MH,
When I read things that Amory Lovins say about energy savings in
residential and tertiary buildings, he normally make a lot of sense, but on
hydrogen and fuel cells efficiency he is "way out". In best case a
hydrogen/fuel cell vehicle have the same efficiency as a gasoline, but will
in most cases have a lower efficiency. This if you start from energy
source. EVs or even biodiesel hybrids beat the hydrogen/fuel cell with a
large margin.
Hakan
At 12:55 AM 10/14/2004, you wrote:
Hydrogen or Biofuels?
September / October 2004
By Amory Lovins and David Morris
Utne magazine
http://www.utne.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=utne&story.id=11334
Two experts go head-to-head on the future of energy
In our January-February 2004 issue, we reprinted from Alternet an
essay by local-economy advocate David Morris, vice president of the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in which he takes aim at the
advocates of a hydrogen-based economy, asserting, among other things,
that because large energy interests are poised to dominate the
process of generating hydrogen from substances like gas, oil, and coal,
the push to hydrogen will actually be a setback for renewable energy
from wind power, biomass, and other sources. Energy analyst Amory B. Lovins,
CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, and a
prominent advocate of hydrogen fuel cell technology, responds.
FROM AMORY LOVINS
In voicing skepticism about the role of hydrogen in our energy future,
my valued friend David Morris makes several points:
He is understandably frustrated that hydrogen will initially be made
mainly from natural gas, as 96 percent of U.S. hydrogen is now. But he
wrongly thinks this will waste energy and increase carbon dioxide emissions.
Because fuel cells are two to three times more efficient than gasoline
engines,
CO2 per mile will actually drop by 40 to 67 percent compared with today's
gasoline cars -- and much more with efficient car designs.
He's irritated that nuclear advocates claim they'll be the hydrogen
producers. But they won't be -- their option costs far too much.
He's worried that hydrogen might come from coal. This is a real
possibility later, but by then we will have good ways to keep
the carbon out of the air.
Because General Motors likes fuel cells, he assumes that car and
oil companies are preparing for an oil-based hydrogen future.
Generally, they're not.
He thinks hydrogen will be too costly to distribute.
Wrong -- the Swiss study he cites [which claimed that
the compacting of this very light and diffuse element for
storage and transport is too costly and energy-intensive]
considered only the clearly uneconomic options and ignored
hydrogen's advantage of more efficient use.
He thinks a hydrogen transition will need "hundreds of billions of
dollars" of new infrastructure. This is a vast overestimate.
He doesn't recognize hydrogen's important potential to
accelerate the adoption of renewable energy.
Many environmentalists suspect the Bush administration's
enthusiasm for hydrogen serves mainly to distract attention from
the short-term energy steps they're unwilling to take. It's
impossible to tell from the outside whether that's true or not,
but if it is, this self-inflicted wound is not a reason to
reject a sound hydrogen transition as a complementary part of
a broader energy strategy starting with aggressive efficiency,
renewable energy, and distributed resources.
Many other good and usually well-informed people have written
similar critiques of hydrogen. A well-documented response,
"Twenty Hydrogen Myths," is free at http://www.rmi.org
FROM DAVID MORRIS
My esteemed colleague Amory Lovins and I agree and disagree.
We both focus on the transportation sector. We both favor a
dramatic improvement in vehicle efficiency and the
replacement of gasoline with a domestically produced,
environmentally benign fuel.
We disagree on how to achieve these objectives.
Amory advocates fuel cell vehicles that run on hydrogen.
I propose hybrid electric vehicles fueled by electricity
and biofuels like ethanol.
I believe my strategy is far cheaper and far quicker to
implement than Amory's. Hybrid vehicles, which use
electric motors as well as an engine for power, are
commercially available. They already achieve fuel
efficiencies as great as those promised by fuel cell cars.
With modest modifications, hybrids can be made to plug into
the electric grid to charge their batteries. That allows
electricity to become their primary fuel and reduces by some
85 percent the amount of fuel needed by the engine.
In turn, this allows us to think of biofuels like ethanol as
replacements for gasoline rather than, as now, simply additives
to it. Unlike hydrogen, ethanol is already widely available.
Ethanol is half the price of hydrogen today and may have a
still lower price a decade from now. Cars that operate on either
ethanol or gasoline -- or any combination of the two -- can be
made at an additional cost of $150 per vehicle. More than
4 million are on the road right now. The most optimistic estimate
of the additional cost for a fuel cell car in 2015 is $10,000;
most estimates are considerably higher. Ethanol refueling stations
cost 90 percent less than hydrogen refueling stations.
Hydrogen advocates should be applauded for proposing a solution
commensurate with the problem. But a better strategy exists.
Much more detail can be found in my recent report
"A Better Way to Get from Here to There,"
which can be found at http://www.newrules.org
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