Gasohol and the Hindenburg

Aside from the obvious fact that the Hindenburg conflagration and the "gasohol" program have both been spectacular disasters, you might wonder what other connections there might be. Well, one connection is that the Greenies revere as "renewable" energy resources both hydrogen gas -- which made the Hindenburg lighter than air -- and ethanol from sugar cane -- which makes "gasohol" out of gasoline.

The Greenies insist that we run on renewables -- hydrogen in the long run, and sugar cane in the short run. Why? Because they claim that we are causing global warming by burning hydrocarbon fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.

TRENDING: Caught red-handed

What is a "renewable" energy source? Well, according to the Greenies, sunshine is. If you soak up some of it today, not to worry, because -- chances are -- there will be a whole new batch of it tomorrow. Sugar cane is another Greenie example. In some parts of the world you can grow two or three crops per year. If you made ethanol out of your last sugar cane crop and are burning it in your SUV now, not to worry, because -- chances are -- you can make more ethanol out of your next crop.

Leafy green plants know how to take water vapor, carbon dioxide and nitrogen out of the air and efficiently manufacture -- using a little bit of that renewable sunshine -- the amino acids upon which all life depends. Animals -- including humans -- don’t know how to do that.

But, the Greenies -- and most congressmen -- figure they are a lot smarter than leafy green plants. And if those dumb plants have figured out how to thrive on air, water and sunshine, then Congress figures that if they throw enough money at the Department of Energy, then DOE can figure out how to do it, too. And since shifting to -- and running on -- renewables makes no economic sense, now or in the foreseeable future, Congress has provided lavish subsidies to the producers and some of the users of these Greenie "renewable" fuels.

However, there is a basic problem we humans face that those dumb leafy green plants don’t face. The leafy green plant just stands there in the field, soaking up what sunshine it can, and growing as much as that absorbed energy allows for. Well, that’s no good for you soccer moms with your SUVs. You can’t afford to stand around in a plowed field all day. You’ve got places to go, things to do. Maybe you could get Congress to pay someone else to grow a crop of sugar cane, harvest tons of it, ferment it, make enough ethanol to fuel your SUV, so that you can go places and do things, at least until the next crop is in.

So, on behalf of the Greenies, soccer moms, and potential sugar-cane growers, Senators Bayh and Church got Congress to enact, in 1978, The National Alcohol Fuels Commission Act. Not content with providing lavish subsidies to the blenders (of ethanol with gasoline to make gasohol), Bayh and Church wanted us to go whole hog, to shift completely to bio-mass derived alcohol fuels. Their commission was supposed to study the short- and long-term potential of alcohol fuels derived from plant, animal and industrial sources and wastes -- and from coal.

Coal? How did coal get in there? Surely the Greenies and farmers didn’t consider coal to be a "renewable" energy source? Well, it turns out, there is also a powerful Senator from West Virginia -- where there is a lot of coal -- named Byrd, and he put that lump of coal in the Greenie’s Christmas stocking.

You can probably guess what the final report of the commission said. They thought making methanol from coal was a really great idea. And it is. But they didn’t think making methanol from old newspapers or ethanol from sugar cane was such a great idea. Senator Byrd had little control over the Brazilians, so he couldn’t stop them from doing what Senators Bayh and Church wanted us to do. Brazil actually shifted from running on gasoline to running on ethanol and the first time there was a sugar cane crop failure Brazil was in a heap of trouble. Before they could convert back, Brazil nearly went bankrupt.

The problem with all these "renewable" energy sources is that when you need them, they aren’t there. The reason we rely on coal, oil, natural gas and uranium for our energy production is we find them already concentrated in large deposits. So, if we build a power plant near a coal or oil or natural-gas deposit, anytime we need power for the next five to ten years, the fuel is at hand. But if you intend to use sugar cane, or tree bark or old newspapers -- renewable sources of energy -- someone has got to go out and gather up all that stuff and heap it up in a humongous pile near your power plant. And anytime, nowadays, you have to pay people to do anything labor intensive, such as harvesting millions of acres of sugar cane every few months, it costs lots of money. If you properly account for collection and aggregation costs, those costs alone make most uses of renewable energy, for most purposes in 21st-century America, uneconomic.

Well, what about hydrogen? Rumor has it that there is a lot of hydrogen tied up in water, and there’s a lot of water available. Maybe the Greenies will have better luck there.

The Hindenburg was essentially a gigantic balloon filled with hydrogen gas, which is lighter than air. Air is a mixture of gases, mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Nitrogen is inert, so nothing happens when you try to ignite a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen or a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. But when hydrogen and oxygen gases get mixed together, you can get quite a conflagration if someone then supplies an electric spark.

So how did the Greenies -- who were scared to death by the Three Mile Island meltdown -- come to be enamoured of the Hindenburg conflagration? How did the Greenies get Congress enamoured enough to pass The Hydrogen Future Act of 1996?

Well, first they had to shift the blame for the Hindenburg disaster from the Greenie beloved hydrogen gas to something else. The revisionists now claim that a spark ignited the balloon, itself -- which was coated with man-made hydrocarbon "rocket fuel" -- not the pure hydrogen contained within the balloon.

Of course, once the gas bags burned up, then the hydrogen gas within escaped, mixed with the air, and then the mixture burned. So the Greenies claim that the Hindenburg disaster would never have happened if the Germans had simply stored their hydrogen in inflammable balloons. The Greenies would have you believe that we don’t know how to operate a nuclear-power plant safely, but that we do now know how to safely and cheaply store and then burn hydrogen.

But is it cheap or safe to store hydrogen as a gas? Not really. It is at least as expensive and dangerous as storing propane -- and the same amount of propane, when burned, produces more than four times as much energy.

How about storing hydrogen as a liquid? No way. Liquefied hydrogen is very much more expensive to produce and more dangerous to handle than liquefied natural gas [LNG] and you know how much resistance there was to allowing LNG ships to enter Boston Harbor. And, once again, the LNG -- when burned -- produces more than four times as much energy as does the liquefied hydrogen.

You can’t store hydrogen as water, either, because it takes at least as much energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen as you get back when you recombine them.

Maybe there is some other chemical compound where the hydrogen is not so tightly bound as it is in water, where the hydrogen could be stored. If there was, it could be split-off when needed, with only a small energy penalty, and then burned to produce quite a lot of energy.

There are such compounds and they’re called the metal hydrides. But they’re a very expensive and very heavy storage medium, in terms of the amount of hydrogen that can be liberated from them for use as fuel. In any case, the metal hydrides are merely a storage medium and you still have to produce the hydrogen in the first place so that you can then store it.

The principal method for producing hydrogen gas in large volumes is the steam reforming of hydrocarbons, such as methane or methanol. The products of the reforming are hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide.

Suppose you have an SUV -- prototypes are now available -- powered by a fuel cell that runs on hydrogen stored on-board as a metal hydride. Because the metal-hydride "gas tank" is very heavy and stores relatively little hydrogen, the range of the SUV is not very far and it has to go to a plant -- where hydrogen gas is made -- to refuel. When it is operating, it’s true that it produces only water vapor. But carbon dioxide was produced and released to the atmosphere at the plant where the methane or methanol was reformed to make the hydrogen that was stored as a metal hydride in your SUV.

If you, however, have an SUV -- which will soon be available in California, Japan and elsewhere -- powered by a fuel cell that runs on methanol, where the hydrocarbon reforming is done on-board, then -- in addition to the water vapor produced by the fuel cell burning the hydrogen -- carbon dioxide is produced by the reforming and is released to the atmosphere by your tailpipe. The methanol-powered SUV has a power train that weighs no more than a conventional gasoline powered SUV, so the range is much greater, and you can refuel at any methanol filling station.

But either way, neither Congress nor the Greenies can change the laws of chemistry or physics. If you take methane from an underground reservoir -- or if you make methanol from coal -- and then re-form it to produce hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, and you then take the hydrogen gas somewhere else and burn it, you’ve produced the same total amount of energy and the same total amount of carbon dioxide as you would have by burning the methane or methanol, directly, at one place.

Now, it may make sense for you to do that. And maybe you can fix it so that a minimal amount of the total energy released is wasted. But no matter what the Greenies say, carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. So what’s the big deal about a hydrogen economy that is based on re-forming the old hydrocarbon economy of coal, oil and natural gas? What’s renewable about alcohol and hydrogen made from coal, oil and natural gas?

If the Greenies do turn out to be right about mankind causing global warming by burning hydrocarbon fuels, then we have only one option -- nuclear power. Nuclear-power plants produce no carbon dioxide in generating electricity, so you can power everything that is stationary with electricity. How about things that move, like SUVs? Well, you can produce hydrogen by the electrochemical splitting of water. It’s not the cheapest way, but it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, and that’s what’s important to the Greenies.

So, imagine: There you are -- in the Hydrogen Future of the Greenies, in your hydrogen-powered SUV -- and you notice your metal-hydride tank is getting low on hydrogen. What do you do? Well, just pull into your nearest nuclear-powered hydrogen-gas filling station.

There is one in your neighborhood, isn’t there?