A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” This well-worn quotation (usually ascribed to Senator Everett Dirksen (1896-1969)) has a habit of springing to mind when perusing the US Department of Energy’s annual budget proposals.
A striking feature of the latest budget request, for FY 2004, issued on 3 February, is the increasing prominence given to research in support of a transition to the hydrogen economy, with $1.7 billion proposed over the next five years to develop fuel cells, hydrogen infrastructure and hydrogen-based automotive technologies.
Building on the FreedomCAR(Co-operative Automotive Research) publicprivate initiative launched in January 2002, the latest budget proposal includes a new hydrogen programme, called FreedomFuel, and seeks a doubling of DoE spending on hydrogen research and development in 2004 alone.
With hydrogen fuel cells about ten times more expensive than internal combustion engines and hydrogen fuel costing about five times more to produce than petrol, there is of course a long way to go.
But from the president downwards, the current US administration seems increasingly enamoured of hydrogen as a solution to energy ills. It has been mentioned in several recent speeches by George Bush, notably in his 28 January State of the Union address.
Neither can Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham be accused of downplaying the potential benefits. “A hydrogen economy will mean a world where our pollution problems are solved, ” he claims, “and where our need for abundant and affordable energy is secure…and where concerns about dwindling resources are a thing of the past.” In fact, he believes that “someday…Americans will look back on the transition to a hydrogen economy as one of the most important if not the most important national scientific/technological achievements in our history.” The key attraction of hydrogen for Americans is that they can produce it from indigenous sources from feedstocks such as natural gas (eg by steam reforming, which is already well established), coal and biomass (eg by gasification), and even water (eg by nuclear or renewables powered electrolysis) and it can be used as a clean fuel for transport.
This provides a route out of dependence on oil imports. The USA currently imports over 50 per cent of its oil and if current trends continue this figure would rise to 70 per cent, with around three-quarters of it going to transport.
With his proposed hydrogen programme, Spencer Abraham estimates that “by 2020 we will have begun to reduce our reliance on imported oil, and to eliminate polluting emissions and greenhouse gases and we will have done it without affecting the freedom of personal mobility Americans demand.” The hydrogen strategy is an example of what might be called the “vision and roadmap” process that US DoE increasingly uses to chart R&D plans for the longer term. Underpinning the strategy is the National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, launched by Spencer Abraham late last year, which in turn came out of a gathering of hydrogen visionaries in November 2001 who produced a document entitled A national vision of America’s transition to a hydrogen economy – to 2030 and beyond (published in February 2002).
A similar roadmap has been drawn up for future (Generation IV) nuclear reactor designs (see pp 28-29). And in FY 2004 yet another roadmap is planned which will bring together the themes of hydrogen and nuclear power. This will be part of the new Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative, which is also included in the US DoE’s latest proposed budget.
Powering the hydrogen economy with emissions-free nuclear plants raises some very interesting possibilities. Well worth further research is thermo-chemical splitting of water (promising some advantages over electrolysis). Such thermochemical processes need very high temperatures, in the region of 800°C to 1000°C, and the USDoE believes that advanced high temperature gas-cooled reactors (of the kind being investigated in the Generation IV exercise) could fit the bill. Indeed, according to the US DoE “preliminary estimates indicate that hydrogen produced using nuclear-driven thermo-chemical processes would be only slightly more expensive than gasoline without emissions-avoidance incentives.” The Japanese are potential leaders in this field. Their 30 MWt helium-cooled HTTR (High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor) has already achieved a core outlet temperature of 850°C, with plans to go to 950°C shortly. Future proposals include equipping the reactor with natural gas steam reforming and beyond that the possibility of using it as the power source for thermochemical splitting employing the IS (iodinesulphur) cycle (as proposed by GA in the early 1980s these things certainly don’t happen overnight).
EPRI founder Chauncey Starr (90 last April) is also having visions of a nuclear-hydrogen fuelled future. He is proposing what he calls the continental SuperGrid essentially an integrated energy pipeline for the USA delivering both nuclear generated electricity (via superconductor) and hydrogen (which is also used to cool the superconductor). Starr reckons costs will be “on the order of $ 1 trillion at an average rate of $10 billion year” a case of ten billion here, ten billion there.
But Starr is unashamed of his “outside the box” thinking. Many technologies we now take for granted were, in Starr’s words, “initially ‘outside the box’ of their period.”