Costs of Switching to the Hydrogen Economy

Okay, in the June 2003 issue of Business 2.0, they have an article on an Accenture consultant’s plan to switch the US over to a hydrogen economy by 2020. To do this, would require $10 billion dollars a year in government subsidies for the automakers to build hydrogen cars, plus the oil companies spending some $280 billion between 2005 (when the first hydrogen powered cars could be expected to begin rolling off the assembly lines) and 2020. The hydrogen would be produced by on-board reformers which would convert natural gas into hydrogen that would then be processed by fuel cells.

The oil industry isn’t exactly thrilled by this proposal, and disputes some of Accenture’s numbers, however it’s attracted the support of former Betchel president (one of the world’s largest builders of pipelines and powerplants) George Shultz ([Troy McClure] You might remember him from such administrations as the Reagan/Bush Administration.[/TM]) You can read a piece by Accenture discussing the proposal here.

This plan would have fuel cell cars completely taking over new car sales by 2015, whereas the Bush administration’s plan wouldn’t have that happening until 2040.

It sounds good, but I gotta ask: Why not simply run cars off natural gas and scrape the fuel cells? That’d be cheaper.

Seems like an attempt to look like bold environmentalists by making a big step when a smaller step like cars made to run on propane could be done much more cheaply and effectively.

Whatever the price, it will be a lot less than another 9-11. How many trillions of dollars has terrorism cost the world to date?

Now if they had been as skilled at hijacking as Zenster apparently is, the cost would have been much greater…

Please excuse my ignorance, but by using natural gas and propane wouldn’t be just be setting ourselves up for more of the same fossil fuel problems in a short time?

Not necessarily. By using those fuels, we stop a lot of money from going outside the country (since the US does have massive natural gas reserves), this money can then be invested in finding cheap ways of producing hydrogen (namely building CANDU-type reactors, sun and windfarms) by splitting water.

Propane burns so much cleaner than gasoline that a 1950s era car running on it would be almost as clean as the newest cars are. Additionally, it performs similar enough to gasoline that people could easilly get used to it and say to themselves “Hmm, this alternative fuel is actually pretty good maybe I can give some of the others a chance”.

I’ve been looking for the issue of Car & Driver which discusses propane powered cars, but I haven’t been able to find it. IAC, as I recall, propane powered vehicles tend to be “wimpier” than their gasoline counterparts. This isn’t to say that car companies couldn’t fix the problem on subsequent models, but someone who had their car converted over to propane would definately notice the difference.

There seems to be this myth that we’re the OPEC of natural gas. We’re not. And according to Alan Greenspan, the era of cheap natural gas is over.

Carry on.

Here is a pretty good article on LPG cars.

www.wps.com/LPG/LPG-book-final.html

Notice, though what Greenspan says here:

IOW, the main reason for the shortage is that we’re not aggressively drilling new wells, not that we’re about to run out of LNG.