Living Without Oil
As war looms, the search for new energy alternatives is all the more urgent
Although President Bush called hydrogen a "pollution free" technology, that isn't necessarily the case. Extracting hydrogen from its most common source, water, requires electricity. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham says that electricity could come from coal, a domestic but dirty source, or from nuclear energy, an option whose expansion the U.S. public has not welcomed. Hydrogen also can be gleaned from gasoline, an idea that has garnered notable support from Big Oil. Environmentalists want to see large amounts of new wind and solar power deployed to help generate the fuel, and the Bush plan would put most funding toward that goal. But wind power, although competitive and growing at a rate of 28 percent last year, still accounts for less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity. Expensive solar's footprint is even smaller. Until renewable energy is more widespread, many suspect that hydrogen will be manufactured out of a clean, though not ideal, alternative fuel, natural gas.
That's the hope of H2Gen of Alexandria, Va., which plans to roll out its first on-site hydrogen generation stations using natural gas later this year. The company hopes to silence critics who say distributing hydrogen would be prohibitively expensive, requiring either tanker trucks of liquid hydrogen or construction of a new nationwide pipeline system. H2Gen's idea is to hook its 6-by-7-foot fueling stations to existing natural gas lines and, through an on-site chemical process, extract hydrogen at a cost competitive with that of gasoline. "We see ourselves as a transition to the renewable hydrogen future," when there's enough wind and solar energy to produce hydrogen from water, says Sandy Thomas, company president.
When consumers begin to see hydrogen cars in showrooms, which General Motors Vice President Larry Burns thinks will be by 2015, they may not be recognizable. GM's version, the Hy-wire, has no hood, steering wheel, or pedals. The driver uses handgrips to steer, accelerate, and brake while looking out through a floor-to-ceiling windshield. "We think we can truly reinvent the automobile and the industry around the fuel cell and make good money doing that," says Burns.
High stakes. But with terrorism a national concern, many observers see 12 years as too long to wait for the country to wean itself from Middle East oil. Given the high stakes, is any alternative ready now? U.S. farms and fields have yielded some homegrown energy choices, like biodiesel, natural gas, and ethanol, but it has been hard for them to challenge the entrenched oil industry with its relatively low prices and robust infrastructure. Biodiesel would seem to have the inside track; it can be pumped into nearly any diesel engine tank with no modification. In fact, Rudolph Diesel used peanut oil to power the engine he debuted at the 1900 World's Fair. Biodiesel can be made from any fat or vegetable oil--even used and purified kitchen grease--although it is usually made from the nation's second-biggest crop, soybeans. Environmental benefits are impressive; 100 percent biodiesel eliminates sulfur emissions and cuts particulate matter and some other pollutants by about 50 percent.
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