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Iredell's hydrogen
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Published: March 4, 2009
Last week at a South Carolina conference on energy as a growth business in the South, one of the speakers hacked up the old media myth that "hydrogen is still years in the future." Like a B-movie zombie that claws its way back out of the grave, the "hydrogen-is-a-long-way-off" myth comes back over and over.
Often those who spout this chestnut go to pontificate that "it will take years to build a hydrogen infrastructure."
What a crock.
A U.S. hydrogen infrastructure has been around for decades, serving industrial customers all over the country. Cardinal Float Glass right here in Mooresville is a hydrogen user. True, retail dispensing pumps are yet to be deployed but that's a far cry from a whole "missing infrastructure."
The parallel story is diesel for passenger cars. The fact that no corner filling stations (remember filling stations?) had diesel pumps did not keep Ford, Chrysler, GM and even Volkswagen from rolling out consumer vehicles to take advantage of the higher per?gallon mileage and lower cost of diesel.
Like hydrogen, diesel had a well?established infrastructure serving industry—the nation's truck fleets. And just as truck stops helped bridge the gap when diesel cars first emerged, some industrial users may bridge the gap during the hydrogen transition.
As soon as a retail market for diesel emerged, pumps appeared at enough convenience stores to meet the need. The same will happen with hydrogen.
Those who work in the industrial gas business tell me that the amount of hydrogen already sold for non-vehicular use is so great that if hydrogen cars of many brands were already in show rooms and on the roads, it would take years before the H2 they need would make a dent in the existing commercial H2 flow.
That's not to say that the infrastructure won't need to evolve. Today most hydrogen still comes from fossil natural gas so carbon dioxide is a waste product from its production.
In the future, nuclear power and renewable electric sources will be the growing fraction of the hydrogen supply. The implication: a cleaner hydrogen infrastructure is in the wings.
Much of the "no infrastructure" myth probably stems from the fact that we know so much about where oil comes from. The news from Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Alaska and Venezuela sees to that.
It's not surprising that those not yet familiar with the hydrogen economy would jump to the conclusion that a comparable international hydrogen infrastructure must be built.
But that's not the case. To illustrate, let's bring hydrogen right home to Mooresville. From what sources will our first hydrogen Hondas, BMWs and their Ford, GM and Chrysler siblings get Iredell hydrogen?
Here's an educated guess. I don't have any inside information.
The very first vehicle hydrogen may come from the most common source, natural gas reformers in California, trucked East in tube trailers pulled to NC by diesel tractor trucks. The first retail outlets seem likely to be the oil companies with hydrogen divisions or subsidiaries. Shell Hydrogen has been among the most conspicuous at deploying stations in DC an elsewhere, so they're a good bet.
Given the greater commitment of the Obama Administration to world collaboration on carbon and climate change reduction, non-carbon H2 sources seem likely to be given both regulatory and economic precedence. That could mean that companies like Air Products which harvest byproduct hydrogen from chemical manufacturing might have an early edge.
Everything will depend on how well zero-carbon hydrogen is incented by government. If it's sufficiently encouraged, one intriguing possibility is to redirect to electrolysis a fraction of the hydroelectric power freed-up when Alcoa's four-dam system on the Yadkin ceased powering aluminum smelting.
If the numbers can be made to sing, central North Carolina (including Mooresville) could have an in-State, zero-carbon, renewable source for all the hydrogen its cars could use for perhaps the next decade.
Over the longer term, next door neighbor South Carolina has opted to be a nuclear electricity leader. That means a lot of zero-carbon electricity might become available to electrolyze hydrogen from water.
And, perhaps in the same timeframe, thermochemical water splitting technology may come online. Dr. Bill Summers at the National Hydrogen Lab at Savannah River has already demonstrated a relatively simple system that makes hydrogen from high temperature heat and water.
A related technology is being developed by Dr. Greg Naterer of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology; it just might split water using waste heat from power plants. If the technology works as hoped, bulk hydrogen could be mass?produced for only the cost of construction, since the feed energy would be what we now dump into lakes and the air.
It's still vision, not availability, that sets our hydrogen time-line.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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