What are the chances of a successful hydrogen-based economy? Can the US make the switch? Is it a pipe-dream? Is there another realistic option?
This question is better suited for great debates as there is likely no concise factual answer. Specific questions about hydrogen economy are fine and several of those questions have been asked already and may be found with a quick search. I will let a moderator know this post may be better in a different forum. The search is worth it as a lot of people here have posted on the topic.
The short version:
There will never be a hydrogen based “economy” There’s no point in replacing powr lines with hydrogen batteries. Hydrogen is a good way of storing energy though, so it may see a lot of use in vehicles.
There is nothing inherently impossible about a hydrogen-based economy. In that sense, there is hope.
As it currently stands, the cost of transitioning to an HBecon plus the risks involved in a poor transition are higher than the potential savings. So, we aren’t likely to make a massive jump.
The key to the process is plan the transition as a series of small steps, which will minimize the risk.
The first steps are to develop an efficient low-temperature fuel cell for extracting energy from hydrogen and to develop an efficient process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen. (Note: it will always take more energy to split the water molecule than you get from reconstituting, but we need to get them closer together.)
With that development, you have the building blocks for the HBecon. A solar collector or wind turbine can store excess energy as hydrogen, so it is available when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. A vehicle running on hydrogen combustion can have similar performance to a gasoline combustion vehicle.
In the beginning, none of those choices will be correct for everyone but will be appealing to some. As the technology is adopted, the benefits of further adoption should increase and the risks go down. When/whether hydrogen replaces oil in the economy depends upon how efficient we can make the hydrogen processes and how volatile the oil markets get.
Think of us as living in a time similar to just after Alexander Bell shouted to James Watson down a wire of copper. Some dreamer might say “Can you imagine a day when a telephone would sit in every home and you could talk to anyone in the country?”, and hard core realist would say “Nonsense, that would cost too much. We’ll just run the phone lines in place of the telegraph lines so that the operators don’t have to keep using Morse code.” Nevermind talk of fax machines, cell phones or the internet.
In summary, as a response to the question:
There is high hope for a partially hydrogen based economy, where it replaces crude oil for a small percentage of the nation’s energy needs.
There is decent hope for a significant hydrogen based economy, where it replaces crude oil for a significant percentage of the nation’s energy needs.
There is some hope for a massively hydrogen based economy, where it replaces crude oil for nearly all of the nation’s energy needs.
As with any hope, though, there is a need for leadership, action and money… and even with massive amounts of those, there is still a risk of failure.
I am not sure about hydrogen based Economy. Hopefully it will replace gasoline Internal combustion Engines.
I think to get off the oil based current system, I large number of Technologies will come into play.
We will roll out Fuel Cell, but also Solar & Wind.
We might even someday achieve the Holy Grail on Energy production: Fusion.
We can build safer Fission plants, but much public resistance and waste storage problems.
Solar is projected (Projected only) for two major developments in next 10 years.
They expect to have a cheap plastic based solar Photovoltaic cells at 1/10 current costs and about 20% efficiencies.
They also believe current technology will improve to the 32% range.
Wind Power and Solar Chimney’s offer a lot of power opportunities.
To power large cities, we will still need large power plants. Neither Solar nor Wind will handle this.
Our Government could push for several things President Carter tried for in late 70’s.
The Energy Star guidelines should be beefed up.
If we consume less power per capita our need to build extra capacity would decrease, freeing money to invest in the alternate Technologies developing.
IIRC, in the book Why Things Break the author discusses a fundamental problem of a hydrogen economy: hydrogen makes many materials brittle and easy to break. You’ll have to go to the reference itself for a discussion—a very, very non-technical discussion—of the issue. According to an Amazon editorial review, the author, Mark Eberhart, is talking about hydrogen-powered cars specifically; however, it seems like it’d be relevant to a fully hydrogen powered economy.
I hadn’t intended to debate but I disagree with the last two statements because of the low energy density of hydrogen. I think Hydrogen has potential for an energy storage medium for locally generated wind an solar power. Who cares about bulky fuel in basement tanks? As for cars I see less use for it because the low energy density will make it difficult to make fuel tanks big enough to give cars a decent range.
I would not say we could have an economy that was truly hydrogen based, but we could have an economy of which hydrogen is a significant part. The reason I would not call an economy hydrogen-based is that you always need some other energy source to produce the hydrogen in the first place. If, for instance, we produced the hydrogen using coal-powered generators (probably the most straightforward possibility), then I argue that that would be a coal-based economy (which would probably still be preferable to a largely oil-based economy such as we have currently).
One of the big advantages of hydrogen cars, though, is that they adapt seamlessly to other advances. Once the infrastructure is in place for hydrogen production and refueling, it doesn’t matter where the electricity is coming from. If we start building practical solar power plants, or wind, or tidal, or even the Holy Grail fusion, we would then be able to switch over to a solar or fusion or what-not based economy with the flip of a switch. We would not, at that point, have to replace all of the hydrogen refueling stations, or the hydrogen production plants.
The phrase ‘hydrogen-based economy’ is very misleading.
Hydrogen is just a battery to STORE power, nothing else. It has nothing to do with how the power is generated (wind, solar, burning coal, vast hampster-wheel arrays, or what-have-you).
Hydrogen power-storage technology is still developing, but at this point, while it might end up being better for many applications than good old lead-acid/NiCad/whatever batteries, there’s no reason to think it’s going to be so much better that it will radically change things. Just a slightly more efficient battery. If someone invented an improved lead-acid battery with ten times the power capacity per weight, then hydrogen fuels would be abandoned for most purposes.
So talking about an ‘economy’ doesn’t really make sense. Clearly, nobody’s going to be paid in hydrogen or anything. And hydrogen won’t be the focus of most economic activity any more than copper (used to carry electricity around) is the focus of most activities right now (for electricians, yes. The whole economy, no.).
Calling out current arrangement a ‘fossil fuel economy’ does make some sense, as most of our power comes from fossil fuels, and finding and extracting it does drive quite a bit of our economy (and, many argue, our foreign policy).