethanol. You know it

is an oxygen ated. It's supposed to be designed to reduce carbon monoxide. There are certainly issues about other emissions. I think most people believe that you can design the car so that it has ultra low emissions with an ethanol blend. But there's no question that you know ethanol is not a you know pollution free fuel in the way that electricity could be for an electric car. Or hydrogen could be in a fuel cell which is the most the point that we have to finish I do want to ask you. Quickly because some people have talked about the potential for the fuel cell for all kinds of applications vehicles. Yes but also things like cell phones and laptop computers and also for residences and for buildings where do you think that there is a place for a particular stationary fuel cell and something like a home or a larger building.

Well I'm glad you asked that I actually the book has a couple of chapters on stationary fuel cells stationary fuel cells and they would run on natural gas directly converted to hydrogen. They are very efficient very low polluting. I think they're very promising. I would be surprised if they don't scale down in size very well so I would be surprised if you saw them in a lot of people's homes but you might well see them in commercial buildings and industrial facilities and power plants. My guess is that not this decade but next decade that may be the decade of the stationary fuel cell. And they might be quite popular and it is also entirely possible that they become popular for for laptops and cell phones that there are a lot of companies racing to develop the these tiny micro fuel cells and they may well succeed. Well there will have to leave it with our thanks to our guest Joseph Romm. He's the author of

the book the hype about hydrogen fact and fiction in the race to save the climate. He helped oversee hydrogen and transportation fuel cell research in various positions in the apartment of energy during the Clinton administration Dr. Ron thanks very much for talking with us. You're quite welcome.