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Making the Transition to the Hydrogen Economy

By Eric McErlain
In the January/February issue of The American Enterprise, William Tucker points out one of the unique advantages of nuclear energy's environmental footprint when it comes to hydrogen production:
Paul Grant of the Electric Power Research Institute has done a fair and objective job of trying to calculate exactly how much power would be required to shift our transportation sector to hydrogen. "Fuel cells now convert 50 percent of their hydrogen energy back to electricity, but let's assume that future technologies can reach 80 percent--which is remarkably high," he says. "With other conversion factors, we would need roughly 230,000 tons of hydrogen a day in liquid form to run our current transportation sector. Producing this would require 400 gigawatts of continuously available electrical power--which is almost double our present capacity.

"To meet this demand, we would need 800 new natural gas generating plants, 500 larger coal plants, 200 new Hoover dams, or 100 French-type nuclear clusters, which are made up of four 1,000-megawatt plants. The total amount of space taken up by the nuclear plants would be 80 square miles--about the size of the District of Columbia. The wind option would require covering 50,000 square miles, the size of New York State. Efficient solar collectors would cover 5,000 square miles, about the size of Connecticut." (Lovins is even less optimistic. He wants to use all of North and South Dakota--150,000 square miles--for the windmill option.)

Grant summarizes the stark realities this way: "If you're really serious about cutting our fossil fuel consumption with hydrogen, nuclear power seems the only sensible option."

In a followup piece that was posted this morning, Tucker had this to say:
As I pointed out in my TAE article, the only realistic scenario for "kicking the oil habit" is to power America's auto fleet with a combination of electricity and hydrogen-from-electricity. The only environmentally benign way to produce this electricity--twice what we consume now--will be nuclear power.

The question is this: Will we experience the whole transition as another "energy crisis?" Or will we start now making a smooth transition to a nuclear-hydrogen economy?

And as the New York Times reported over the weekend, some Americans fed up with rising gas prices aren't waiting to be told:
Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet . . .

"I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon," said Mr. Gremban, an engineer at CalCars, a small nonprofit group based in Palo Alto, Calif. He gets 40 to 45 miles per gallon driving his normal Prius. And EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 m.p.g. and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.

"If you cover people's daily commute, maybe they'll go to the gas station once a month," said Mr. Kramer, the founder of CalCars. "That's the whole idea."

For more information on the potential of the hydrogen economy, click here.

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