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  • From: Paul Osmond <p.osmond@unsw.edu.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Re: Hydrogen
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:38:43 +1000

Some interesting thoughts on hydrogen from Amory Lovins - apologies for the length, but it's worth reading. My main criticism is that he seems to give insufficient recognition to the fact that natural gas is not a renewable resource....

Cheers, Paul Osmond
(University of New South Wales, Australia)


------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 08:29:29 +1000
From: Len Puglisi <moral@alphalink.com.au>
Subject: Amory Lovins on Hydrogen
Amory B. Lovins's Hydrogen
Primer A Few Basics About Hydrogen
by Amory B. Lovins
The potential cost-effective windpower in the Dakotas could make as
much hydrogen as the world now uses enough, if used in efficient fuel-
cell vehicles, to displace all oil now used by U.S. highway vehicles.
If there were no oil in Iraq, would we have just fought a war there? The
Administration cited weapons of mass destruction as the main casus
belli, but it cannot be denied that U.S.
interest and policies in the region are influenced, and perceived to be
influenced, by our interest in oil. Yet, just as our transportation fuels
have transitioned from clunky, awkward solids to easy-to-store liquids
(coal to oil) during the past two hundred years, they are likely to
transition again, from liquids to gases. The most likely candidate to
power our transportation devices of the future is the simplest, most
abundant gas—clean, efficient hydrogen.
The chairs of eight major oil and car companies have said the world is
entering the oil endgame and the start of the Hydrogen Era. A Shell
planning scenario in 2001 envisaged a radical, China-led leapfrog to
hydrogen (now clearly underway), making world oil use stagnate until
2020 and then fall. President Bush's 2003 State of the Union message
further emphasized the commitment to developing hydrogen-fuel-cell
cars he'd announced a year earlier (FreedomCAR).
Yet many diverse authors have lately criticized hydrogen. Some call it
a smokescreen to hide White House opposition to raising car efficiency
using conventional technology, or fear that working on hydrogen would
divert effort from rather than complement renewable energy
deployment/adoption. Some simply presume that if this President
believes something, it must not be true. Most reflect errors meriting a
tutorial on basic hydrogen facts. But before I discuss the transition to
hydrogen, here are four key points about H2 that are not always
articulated:
1) Hydrogen makes up about 75 percent of the known universe, but is not
an energy source like oil, coal, wind, or sun. Rather, it is an
energy carrier—a molecule that, like electricity, can carry useful
energy to users. Hydrogen is an especially useful carrier because
like oil and gas, but unlike electricity, it can be stored in large
amounts.
2) The reason hydrogen isn't an energy source is that it's almost never
found by itself, the way oil and gas are.
Instead, it must first be freed from chemical compounds in which
it's bound, using heat and catalysts to "reform" hydrocarbons or
carbohydrates, electricity to "electrolyze" water, or other methods,
including experimental processes based on light, plasmas, or
microorganisms. All devices that produce hydrogen on a small scale,
at or near the customer, are collectively called "hydrogen
appliances."
3) Over two-thirds of the fossil-fuel atoms burned in the world today
are hydrogen. The debate is about whether getting rid of the last
third (the carbon), and even its combustion ("uninventing fire"),
could be more profitable and attractive than burning both the carbon
and the hydrogen.
4) Hydrogen is the lightest molecule, eight times lighter than natural
gas. Per unit of energy, it weighs 64 percent less than gasoline or
61 percent less than natural gas: 2.2 pounds of hydrogen has (within
two percent) the same energy as one U.S. gallon of gasoline, which
weighs 6.2 pounds. Conversely, hydrogen is bulky - per unit volume,
hydrogen gas contains only 30 percent as much energy as natural gas,
and even at 170 times atmospheric pressure (170 bar), only six
percent as much energy as gasoline.
So much for the basics. Now for the currently prevalent myths:
1. A whole hydrogen industry would need to be developed from scratch.
Wrong. Hydrogen manufacture and use is already a large and mature
global industry. At least five percent of U.S. natural gas output is
currently converted into industrial hydrogen, half of which is used in
refineries - mainly to make gasoline and diesel fuel.
Globally, about 50 million metric tons of hydrogen is now made for
industrial use, about 3-5 times America's consumption. Nearly all
hydrogen is extracted ("reformed") from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas,
because that's cheaper than electrolysis unless you have extremely
cheap electricity (generally well under two cents per kilowatt-hour), or
unless the hydrogen is a byproduct (about two percent comes from
electrolytic chlorine production).
2. Hydrogen is too volatile and explosive to use as a fuel.
Wrong. Although all fuels are hazardous, hydrogen's hazards are
different from and generally more easily managed than those of
hydrocarbon fuels.
It's 14.4 times lighter than air, four times more diffusive than natural
gas, and 12 times more diffusive than gasoline—so leaking hydrogen
rapidly rises away from its source. Also, it needs at least four times the
concentration of gasoline fumes to ignite, it burns with a nonluminous
flame that can't scorch you at a distance, and its burning emits no
choking smoke or fumes—only water.
Hydrogen-air mixtures are hard to make explode.
Hydrogen does ignite easily, with only a tenth as much energy as
natural gas, which a static spark can ignite. However, unlike natural
gas, ignited hydrogen burns at lower concentrations than can explode,
and it can't explode in open air. The 1937 Hindenburg disaster was
investigated by NASA scientist Dr. Addison Bain in the late 1990s. He
found that probably nobody aboard was killed by a hydrogen fire; the 35
onboard who died as a result of the fire were killed by jumping out or by
the burning propeller-engine diesel fuel, flammable furnishings, and
dirigible itself, which coated with a paste containing aluminum powder
and chemically similar to rocket fuel was easily set alight by a spark.
The clear hydrogen flames swirled harmlessly above the 62 surviving
passengers as they rode the flaming dirigible safely to earth.
3. Making hydrogen uses more energy than it yields, making it
impractical.
It would violate the laws of physics to convert any kind of energy into a
larger amount of another kind of energy. Hydrogen is no exception, and
neither are today's energy forms. Converting gasoline from crude oil is
generally 75-90 percent efficient from wellhead to retail pump and
electricity from fossil fuel is only about 30-35 percent efficient from coal
to retail meter. Hydrogen is typically converted at efficiencies around
72-85 percent in natural-gas reformers (thermochemical devices that
separate hydrogen from carbon) or around 70-75 percent in
electrolyzers. (These efficiencies are all reduced by 15 percent
because a different definition of the hydrogen's energy content, called
"Lower Heating Value," is appropriate for its use in fuel cells than is
used to measure sales of fossil fuels.) But hydrogen's greater end-use
efficiency can more than offset its conversion loss. From wellhead to
car tank, oil is typically 88 percent efficient (the lost energy mainly fuels
refining and distribution). From car tank to wheels, gasoline is typically
16 percent efficient. The average contemporary vehicle is thus about
14 percent efficient well-to-wheels. A hybrid vehicle like the Toyota
Prius nearly doubles the gasoline-to-wheels efficiency to 30 percent
and the total to 26 percent. But an advanced fuel-cell car's 70 percent
natural-gas-well-to-hydrogen-in-the-car-tank efficiency, times 60
percent tank-to-wheels efficiency, yields 42 percent - three times higher
than the normal gasoline car or one and a half times higher than the
gasoline-hybrid-electric car.
Thus the energy lost in making hydrogen is more than made up by its
extremely efficient use, saving both fuel and money.
4. Delivering hydrogen to users would consume most of the energy it
contains.
Wrong. Two Swiss scientists recently analyzed the energy needed to
compress or liquefy, store, pipe, and truck hydrogen. Their net-energy
figures are basically sound - but their widely quoted conclusion that
because hydrogen is so light, "its physical properties are incompatible
with the requirements of the energy market" is not. In fact, their paper,
published by the competing Methanol Institute, simply catalogues
certain hydrogen processes that most in the industry have already
rejected, except in special niche markets, because they're too costly,
including pipelines many thousands of kilometers long, liquid-hydrogen
systems (except for rockets and aircraft), and delivery in steel trucks
weighing more than one hundred times as much as the hydrogen
carried.
The authors also focus almost exclusively on the costliest production
method - electrolysis. They admit that reforming fossil fuel is much
cheaper, but reject it because, they claim, it releases more CO2 than
simply burning the original hydrocarbon. That ignores the hydrogen's
more efficient use: even under conservative assumptions about car
design, a good natural-gas reformer making hydrogen for a fuel-cell car
releases between forty and sixty-seven percent less CO2 per mile than
burning hydrocarbon fuel in an otherwise identical gasoline-engine car,
because the fuel cell is 2-3 times more efficient than the engine.
Even more fundamentally, the Swiss authors analyzed only costly
centralized ways to make hydrogen. Most industry strategists suggest -
at least for the next couple of decades - decentralized production at or
near the customer, using the excess off-peak capacity of existing gas
and electricity distribution systems instead of building the new hydrogen
distribution infrastructure whose costs the Swiss analysis finds so
excessive.
5. Hydrogen can't be distributed in existing pipelines, requiring
costly new ones.
Wrong. If remote, centralized production of hydrogen eventually did
prove competitive or necessary, existing gas transmission pipelines
could generally be converted by adding polymer-composite liners,
similar to those now used to renovate old water and sewer pipes, plus a
hydrogen-blocking coating or liner, and by converting the compressors.
Even earlier, existing pipelines could carry a mixture of hydrogen, up to
a certain level, to "stretch" natural gas; users of fuel cells could
separate the two gases with special membranes. Some newer pipelines
already have hydrogen-ready alloys and seals, and all future ones
should be made hydrogen-compatible, as Japan intends for its big
Siberia-China-Japan gas pipeline. As for gas distribution pipes, many
older systems are already largely or wholly hydrogen-compatible
because they were originally built for "town gas" (synthetic gas that's up
to sixty percent hydrogen by volume), although burner-tips, meters, and
other minor components could require retrofit.
6. We don't have practical ways to use hydrogen to run cars, so we
must use liquid fuels.
Wrong. Turning wheels with electric motors has well-known advantages
of torque, ruggedness, reliability, simplicity, controllability, quietness,
and low cost. Heavy and costly batteries have limited battery-electric
cars to small niche markets, although the miniature lithium batteries
now used in cellphones are severalfold better than those used in
battery cars. But California regulators' initial focus on battery cars had a
huge societal value because it greatly advanced electric drivesystems.
The question is only where to get the electricity. Hybrid-electric cars
now on the market from Honda and Toyota, and soon from virtually all
auto-makers, make the electricity with on-board engine-generators, or
recover it from braking. This gives the benefits of electric propulsion
without the disadvantages of batteries. Still better will be fuel cells—the
most efficient (50­70 percent from hydrogen to direct-current
electricity), clean, and reliable known way to make fuel into electricity.
Fuel cells reverse the high-school chemistry experiment—splitting
water with an electric current so hydrogen and oxygen bubble out of the
test-tube—by chemically recombining hydrogen and oxygen on a
special membrane, at temperatures as low as 160­190°F (much higher
in some types), to produce electricity, pure water, heat, and nothing
else. Invented in 1839, fuel cells have been widely used for decades in
aerospace and military applications. Breakthroughs since the early
1990s mean that, even in this decade, they'll start becoming affordable.
As for most other manufactured goods, real cost should fall by about
15­30 percent for each doubling of cumulative production. Used in the
right place and manner, even today's hand-made fuel-cell prototypes
can compete in many buildings.
Testing of vehicular fuel cells is well advanced.
Already, many manufacturers have tens of fuel-cell buses and over a
hundred fuel-cell cars on the road; a German website
(www.hydrogen.org/h2cars/overview/main00.html) reports 156 different
kinds of fuel-cell concept cars and sixty-eight demonstration hydrogen
filling stations; Honda and Toyota are leasing fuel-cell cars; six other
automakers plan to follow suit during 2003­05; many kinds of military
vehicles are demonstrating more advanced fuel cells; ship, boat,
scooter, and recreational uses are emerging; and Fedex and UPS
reportedly plan to introduce fuel-cell trucks by 2008. A Deutsche Shell
director predicted in 2000 that half of all new cars and a fifth of the car
fleet will run on hydrogen by 2010, while the German Transport Minister
forecast ten percent of new German cars.
Some automakers formerly assumed that they must extract hydrogen
from gasoline (or methanol) aboard cars, using portable reformers, for
two reasons: tanks of compressed hydrogen would be too big because
hydrogen has so much less energy per unit volume than liquid fuels,
and it would be too hard or costly to shift today's fueling infrastructure
from gasoline to hydrogen. Both these problems have now been
solved, so few automakers still favor onboard gasoline reformers.
That's good, because they're very difficult and problematic, and would
cut gasoline-to-wheels efficiency to or below that of a good gasoline-
engine car. Since almost all automakers now agree that reformers
should be at or near the filling station, not aboard the car, there's no
longer any reason to reform gasoline: natural gas is much cheaper, and
is easier to reform. Hydrogen will thus displace gasoline altogether,
without spending the energy and money to make gasoline first.
There is similarly little reason to "bridge" with methanol, except perhaps
to run fuel cells in very portable devices like vacuum cleaners,
cellphones, computers, and hearing aids.
7. We lack a safe and affordable way to store hydrogen in cars.
Wrong. Such firms as Quantum (partly owned by GM) and Dynetek
now sell filament-wound carbon-fiber tanks lined with an aluminized
polyester bladder. They are extremely rugged and safe, unscathed in
crashes that flatten steel cars and shred gasoline tanks. The car isn't
driving around with highly pressurized pipes, either, because the
hydrogen is throttled to the fuel cell's low pressure before it leaves the
tank. That pressure reduction is done inside the carbon shell,
eliminating external high-pressure plumbing.
Such aerospace-style tanks operating at up to 700 bar and tested
above 1,656 bar have been tested by GM in fuel-cell cars and have
been legally approved in Germany; U.S. authorities, who've licensed
345-bar tanks, are expected to follow suit shortly. The carbon-fiber
tanks could be mass-produced for just a few hundred dollars, and can
hold 11­19 percent hydrogen by mass, depending on pressure and
safety margin.
A 345-bar tank is nearly ten times as big as a gasoline tank holding the
same energy. But since the fuel cell is 2­3 times more efficient than a
gasoline engine, the hydrogen tank is only 3­5 times bigger for the
same driving range. Lighter, stronger, more efficient cars and their
more compact propulsion systems can largely make up that difference.
The result works so well in all respects that further advances in
hydrogen storage, or costly work-arounds like liquid hydrogen, simply
aren't necessary.
8. Compressing hydrogen for automotive storage tanks takes too much
energy.
Wrong. Filling tanks to 345 bar takes electricity equivalent to about
9­12 percent of the hydrogen's energy content. However, most of that
energy can then be recovered aboard the car by reducing the pressure
back to what the fuel cell needs (~0.3­3 bar) through a turboexpander.
Also, the compressor's externally rejected heat can be put to use. And
compression energy is logarithmic—it takes about the same amount of
energy to compress from 10 to 100 bar as from 1 to 10 bar, so using a
700-bar instead of a 345-bar tank adds only one percentage point to the
energy requirement. Modern electrolyzers are therefore often designed
to produce 30-bar hydrogen, halving the compression energy required
for tank filling.
The latest electrolyzers can cut it by three-fourths.
9. Hydrogen is too expensive to compete with gasoline.
Wrong. Using fuel-cell cars 2.2 times as efficient as gasoline cars,
onsite miniature reformers made in quantities of some hundreds—each
supporting at least a few hundred fuel-cell vehicles—and using natural
gas at $5.69 per gigajoule or $6 per million British thermal units could
deliver hydrogen into cars at well below $2 per kilogram. That's as
cheap per mile as U.S. untaxed wholesale gasoline ($0.90 per U.S.
gallon or $0.24 per liter). Other countries often pay more for both
natural gas and gasoline, so miniature reformers tend to retain their
advantage abroad.
Only a tiny fraction of hydrogen is made electrolytically, because this
method can't compete with reforming natural gas unless the electricity
is very cheap or heavily subsidized, or the electrolysis is done on a
very small scale (a neighborhood with up to a few dozen cars).
However, mass-produced (around one million units) electrolyzers each
serving a few to a few dozen cars could beat taxed U.S. gasoline even
using three cent per kilowatt-hour off-peak electricity, so household-to-
neighborhood-scale electrolyzers could be a successful niche market if
enough units were made. Yet such units, even initially using fossil-
fueled electricity that might increase net carbon output per car, would
be small enough to create little electrical load or climatic concern. Their
market role would be temporary, or they would switch to using
electricity from renewable sources.
10. We'd need to lace the country with ubiquitous hydrogen production,
distribution, and delivery infrastructure before we could sell the first
hydrogen car, but that's impractical and far too costly—probably
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Wrong. RMI's 1999 hydrogen strategy (see "A Strategy for the
Hydrogen Transition," www.rmi.org/images/other/HC-
StrategyHCTrans.pdf) shows how to build up hydrogen supply and
demand profitably at each step, starting now, by interlinking
deployment of fuel cells in buildings and in hydrogen-ready vehicles, so
each helps the other happen faster. Such linkage was adopted in
November 2001 by the Department of Energy and is part of the
business strategy of major auto and energy companies.
Extensive analysis by the main analyst for Ford Motor Company's
hydrogen program indicates that a hydrogen fueling infrastructure
based on miniature natural gas reformers, including sustaining their
natural gas supply, will cost about $600 per car less than sustaining the
existing gasoline fueling infrastructure, thus saving about $1 trillion
worldwide over the next forty years. In absolute terms, a filling-station-
sized gas reformer, compressor, and delivery equipment would cost
about $2­4 billion to install in an adequate fraction (10­20 percent) of
the nation's nearly 180,000 filling stations. Even a small (twenty cars
per day) reformer would cost only about a tenth as much as a modern
gasoline filling station costs (about $1.5 million, not counting the
roughly threefold larger investment to produce and deliver the gasoline
to its tanks—a far more capital-intensive enterprise than for natural
gas).
Although more work is needed to pin down the numbers exactly, other
analysts are also starting to conclude that switching from oil to
hydrogen could be not costly but profitable. For example, Mary Tolan,
who leads Accenture's $2-billion energy practice, estimates that a one-
time $280-billion investment in hydrogen and the natural gas capacity
to make it could save a roughly comparable oil-industry investment,
plus $200 billion in oil imports every year by 2020.
11. Manufacturing enough hydrogen to run a car fleet is a gargantuan
and hugely expensive task.
Wrong. Current worldwide production of industrial hydrogen, about fifty
million tons per year, if it fueled a global quintupled-efficiency1 car
fleet, would displace two-thirds of today's entire worldwide consumption
of gasoline. About a third of that hydrogen production is currently being
used to make gasoline and diesel fuel. If that U.S. refinery usage were
diverted into direct fueling of quintupled-efficiency vehicles, like
Hypercar, Inc.'s Revolution (www.hypercar.com) concept SUV, it could
replace one-fourth of U.S. gasoline—equivalent to twice as much as is
made from Persian Gulf oil.
12. Since renewables are currently too costly, hydrogen would have to
be made from fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
Hydrogen would indeed be made in the short run, as it is now, mainly
from natural gas, but when the hydrogen is used in fuel cells, total
carbon emissions per mile would be cut by about half using ordinary
cars (equipped with fuel cells) or about eighty-plus percent using
quintupled-efficiency vehicles. That's a lot better than likely reductions
without hydrogen, and is a sound interim step while zero-carbon
hydrogen sources are being deployed.
Remember that long-term, large-scale choices for making hydrogen are
not limited to costly renewables-or-nuclear-electrolysis vs. carbon-
releasing natural-gas reforming. Reformers can use a wide range of
biomass feedstocks which, if sustainably grown, don't harm the climate.
With either biomass or fossil-fuel feedstocks, reformers can also
sequester carbon (already being tested in the North Sea, and looking
promising). If sequestration doesn't work, the Victorian carbon-black
process for making hydrogen, with zero carbon emissions into the air, is
also 50+ percent efficient, offering a good backstop technology.
12a. A hydrogen economy would require the construction of many new
coal and nuclear power stations.
This fear of many environmentalists is unfounded.
New nuclear plants would deliver electricity at about 2­3 times the cost
of new windpower, 5­10 times that of new gas-fired cogeneration in
industry and buildings, and 10­30+ times that of efficient use, so they
won't be built with private capital, with or without a hydrogen transition.
The 207 "distributed benefits" recently described in Small Is Profitable
(www.smallisprofitable.org) further increase nuclear power's
disadvantage, often by as much as tenfold.
Electricity from any source is rarely competitive with natural gas for
producing hydrogen. Just the operating cost of existing nuclear plants is
barely competitive with that of other traditional power plants or with the
full cost of gas-fired cogenerated electricity or windpower—even less
so when hydrogen or electricity delivery costs are included.
New nuclear plants are forever uneconomic. Indeed, hydrogen fuel
cells will join their toughest competitors. The hydrogen future, long
touted by nuclear enthusiasts as the savior of their failed technology, is
just another nail in its coffin.
12b. A hydrogen economy would retard the adoption of renewable
energy by competing for R&D budget, being misspent, and taking away
future markets.
This concern is partly prompted by allegations—probably unprovable
either way—that the Department of Energy may have diverted funds
that Congress voted for renewable R&D into fossil-fuel hydrogen
programs.
Such diversion would be illegal and unwise.
Unfortunately, such a reallocation is proposed in the President's 2004
budget. Both many renewables and many hydrogen programs are
worthwhile and important for national prosperity and security, so we
should do both, not sacrifice one for the other. Fortunately, hydrogen
creates important new economic opportunities and advantages for
many renewable energy sources, so a well-designed hydrogen
economy should speed up renewables' wide adoption.
12c. Making hydrogen from natural gas would quickly deplete our gas
reserves.
At least five percent of U.S. natural gas is currently used to make
industrial hydrogen. Natural gas is more abundant and widely
distributed than oil.
Making enough hydrogen to run an entire U.S. fleet of quintupled-
efficiency light vehicles would take only about one-fifth of current U.S.
gas production. But gas use wouldn't actually increase by nearly that
much if at all.
In fact, the sort of integrated hydrogen transition that RMI recommends
and GM (among others) assumes may even decrease net U.S.
consumption of natural gas by saving more gas in displaced power
plants, furnaces, boilers, and refinery hydrogen production than is
made into hydrogen. In other words, a well-designed hydrogen
transition may well reduce U.S. consumption of oil and natural gas
simultaneously.
13. A viable hydrogen transition would take 30­50 years or more to
complete, and hardly anything worthwhile could be done within the next
20 years.
Quintupled-efficiency vehicles, under development since 1991, could in
principle ramp up production as soon as 2007 with aggressive
investment and licensing to manufacturers. Such vehicles could make
the hydrogen transition very rapid. Although very long transition times
have been reported as inevitable according to unnamed experts, many
other experts feel the transition could take off quickly.
Accelerated-scrappage feebates could turn over most of the U.S. car
fleet in less than a decade if desired. The scores of hydrogen refueling
stations in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. could grow rapidly: Deutsche
Shell has said hydrogen could be dispensed from all its German
stations within two years if desired.
14. The hydrogen transition requires a big (say, $100­300 billion)
federal crash program, similar to the Apollo Program or the Manhattan
Project.
Many political leaders and activists cite such large, round numbers to
symbolize the level of investment and commitment they consider
appropriate. However, it's not clear that a federal crash program is the
right model when there's plenty of skill and motivation in the private
sector to introduce hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles rapidly—if they can
compete fairly.
This is difficult when, for example, the latest tax law makes up to
$100,000 spent on a Hummer (bought ostensibly for business
purposes) deductable in new tax breaks, federal funds for automotive
innovation virtually exclude innovation-rich small businesses, global
and state initiatives to make carbon costs visible are opposed by the
federal government (disadvantaging U.S. businesses), and feebates
aren't yet on the agenda.
Coherent private- and public-sector policy could go a long way toward a
rapid and profitable hydrogen transition. There are signs of smarter
policy emerging in the Department of Energy's recent restructuring to
integrate hydrogen, vehicle, building, and utility programs.
On the other hand, a senior DOE official, when told in January 2002
that the just-announced FreedomCAR program hoped to develop over
the next 10­20 years a car that had already been designed (by
Hypercar, Inc.) in 2000, replied, "Well, then, we'd better not try to help
you, because we'd just slow you down." That might be true, but if we
want a vibrantly competitive rather than a failed automotive industry,
we'd better make it as untrue as possible.
The total cost of a hydrogen transition is probably a lot more than the
$1.7 billion proposed by President Bush over the next five years, but is
probably far less than $100 billion. It may not be much bigger than the
billions of dollars that the private sector has already committed to
pieces of the puzzle—if the money is intelligently spent on an
integrated buildings-and-vehicles transition that bootstraps its
investment from its own revenue and earns an attractive return at each
stage. And evidence is emerging that this future will be more profitable,
not only for customers and the earth, but even for oil companies.
Amory B. Lovins is cofounder and CEO of RMI.
1 Such as the Hypercar®. These are super-lightweight vehicles that
reduce power requirements roughly threefold by reducing weight and
drag. In round numbers, these cars' efficiency is tripled if they run
on a conventional engine, quadrupled if they're powered by a hybrid
electric-drivetrain, and quintupled if they run on a fuel cell.
Author's note: This article is a highly condensed version of "Twenty
Hydrogen Myths," a detailed paper correcting many errors recently
published about hydrogen. For the full article, please visit
www.rmi.org in late June 2003. This work was partially supported by
The Rose Family Foundation and the Harold Grinspoon Foundation.
rmi.org is published by Rocky Mountain
Institute.
1739 Snowmass Creek Road | Snowmass, CO
81654-9199 | Ph: 970.927.3851 Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved.
thomfish@rmi.org
Other R.M.I. web sites include: Natural Capitalism
(www.naturalcapitalism.org) National Energy Policy Initiative
(www.nepinitiative.org) Small Is Profitable
(www.smallisprofitable.org)
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