DC, AC, now HC — plus hydrogen as a portal

by guest blogger Stan Thompson

In the late 1800s Nikola Tesla took Thomas Edison’s DC and alternated the polarity back and forth so that its voltage could be stepped up by a transformer and hauled much further by overcoming electrical resistance. Way off in the distance, at the user end, another transformer stepped it back down to a safer voltage and higher current to light places and turn stuff.

Fast forward to today and thousands of scientists, engineers and captains of industry are taking DC and AC and stepping it over to hydrogen: “HC.” Hydrogen is electric energy relaxed. Make it when you’ve got some wind or sun; use it when you need some electricity. In between, pipe it, tank it and haul it. At the user end HC’s stepped over to boutique electric power at pretty much any voltage or current or frequency that’s needed.

Tesla’s AC gave the utility of distance to electric energy. Hydrogen “HC” gives electricity the utility of spacetime.

Hydrogen, almost coincidentally, is a portal—the shared element connecting two vastly dissimilar worlds.

It’s true that electrochemistry bleeds-off a lot more loss that an extension cord. But try to power a ship or a plane with a cable! You can’t. That’s the trade-off and hydrogen’s big draw.

Hydrogen’s killer aptitude is that it can be simultaneously stored and transported in pipes. Take the Smart Grid—able to precisely match supply with demand—and add hydrogen:  you’ve got the Soft Grid, where exactness just doesn’t matter so much. Want to use solar at midnight? Want to use hydro in a dry spell? Wind in a calm? And do all this without tons of costly, fading batteries with a complex life cycle?  It’s a pipe dream—in the best sense—and it’s why hydrogen is surging back.

Hydrogen today is a portal between two worlds. One—the world of fuel extraction—is characterized by energy sources that are eventually depleted and exhausted;  by residues like coal ash, CO2 and toxic elements that must be managed;  and by geopolitical baggage begetting control by tyrants and wars to capture neighboring countries’ extractible assets.

On the other side of the H2 portal—the world of synthesis—materials are drawn from the ambient environment which includes renewable-energy-intensive perpetual recycling, air and water. Material extraction from the earth will continue as needed but that slowly becomes the last, not the first, recourse.

Pundits make it sound as though the two worlds straddling the hydrogen portal must haggle over price in some eternal bazaar. That’s just wrong. At present the eras do overlap but that’s a transient externality which gets far too much attention. The relationship between the two is not “cheap or costly” but rather “before and after.” Price is a trend, not a fixed parameter, but the fact of eventual depletion is fixed.

Pundits are constantly observing, sagely, that “We’ve seen this hydrogen bubble before.” And we have. And, earlier, it didn’t develop mainly because many of these same sages made a glaring blunder. Their trope was “Hydrogen is the car tech of the future…and always will be.” But anyone can see that—absent government support—no synthesis infrastructure can ever be funded without a vast fleet of existing light vehicles to buy hydrogen from it and nobody was going to buy vehicles until there is ubiquitous H2 support infrastructure deployed to keep them running.

We quarreled for a decade over the chicken vs. egg paradox when we could have been dining on steak (or on soy bean cake, if that offends).

The introduction paradox is not special to hydrogen. The learning model was diesel. Truck stops nurtured early adopters until pump island numbers were reached and the diesel car market took off. Hydrogen will be the same. The economics are obvious but publications that buy articles from pundits don’t sell ads to train, trucks ship and airplane builders. They do, however, sell a lot of car ads. For over ten years this kept the “H2 later” myths in circulation and the hydrogen transition in limbo.

Today truck builders Azetec, Cummins, Daimler/Freightliner, Honda/Isuzu, Hino/Toyota, Hyundai, Hyzon, Iveca, Kenworth, Nikola, PACCAR, Peterbuilt and Mack/Volvo have announced hydrogen trucks. Per Haley Zaremba in Oil Price online (10/24/2020), “The U.S. Is Backing Hydrogen Trucks With A New $100 million Initiative.” They are doomed, of course, because a Bloomberg Opinion pundit says “The case for hydrogen truck is also weak” and quotes another Bloomberg source as believing “…hydrogen doesn’t even make sense for trains.” (This news will disappoint France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Sweden, who want all diesel trains gone in fifteen years as well as several other countries.)

Per Russ Mitchell in the L.A. Times “…the [California Air Resources] board ordered manufacturers of medium-duty and heavy-duty commercial trucks to begin selling zero-emission versions in 2024, with 100,000 sold in California by 2030 and 300,000 by 2035.”

Pundits have a mutual pact to banish any of their number who write a piece that doesn’t acknowledge the abundance of hydrogen. But since exactly as much water must be released by fuel cells as is electrolyzed, none at all is consumed. It’s like celebrating the future of cell phones because the desert is full of silicone sand.

The bubble-mongers are the weirdest of all. Do the dimmest among them really believe that carbon might come back? Carbon, Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa are gone. Get over it.

The sages quip that “You have to put in a huge amount of electric power to get green hydrogen out.” Do they think more power comes out of any electrical system than goes in? What is the price differential between one gigapuff and two gigagpuffs of wind?

Short of a cataclysmic war, nothing is going to push civilization back through the hydrogen portal into the extraction era. As awful as CO2 emissions are, leaking gas wells may be worse. If a cheap, totally sufficient CO2 sequestration process appeared tomorrow, the extraction-synthesis transition wouldn’t blink, anymore than steam locomotives would reappear.

Substances won’t shape the future but the future has already begun to shape substances. Never-to-be-mentioned fertilizer production consumes that “96% brown” fraction that the hydrogen police tout ad nauseam as a reason to scorn the hydrogen transition. As you read this, a vast amount of capital and smarts is being poured into zero-carbon fertilizer plants in Scandinavia, Spain and Australia, using wind and sun derived hydrogen, not natural gas. Making matter with energy is not just the province of particle colliders.

BNSF built the first hydrogen locomotive in 2008. Boeing flew the first manned hydrogen plane that year and Iceland launched their first hydrogen ship. The technology worked; the economics would have; but uninformed punditry and advertising dynamics proved more powerful than science, technological commerce and environmental needs combined.

The post DC, AC, now HC — plus hydrogen as a portal first appeared on Hydrogen Cars Now.