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Discontent Rising

Ellie Keen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:58:47 +0000

The prospect of a four-day strike over pay by the tanker drivers that supply Shell petrol stations has begun to generate near apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Primed by the government invoking emergency procedures last Friday and the panic buying response of motorists after the refinery workers’ strike at Grangemouth in April, the message the media is peddling is “oh no, here we go again”.

But given that Shell has only one in every 10 filling stations across the country and that these are concentrated in the south-east, the north-west, central Scotland and parts of the Midlands, the headlines are over-egging the pudding.

But what is giving rise to the overreaction is an emerging sense (pdf) of “feel-bad Britain”, where issue after issue adds to a sense of gloom, hopelessness and powerlessness as standards of living for the majority of people begin to plummet.

The rising cost of fuel and food, the credit crunch, the fall in house prices and the tailing off of demand in the housing market have all come thick and fast. Wages are not keeping pace and a small minority of wealthy individuals as well as many companies seem immune to and unmoved by what is happening to the majority of people. And on top of this, our public services are not improving despite the money ploughed into them.

In the case of the threatened fuel strike, the workers are demanding a 13% rise but are being offered 6.8% when their bosses got a 15% rise plus bonuses and the company is benefiting as the price of a barrel of oil climbs inexorably to $200.

But the other side to the story of feel-bad Britain is that there is no sense that the government is exercising any control over events. Brown made pleas to both the banks to pass on cuts in interest rates to the customers and to the oil companies to cap prices. They either said no or politely ignored him as nothing has changed. Then Brown tells us he is listening and that he “feels our pain”, but still nothing seems to change.

The sense of a government on the slide (but nonetheless immovable until May 2010) adds to this despair. What may bring things to a head – over fuel at least – is if hauliers start to exercise their collective disruptive power as they did back in late 2000 by stopping fuel leaving the refineries and organising go-slows on the motorways.

Already, there have been small signs of this in Scotland and Wales.

If the reaction of the Spanish hauliers is anything to go by, our reliance on private road transport to move goods and products about will be cruelly revealed. In Spain, where mostly small owner-employer operators are protesting over rising fuel costs, the supermarket shelves have started to go bare within just three days.

The general sense of malaise would also become even more apparent if the owners and operators of fishing boats started to blockade ports, as they have done in Spain and Portugal in recent weeks, over the cost of fuel.

For all the headlines that talk of a return to the “dark days” of the 1970s in Britain, only if the hauliers acted en masse would we come close to a replay of those times.

Actions do not match

tim — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:55:15 +0000

Those behind the demand for a third runway and a sixth terminal stress the jobs that would be created, but what really motivates them is the profits that they foresee.

That might be bearable but for the severe effects that the development will have on the environment and on the lives of the people living in the region of the airport.

Pressing ahead with expansion puts the government in a difficult position, given its frequent verbal commitments to combating climate change.

Unfortunately, its actions do not match what it says.

The government claims that the planned development meets noise and air quality targets, but it discounts the reality that the entire village of Sipson, with about 700 homes, would be utterly destroyed.

Nor will that be the end of the matter.

An expanded Heathrow, with a new runway and increased passenger numbers, will put greater strain on the already existing M4 and M25 motorways that serve the airport.

It is inevitable that the roads lobby will already be preparing the case to expand these motorways or to create another, leading to the further concreting over of another part of the overcrowded south-east of England.

The government ought to reject the short-sighted short-termism of the motorway and airline lobbies.

It should expand and modernise the environmentally friendly railways, with exclusive high-speed tracks to obviate the need for short-haul flights and take a conscious decision to drive down rail prices to encourage passengers to switch their means of travel.

Tube chaos

Tory Mayor Boris Johnson owes an apology to all London Underground staff who suffered physical and verbal assault at the weekend.

He should also apologise to all citizens in the capital for the chaos to which their Tube system was reduced by a minority of anti-social elements who took advantage of the mayor’s political stunt.

What happened on Saturday night should not have surprised anyone.

It was the logical result of too much drink taken in the midst of crowds too big to control by Tube staff and police.

Rail union RMT leader Bob Crow had already pointed out the impossible task handed to staff of carrying out the mayor’s unthought-through plan to ban alcohol on public transport.

The main problem for staff is not someone who opens up a can of beer or who sips from a hip flask on a Tube.

Problems arise when people roll into stations already steaming, after hours spent in pubs or City clubs, and look to have a go at staff carrying out their duties.

The mayor’s “Look how tough I am on yobs” gimmick is useless in tackling the anti-social behaviour witnessed on Saturday night and the similar misconduct that public transport staff suffer every other night of the year.

Instead of blurting out the first thing that comes into his head, he, like government ministers, would be far better served listening to the people who are at the sharp end of this problem.

London bus drivers to get DNA ‘spit kits’

Ellie Keen — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:38:27 +0000

London’s bus drivers who are spat at will be able to collect the saliva in a DNA ‘spit kit’ so the assailant can be identified when their saliva samples are sent off to the police national database for analysis. The kits have been used in Tube stations for years.

At the same time, the Metropolitan Police Service’s Transport Operational Command unit is setting up a work place violence unit to investigate violence against bus drivers across London. And new guidelines for courts have recommended tougher sentences for those who assault people working in the public sector or provide a service to the public such as bus drivers and tube staff.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: “We have the finest bus drivers in the world in London and it saddens me that they may find themselves the victims of this disgusting activity. These kits will increase the likelihood of being able to track down perpetrators and sends them a clear message that this foul behaviour will not be tolerated.

“We are determined to make public transport a safer place through measures such as the ban on passengers carrying open containers of alcohol and I am aware that this will ask more of our drivers. However, I hope they will agree that by providing support such as the new workplace violence unit we are fulfilling our pledge to protect them.”

Steve Burton, director of community safety and enforcement at Transport for London, added: “Spitting at drivers is unacceptable and will not be tolerated and with these DNA kits … London’s bus drivers can collect the DNA evidence needed for a successful prosecution.”

• The London Assembly’s transport spokesperson Val Shawcross has accused Boris Johnson of ignoring people with disabilities by replacing bendy buses with a new generation of Routemaster style vehicles. The Mayor’s comment that conductors would help people on and off the platform was “deeply patronising” and offensive to people with disabilities, parents with buggies and elderly people. “It’s a pretty Victorian attitude,” she said.

• Transport unions are not happy at the appointment of Tim Parker as TfL head. Parker was once dubbed “the Prince of Darkness” by unions and has a reputation for cutting costs. He will also become First Deputy Mayor and Chief Executive of the GLA Group and will be paid a £1 salary.

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: “This is a scary moment for London’s commuters. Tim Parker is one of the multimillionaire elite private-equity buccaneers who asset- stripped the AA by cutting jobs and cutting services and raising prices to customers.”

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, said: “The world’s finest metro system does not need an asset-stripper or a Prince of Darkness.”

Public in the Dark about Biofuels in their Petrol

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:16:35 +0000

Almost nine out of ten Britons have no idea that biofuels will be added to their petrol from tomorrow, according to the first ever public attitudes survey on the controversial alternative fuels. The research also revealed that, of those who knew what biofuels are, three quarters would prefer the Government to curb emissions by improving public transport or making cars greener.

The YouGov survey, commissioned by Friends of the Earth, also revealed that 78 per cent of the public agree that European governments should make vehicle manufacturers double the fuel efficiency of new cars by 2020 in order to tackle climate change. And that more than two thirds of people think the Government is not doing enough to improve public transport.

The Government’s Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation, brought in to meet EU regulations, means all petrol sold in the UK will have to include at least 2.5 per cent biofuels – made from crops- from 15 April 2008. But although the move aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions, new scientific evidence shows that the growth in biofuels could actually increase greenhouse gas emissions through land conversion and greater use of chemical fertilisers.

Worryingly, two thirds of those surveyed by Friends of the Earth were unaware that the growth in biofuels is contributing to the destruction of rainforest.

Friends of the Earth believes the UK Government and the EU should scrap their biofuels targets and tackle transport pollution by investing in better public transport and strengthening proposals for mandatory emissions limits on all new cars.

Friends of the Earth biofuels campaigner, Kenneth Richter, said:

“Most people will be horrified to know the Government is putting biofuels in our petrol when the damage they do to forests could make climate change worse.

“People want to see real green transport solutions that make a difference to their lives instead – like better public transport and smarter cars that burn less fuel. It’s now up to the Government to put transport policy on the right track.”

Notes:

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,183 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 3 – 7 April 2008. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

[1] The survey results are:

When asked whether they thought European Governments should make vehicle manufacturers double the fuel efficiency on new cars by 2020, 78 per cent of all respondents either agreed or strongly agreed.

Overall more than two thirds (70 per cent) think the Government is not doing enough to improve public transport.

When asked, “are you aware that the growth in biofuels is contributing to deforestation in countries like Indonesia?” only 33 per cent of respondents answered yes.

89 per cent of people in Great Britain do not know that biofuels are going to be added to their petrol from 15 April when the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation comes into force.

Of the 1,209 respondents who knew what biofuels were (55 per cent), fewer than one in seven people (14 per cent) thought they were the best way to reduce emissions from road transport. 44 per cent singled out improving public transport as the best option.

[2] Recent research has suggested that the carbon dioxide emissions released when land is converted to grow biofuels could take centuries to pay back. Globally the push for biofuels is resulting in increased pressure on the worlds remaining rainforests which hold huge stores of carbon.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/February/07020802.asp

Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has calculated that using chemical fertilisers to grow biofuel crops can release twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp

[3] There are increasing calls for Government caution on biofuels, The King Review of Low Carbon Cars, commissioned by the UK Government and published on 12 March 2008, urged the EU to shift the focus of its policy from biofuels to cleaner automotive technology. It also recommended adopting a target of 100 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions for each kilometre a car travels. Friends of the Earth is calling for European governments to go even further and make vehicle manufacturers double the average fuel efficiency on new cars by 2020 – something supported by the vast majority of people in our survey released today.

New cars sold in the UK in 2007 emitted 164.9 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre (g/km CO2). The latest figures for the EU as a whole showed that average emissions of new cars sold in 2006 were 160g.km CO2. Doubling average fuel efficiency would reduce average emissions to 80g/km CO2.

The EU is currently deciding on emissions targets for the next decade or more. And has recently weakened its plans to reduce average emissions from new cars sold in the EU to no more than 120g per kilometre by 2012 in the wake of lobbying from car companies like Porsche.� As well as relaxing the limit to 130 g/km it has not proposed any firm longer term targets for 2020. Car manufacturers are calling for the 2012 target to be weakened still further and, according to reports, Porsche is considering legal action against the EU if it sticks to its original 120g/km CO2 target – see http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/09/14/afx4117266.html for further information.

For further information about low carbon cars and the current EU negaotaitions, see http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/delivering_greener_cars.pdf

For further information about Friends of the Earth, visit www.foe.co.uk.

Public Transport: How to Get Back on Track

Ellie Keen — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:42:56 +0000

The market has failed. The Tory privatisation of the railways has been a disaster. The Hatfield derailment exposed the failure of Railtrack and the fundamental flaw in the “separate the wheel from steel” strategy – in which railway operations are split from infrastructure. More rail disasters, from Ladbroke Grove to Potters Bar, further illustrated that public services left to the dictates of the market cost lives.

In July 1999 even the Economist magazine had to admit that “the Tories preferred to see the railways privatised badly than not at all. And that was what they got.” This was an important admission, but it merely shifted the debate from why privatisation doesn’t work to the problem of its implementation.

Thus, despite party manifesto pledges, New Labour continued with the privatisation agenda until, under intensified public pressure, then transport minister Stephen Byers was forced on 5 October 2001 to bring Railtrack into administration under a “not for profit company”, Network Rail.

Nevertheless, New Labour pressed full steam ahead, not only continuing Tory policies but actually extending the privatisation agenda. It was Gordon Brown who forced through the Public Private Partnership (PPP) on London Underground. This time “separating wheel from steel” has already witnessed five derailments, two in one weekend.

The East London Line extension, due to be finished in 2010, will be run by a complex hybrid of eight different companies. Two will be responsible for signalling, two for infrastructure maintenance, two for infrastructure renewals, one for train and station operations and one for train maintenance.

PPP really put the con in contract. Most spectacularly, Metronet, representing two thirds of the contract, was forced into administration on 18 July last year when it ran up debts of £2 billion – a debt that Gordon Brown has written off with public money.

The madness of the market and the sheer greed of the privateers were well illustrated during the Mayor of London’s Question Time on the day Metronet went into administration. Transport for London (TfL) managing director Tim O’Toole and TfL managing director of finance Steve Allen accompanied Ken Livingstone on the day.

When asked about the potential liability on either TfL or London Underground Ltd as its subsidiary, for a considerable chunk of Metronet’s debts, O’Toole confirmed that “the Metronet debt is guaranteed by us”. And again, when the mayor’s team was further pushed for answers to whether it was true that TfL or the subsidiary could be liable for up to 95 percent of the debt, Allen explained, “That is correct. That is a feature of the PPP contracts.”

Brown paid out over £500 million to accountancy firms to draw up the failed PPP contracts. One of the firms, Ernst & Young, took over as administrator, charging £750 per person per hour – and there are 45 of them. Just like the collapse of Northern Rock although the mess is not of our making, the rich are determined that we pay. The argument is simple: if it’s the public who pay, then it should be the public who own and control.

A fully integrated, publicly owned, democratically accountable and environmentally sustainable transport system is not only possible but necessary. Climate change is a major issue facing humanity. However, it is also a class issue. This was starkly exposed when a young delegate from the RMT union asked David Miliband, environment minister, the following question at the TUC Congress in 2006:

“If we are serious about greening Britain and reducing harmful emissions, then railways must be a key part of the solution. So is it not time that we took some serious steps towards making rail travel attractive, affordable and available to all?”

The minister’s shameful response was, “I was absolutely dreading a question about transport because I do not know anything about transport. Do we need to make the railways affordable and attractive? Yes. How do we do it? I do not know.”

Yet transport policy will play a major part in the Climate Change Bill’s target to reduce carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050. Road transport currently contributes over 21 percent of Britain’s carbon emissions, with a predicted rise to 30 percent from 1990 to 2020. Moreover, in 2002 189 million passengers used Britain’s airports, with a projected increase of between 350 and 460 million by 2020. Just creating a high speed rail link between London and Scotland would cut demand for internal flights.

There is an alternative. The madness of the free market in transport must be ended to allow for a sustainable public transport system integrating principally rail, buses and shipping. There is a convergence of interest between transport workers and the public to achieve this. For the public, any modal shift from roads, private car use and aviation, must take the cost of travel into account. Figures since 1975 indicate that up to 2004 the cost of motoring fell by 11 percent, while during the same period rail fares rose by 70 percent – probably accounting for the fact that rail currently only accounts for 6 percent of all transport journeys.

In 2004 rail unions commissioned the labour movement thinktank Catalyst to investigate the financial structure and performance of the railway industry post-privatisation. One report concluded that receipts from fares increased from £2.94 billion to £4.39 billion in 2003. In the same year train-operating companies also received £1.2 billion in public subsidy. They then paid shareholders £160 million. The profits of the private companies are dependent on massive state handouts and expensive fares.

If the drive for profits was removed, the cost of travel by rail and bus could be slashed. Furthermore, tickets could be made interchangeable between rail, tube, light rail, buses and trams. A coordinated timetable between different modes of an integrated public transport system could then be created.

This would require massive investment in public transport to deal with the problems of overcrowding and to enhance safety equipment. For example, if 5 percent of people travelling by car turn to rail it would require a 50 percent increase in rail capacity.

For rail workers we expect decent terms and conditions and an end to attacks on health and safety. Privatisation and the fragmentation of the railways have led to a concerted and continual drive to casualise the workforce with the introduction of agency and security staff at minimum wage and often zero-hour contracts in place of licensed and qualified railway staff.

This economic race to the bottom lies behind the current dispute on London Underground. The privateers are continually seeking ways of skirting around, undermining and plain cutting corners when it comes to safety. Any mass transport system needs to be run to the highest safety standards with staff present at all locations with pay and conditions that reflect the important role they play.

For the planet, an integrated transport system is not only necessary for public use. It is also necessary environmentally for the passage of freight. The percentage of freight moved by road in Britain is higher than the European Union’s average. Carbon emissions in Britain from heavy goods vehicles increased from 6.3 million tonnes of carbon in 1994 to 7.6 in 2004. Freight volumes are projected to expand in the aviation sector from 2.2 million tonnes in 2003 to 14 million tonnes in 2030 (south east of England). In 2005, 585 million tonnes of foreign and domestic cargo were moved through British ports – the additional volume can be readily accommodated.

In 2005, 90,000 tonnes of domestic cargo and mail were uplifted at British airports. This could be moved by rail, inland waterway and coastwise traffic. All this is achievable. All it requires is the political will to shift from blind faith in the free market policies of successive Tory and Labour governments.

Transport workers and members of the public are best situated to determine what kind of transport system we want. Together we can run a system paid for by the public, democratically accountable to the public and served by public sector workers in our interest.

Unjum Mirza is the secretary of the RMT Stratford No.1 Branch. He writes in a personal capacity

Hydrogen: Not the Vehicle Fuel of the Future

Ellie Keen — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:25:04 +0000

Hydrogen; the smallest, lightest and first element on the periodic table, and most abundant element in the universe. As we bask in the radiance of the vast hydrogen reactor at the centre of our solar system, hydrogen has a poetic rightness as an alternative vehicle fuel. It burns cleanly and the only exhaust gas is water vapour. All our climate and energy security problems solved at a stroke.

Sadly, as is often the case with the nice-feeling alternative technologies, it’s not that easy. It would be colossally expensive to introduce, doing so would commit us to long-term fossil fuel consumption and, most importantly, we can’t make it without significant climate impact worse than if we just carried on using petrol.

HYDROGEN THE FOSSIL FUEL

There aren’t any naturally occurring deposits of hydrogen for us to tap into like coal or oil, nor does it flow freely and abundantly around us waiting to be used like wind and sunlight. Hydrogen only comes bonded to other molecules; it takes energy to separate it. Like a battery, it needs a primary energy source to make it from – gas, coal, or something made into electricity – so it is only an energy carrier, rather than an energy source in the true sense.

Hydrogen is not a new product at all. We have over a century’s experience of industrial production (it’s used in the production of nitrate fertilisers and oil refining among other things). We’ve done much of what could be done to economise. It is still very expensive.

Manufacturing it from natural gas is the cheapest and most experienced method. But gas is rapidly being depleted. We are on course to hit ‘peak gas’ before mid-century, after which demand will outstrip supply and the price will go through the roof. We will hit it sooner if we use more of it, such as a switch away from coal to gas for electricity, or a switch to using it for making large amounts of hydrogen.

But there’s another consideration, the whole point of us even thinking about it in the first place; the climate angle. Manufacturing hydrogen means separating it from the CO2 in natural gas. This ‘clean’ fuel only gives off water vapour from a car exhaust, but that’s because the carbon’s already been emitted at the factory. This climate friendly renewable fuel is actually a carbon-emitting fossil fuel. The climate doesn’t care where you emit CO2, only that you do it at all.

IT’S NOW OR NEVER – THE KEY POINT

The science is clear. In order to prevent runaway climate change, carbon emissions need to be stabilising within ten years, and we need at least a 60% global cut within 30 years (which means the over-emitting nations – ie the major car-driving ones – cutting by at least 90%). So if a technology can’t be developed and deployed in the next decade or so, it’s of no use to us as a response to climate change.

This means that the people currently touting nuclear power as our primary solution are wrong, as it cannot be on-stream quickly enough. It also means that the roll-out of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel – even if it were magically carbon-neutral to manufacture – cannot be any of use to us either; the safety and engineering issues would take too long to surmount.

Dr Joseph Romm served in the US Department of Energy during the Clinton administration when the ‘hydrogen economy’ became big news. Running the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from 1993-98, he oversaw significant increases in funding for hydrogen fuel R&D. Yet, although he’s a believer in the possibility of clean hydrogen, he’s firm in his belief that in 2030 we’ll have less than 5% of vehicles powered by it¹. There’s not a credible voice that disagrees.

Since it cannot be part of a 90% emissions cut in thirty years we should, at least for those three decades, turn our attention elsewhere. But there are also other reasons – practical, engineering and economic – why hydrogen can never work.

H2 WITHOUT THE O

There is a way of making it without using fossil fuels as the raw material; electrolysis of water. Put simply, an electrical charge breaks the bond in H2O, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen.

Because the raw material is water rather than gas or coal, this is often touted as ‘carbon-free’. Except that the electricity is coming from the national grid, which is not carbon-free, it’s mostly fossil-generated. This isn’t preventing emissions therefore, it’s merely displacing them, just like the ‘clean’ car exhaust that emitted all its CO2 at the factory.

As electrolysis uses so much electricity, once again the emissions are greater than if we were using a petrol vehicle. Powering BMW’s new hydrogen car with electrolysis hydrogen made from the UK grid would create around eight times the emissions of driving a normal petrol car².

The only genuinely carbon-free hydrogen would be using renewable electricity to power electrolysis of water. But if we were to do this, we increase the overall demand for electricity. What we give to hydrogen from renewables makes a shortfall in the grid that will be taken up by extra fossil generation. Again, it just displaces emissions.

The only time it becomes genuinely carbon-free is when the whole grid is powered by renewables and we have spare capacity to start powering our vehicles. Even then, hydrogen isn’t the best option. Rather than losing half the energy of electricity making hydrogen and liquefying it, why not just use that electricity directly?

In his book Heat, George Monbiot advocates a proposal by Dave Andrews for using electric cars³. The problems with electric cars are their comparatively short range, and the long time they take to recharge. If we have a lot of renewable generators, we’ll have a lot of unused electricity – the wind and waves keep going through the night when our electricity demand is low. So, we use that off-peak power to charge batteries. When your battery runs low, you pull into a filling station and the battery is removed and swapped for a charged one. It would take the same time as refilling with petrol. More, it would do away with tankers entirely – the vehicles themselves are the delivery fleet.

Some hydrogen enthusiasts have suggested similar ideas for using off-peak renewable electricity to make hydrogen from electrolysis of water, but this ignores the huge inefficiency. If you use renewable electricity to produce hydrogen – instead of electricity made from coal, oil and gas – then you save about 225kg of CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. On the other hand, if you use that electricity directly as electricity you save about 1,000kg of CO2 emissions.

To replace our vehicle fuels with electrolysis hydrogen would take more than our present electricity consumption⁴.

Do we think we can double electricity generation whilst doing away with fossil burning? Or is electrolysis hydrogen as a vehicle fuel a non-starter?

When the Bush administration used the 2003 State of The Union address to announce the kickstart of the hydrogen economy for vehicles, they neglected to mention any of the emissions that come with making it. Under their National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap plan, fossils would be the source of the vast majority of hydrogen, but 10% would come from electrolysis of water, powered by dedicated nuclear power plants⁵. As if there weren’t enough safety issues with manufacturing hydrogen already.

HYDROGEN AS A VEHICLE FUEL

The most prevalent idea for using hydrogen in a vehicle is the fuel cell. Fuel cells are essentially a battery that can be continually charged up. As a technology they’re well established, actually pre-dating the internal combustion engine. Hydrogen is fed through, producing an electric charge and also heat. Very large cells used to power buildings can also use the heat (making them quite efficient and more plausible as a future technology), but in a vehicle this heat – much of the energy we’re getting from the hydrogen – is simply wasted.

Then there’s the issue of having a hydrogen tank in the vehicle. At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen has one three-thousandth of the energy of petrol. Assuming you’re not going to have a fuel tank a couple of hundred times the size of your car, your hydrogen needs to be either compressed or liquefied.

To be liquefied, hydrogen needs to be cooled to -253 degrees centigrade. The energy used to do this is equivalent to 30 – 40% of the energy the hydrogen contains⁶.

Let’s look at that from a climate perspective. It takes 12.5-15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to liquefy 1kg of hydrogen⁷. With the UK’s emissions from generating electricity, that’s 6kg-7.2kg of CO2 emissions⁸. Burning a gallon of petrol releases around 9kg of CO2 to give us about the same amount of energy as 1kg of hydrogen in a fuel-cell vehicle⁹.

That’s 66-80% of the emissions of burning petrol just for the liquefaction process! This is before we count the emissions of the raw material involved in production (if it came from natural gas, that’s another 9kg of CO2¹⁰). This fuel is worse than petrol.

To avoid the practical problems and monstrous energy consumption of cooling to -253 degrees and keeping it there, hydrogen can instead be left at room temperature as a gas but compressed. Compression takes less energy than liquefaction, but then compressed hydrogen contains less energy than liquefied hydrogen. The energy to compress it to 5,000lbs per square inch is only 4-8 percent of the energy it contains¹¹.

However, this isn’t much use for a car; by volume, it contains one-tenth of the energy of petrol. A fuel tank ten times the size of current ones is out of the question, but then again having such a short driving range that you need to refuel ten times as often is utterly impractical. You’d also need many more tankers, pipelines and the rest of the distribution kit.

There is also a solid-state form of storage, ‘metal hydrides’, materials impregnated with hydrogen that release it when reacted with water. It’s a no-hoper for vehicles. The reactions involve very high temperatures, the hydrides are heavy, are highly prone to leaks and we have yet to develop a practical way to remove and recycle the spent hydrides from a vehicle.

As the American National Academy of Engineering concluded, ‘no hydrogen storage system has yet been developed that is simultaneously lightweight, compact, inexpensive, and safe’¹². As those are the four key factors for a vehicle fuel, it’s a practical non-starter even before we consider the emissions issue.

As a liquid, it needs to be maintained at -253 degrees centigrade constantly until the point of use. This can be equivalent to another 10-15% of the embodied energy. By now, not only are the emissions the same or worse than burning petrol, but we’ve lost half the energy we put into making the stuff. It’s like a battery making machine that uses two batteries for every one battery it manufactures.

There are certainly good cases for having a few very inefficient devices – it’s far handier to power your camera off a battery than a small diesel motor. But using grossly inefficient technology for such a huge energy consumer as our vehicle fleet is an extravagant waste of resources that we can’t afford.

As Alec Brooks put it, ‘fuel cell vehicles are energy pigs. Fuel cell vehicles that operate on hydrogen made with electrolysis consume four times as much electricity per mile as similarly-sized battery electric vehicles’¹³.

BURN BABY BURN

So much for hydrogen fuel cells. But in the no-idea-too-profligate world of hydrogen vehicle fuels, there is an even worse concept. BMW have launched their hydrogen vehicle, the H7. As mentioned earlier, there can be no doubt that it is several times worse for CO2 emissions than the worst 4×4¹⁴. It uses hydrogen not to power a fuel cell, but burns it directly in an internal combustion engine. Being even more inefficient than a fuel cell, it means it has a smaller driving range, a mere 125 miles on 8 kilos of hydrogen. The fuel is kept in liquid form in an insulated tank.

The thing with internal combustion engines is that the fuel is, well, combustible. You only want it to burn in a controlled way, rather than have it explode at an inopportune moment. With petrol cars, there’s a problem if the fuel and its gases get too hot; leave it parked somewhere on a blazing summer’s day and it could explode. Fortunately, there’s a little safety valve built in to release it safely. Hydrogen combustion cars regard anywhere above -253 degrees as a blazing hot sunny day.

The H7’s tank is not cooled – how would you find an on-board energy source for such refrigeration? – but is wrapped in layers of fibreglass and aluminium. The insulation cannot prevent the fuel warming, only slow it down. Which means that it reverts to gas and pressure in the tank increases. This isn’t a safety issue as, like a petrol car, there’s a valve that allows it to escape. It is, however, an economic issue. In case it wasn’t already expensive and wasteful enough, after about a day your H7 is preprogrammed to start jettisoning your fuel. A full tank empties itself completely in 10-12 days.

Joseph Romm, despite being something of a hydrogen advocate, is incredulous at the BMW combustion idea, commenting, ‘BMW has managed to develop the least efficient conceivable vehicle that you could invent’¹⁵.

This horrendous inefficiency means that it is more expensive for the owner, worse for the climate and cannot be taken seriously. As David Talbot put it in Technology Review, ‘a car like the Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs – which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all. In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars’¹⁶.

THE FINANCIAL COST – THE INDUSTRY

Even with the American gusto for the hydrogen economy, how likely is it to happen, how quickly and how much would it cost?

With current technology, the infrastructure to supply just 40% of the light-duty vehicles in the USA alone has been estimated at over 500 billion dollars¹⁷.

Don Huberts, CEO of Shell Hydrogen, confirms this estimate. ‘The initial investment has been estimated by Shell at around USD 20bn for the U.S. alone, to supply 2% of the cars with hydrogen by 2020 and to make hydrogen available at 25% of the existing gasoline retail stations. In the subsequent decades, further build-up of the hydrogen infrastructure will require hundreds of billions of US dollars’¹⁸.

Even these mindboggling figures are calculated using the cheap methods like gas which result in CO2 emissions comparable to or worse than burning petrol and do not address the secondary issue of ‘energy independence’, reducing reliance on imported sources of energy.

When we’re throwing half a trillion dollars (and that’s for the USA alone) into climate change mitigation and emissions reduction, we need to ensure the best bang for our bucks. We could do an awful lot more with an awful lot less money, and see results an awful lot sooner. Hydrogen is not something we can have before we’ve done serious emissions cuts, and certainly not as part of them.

Even if it were a clearly good idea, it’s hard to see how it would happen. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Who would shell out hundreds of billions of dollars to supply a fuel nobody uses yet? Yet who would buy a car that you can’t readily refuel? Nobody will be a customer until there’s the infrastructure. But nobody builds pipelines without customers.

It’s not like the growth of car use, comparatively slow and piecemeal. To have any part in climate impact mitigation (let’s just pretend that it even could), this needs to be huge and rapid. Yet with numerous other alternatives looking just as viable and only one or two ever going to be the winner, who’s going to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at what will may well turn out to be the automobile industry’s answer to Betamax?¹⁹

Then there’s the resistance from the old guard to deal with, inhibiting any quick deployment and uptake on this or any other climate response industry. Both the construction of the infrastructure and the take-up by the public will be stymied by those old industries who stand to lose. As if the fossil barons are going to take this lying down.

Just as they bought the politicians to scupper the Kyoto treaty and then did it again last December in Bali, so they’ll move their muscle to stop any transition away from their present dominance, and even resist any incursion to clean up their own industries as such action reduces profits which, if their behaviour is anything to go by, are much more important to them than human survival.

BP, feted as part of the vanguard of the hydrogen industry, are clear that using renewables for electrolysis of water is not part of their plan. ‘We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business,’ said Lauren Segal, BP’s general manager of hydrogen development²⁰.

THE FINANCIAL COST – INDIVIDUALS

At present, hybrid petrol/electric cars are doing well commercially because they are more economical. It’s easy to sell someone the environmentally friendly option when it’s going to be cheaper for them. No driver, irrespective of their environmental feelings, will buy a car if they can’t afford it.

In December 2002 Yozo Kami, Honda’s engineer in charge of hydrogen fuel cells, said it would take at least ten years to get the price of a hydrogen car down to $100,000 (around £50,000). This from the people making one of the cheapest prototypes²¹.

Fuel cells of the type used in cars (proton exchange membrane cells) have a short lifespan too. The industry is aiming at around 4,000 hours of use, which might equate to ten years of driving. As it stands, a good prototype can only manage about 1,000 hours²². Buying a car that costs £50,000 and will be useless in three years isn’t going to appeal to anyone.

And even once the industry were scaled up, as a vehicle fuel hydrogen is still likely to be at least twice as expensive as petrol²³.

This is compounded by the poor efficiency of the hydrogen vehicles. Alec Brooks again; ‘the commonly held belief is that fuel cell vehicles will have two to three times the fuel economy of gasoline powered vehicles. But so far, fuel cell vehicles are losing. The mid-sized petrol powered Toyota Prius has 13 percent better fuel economy than the subcompact Honda FCX fuel cell vehicle’²⁴.

Alec Brooks is a big electric vehicle advocate, but his view is shared not only by the research scientists quoted above, but by those with a vested interest in hydrogen. Shell Hydrogen’s CEO Don Huberts bluntly conceded, ‘at the end of the day, hydrogen and other alternative fuels will be three to four times as expensive as oil based products, and if no one wants to pay for that, we can’t make those fuels’²⁵.

SAFETY

Being a small molecule and very light, hydrogen is particularly leak prone. It is also odourless. Natural gas can have varying or no odour, so an odorising agent is added to it. That smell we think of as gas isn’t gas at all, it’s a chemical blend made in a factory in West Bromwich and added to the supply. It must be weird living round there, how would you tell a gas leak from the smell of the factory?

But anyway, an odoriser cannot be added to hydrogen as not only might it damage the fuel system technology (especially in sensitive fuel cells) but it wouldn’t actually work – the hydrogen would be substantially lighter and separate from its smell.

This gets worse. Not only is it leaky, invisible and odourless, but it burns invisibly too. The first you’d know about a raging fire would be when you stepped into it and went up in flames.

NASA use a lot of hydrogen (it’s in those fat tanks on the side of the space shuttle). Being NASA, all high-tech and with as much experience of handling hydrogen as anyone, they developed a special device for detecting burning leaks issued by their Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. Walk round pushing a broom in front of you and see if the bristles catch fire²⁶.

It is a very dangerous substance to be handling in large quantity, in populated areas, at thousands of forecourts with untrained members of the public.

Some safety factors work in hydrogen’s favour – it is essentially non-toxic and dissipates rapidly in the air, making its way swiftly upwards and bonding with oxygen. If only pools of petrol did the same instead of lingering round waiting for a fag end.

However, you’re in real trouble if the hydrogen leak is already burning. And that’s easily done. It is flammable over a wide range of concentrations and has ignition energy twenty times smaller than natural gas or petrol. ‘Operation of electronic devices (cell phones) can cause ignition’, and ‘common static (sliding over a car seat) is about ten times what is needed to ignite hydrogen’²⁷. Electrical storms several miles away can generate enough static to ignite hydrogen²⁸.

But surely, with it being so volatile and also with it being a new technology needing public confidence, the motor manufacturers have taken extra care and got all this covered, right?

Wrong. In May 2003 Toyota recalled all its hydrogen vehicles after a leak was discovered in the tank of one. Not by engineers, but by the driver noticing a strange noise when refuelling²⁹.

Safety isn’t just an issue for the filling stations and vehicles. Just think about the tankers on the roads.

A study examining the possibility of trucks carrying compressed hydrogen in tubes showed that for every 150 miles the truck drives, it uses energy equivalent to 20% of the fuel it delivers³⁰. Because it carries so little fuel, more tankers would be needed. The study said ‘it would take 15 tube-trailer hydrogen trucks to serve the same number of vehicles that are nowadays energized by a single 26 ton gasoline truck’.

Fifteen times the number of tankers on the road isn’t just an emissions nightmare, it’s a serious safety issue too. They went on, ‘today about one in 100 trucks is a gasoline or diesel tanker. For surface transportation of hydrogen one may see 115 trucks on the road, 15 or 13% of them transporting hydrogen. One out of seven accidents involving trucks would involve a hydrogen truck. Every seventh truck-truck collision would occur between two hydrogen carriers’.

All the new infrastructure would need serious safety testing before rolling out nationally and globally. Even with a massive and unflinching political, industrial and financial push, we’re talking a couple of decades turnaround. From a climate perspective, we don’t have that sort of time to tackle vehicle emissions.

AND IT GETS WORSE

There are other safety and cost factors too. Hydrogen is highly reactive; it bonds easily with other substances so it doesn’t exist in isolation anywhere on earth and has to be ‘manufactured’ by splitting it from whatever it’s bonded to. It’s reactiveness causes metals, including steel, to become brittle. Pipelines, tanker trucks and other things for storage and supply would need to be made of higher grade materials and/or replaced more frequently. The infrastructure costs would be astronomical.

‘Higher strength materials are more susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement,’ says Jim Campbell of hydrogen manufacturer Air Liquide³¹.

Lower strength materials are, of course, more susceptible to rupture. Any potential solution would have to see the high strength material lined with a less reactive low-strength one, adding more R&D time and costs on to this already slow and prohibitively expensive plan.

There are the previously mentioned problems about the high number of hydrogen delivery trucks and their likelihood to be in accidents – one in seven accidents involving a truck would involve a hydrogen transporter.

There are some possible ways around this. There are some proposals to have filling stations producing their own hydrogen. This would remove the delivery fleet and pipeline issues. However, putting a hydrogen production plant in every filling station would be phenomenally expensive and, with production dotted at thousands of small sites scattered round the country, completely rule out any chance of ‘carbon capture and storage’ (technology for large fossil-using sites that could catch and bury their CO2 – more on that in a minute).

Also, the smaller scale plants at filling stations would be even more inefficient than making hydrogen centrally, so what we gain by not transporting it we lose in inefficiency.

HEY KIDS, LET’S MAKE THE HYDROGEN RIGHT HERE!

Astonishingly, some manufacturers are looking at on-board hydrogen manufacturing from a variety of sources. As the manufacture of hydrogen takes place in the car itself, there is no possibility of either using renewable electricity or carbon capture and storage. Most flabbergasting is the suggested use of petrol as the source fuel. Rather than burning it directly, the car uses it to make hydrogen as fuel for its fuel cell. Renault have been working with a company called Nuvera Fuel Cells to develop this³².

Despite all that talk about hydrogen granting countries energy independence, they want to make it from the very oil we’re supposedly becoming independent of! And, in case the idea wasn’t mad enough already, a study found that energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of such a vehicle would be greater than a hybrid petrol vehicle³³. (And there are plenty of existing cars that way outperform the hybrids, appalling guzzlers of oil products whose level of consumption is something that has to become a thing of the past if we’re to have any hope of tackling climate change³⁴).

In-car hydrogen manufacture is the worst of both worlds, as the EU concluded; ‘Indirect hydrogen (via a liquid fuel and on-board reformer) combines high costs with low greenhouse gas savings except when the fuel is from biomass origin’³⁵.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

In theory, hydrogen from fossil sources needn’t involve carbon emissions. We could make hydrogen and have carbon capture and storage (CCS), whereby the CO2 is removed during production and piped to an underground geological gap such as an old gas field or saline aquifer.

In 2005 BP announced it would be piloting the world’s first industrial scale hydrogen production with CCS. The plan was to build a power plant taking natural gas, separating the hydrogen from the CO2, then immediately burning the hydrogen at the same site to generate electricity. This means no compression, liquefaction, storage or transport, making it far more efficient and safe. It also means that this is not a model for production of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.

The captured CO2 would be stored in a North Sea oil field, pumping it down would flush out about 40 million barrels of oil that are not currently recoverable. In consecutive paragraphs of their press release, BP brag about the climate benefit of capturing CO2 and brag about the extra oil they’ll get to burn!³⁶

The emissions from the oil would have been around ten times the CO2 being captured³⁷. Just like ‘clean’ hydrogen for vehicles and biodiesel from palm oil, the result of this supposed solution would be a large increase in carbon emissions.

Even though they would only be capturing 90% of the CO2, and using that to generate far more emissions than they save, BP still called the plan ‘carbon free’³⁸. No shame, no irony, no way they can be trusted on climate issues.

In May 2007 BP cancelled the plan citing governmental delays in approving the project and giving incentives. They were in a rush because the Miller Field is reaching the end of its life, so they want the CO2 in a hurry to extend it. The cancellation was met with dismay by all who spoke of it including those who should know better like Friends of The Earth³⁹.

They’re looking to build these pilot CCS plants where there’s a dividend like bonus oil, yet we need fossil fuels to stay in the ground to avert runaway climate change.

Still, if Chinese power stations don’t get CCS sharpish then we face severe risk of climate catastrophe, and somebody’s got to develop the technology and deliver it to them. So even allowing for the extra oil, a pioneering project like that could perhaps have had some mitigating merit.

In February 2003 the US government’s Department of Energy announced the billion-dollar ten year FutureGen project to design, build, construct, and demonstrate a 275 megawatt prototype plant that would co-generate electricity and hydrogen and have Carbon Capture and Storage to sequester at least 90% of the CO2. It aims to validate the viability of the technology by 2020⁴⁰.

Assuming they manage it, getting it all mass produced and on stream would take around a decade, which means that, even with generous assumptions on the push behind it, we’re not looking at this being part of the solution until 2030. By which time we’re almost certainly past the climate’s tipping point. Which means this stuff is not going to help us.

We have to find another way – again I find myself thinking ‘leave this shit in the ground’ is the only one that seems safe and certain – and maybe, if this technology works and we have happy skippy clean hydrogen in future we can get our cars back out of the garage. But to keep going on the promise of something that can’t arrive in time is like saying to an alcoholic they should keep on drinking because in thirty years time we’ll be able to grow them a new liver in a laboratory.

THE SPECTRE OF HYDROGEN COMMITTING US TO COAL

Carbon Capture and Storage could be possible by 2030. In that time the world will have doubled its coal-fired generation; the lifetime emissions of those new coal plants are equal to half of the total carbon emissions from all fossil fuel use globally since the industrial revolution⁴¹.

Coal is by far the most CO2-intensive energy source. It emits 80 percent more carbon per unit of energy than gas and 29 percent more than oil. Half of Britain’s electricity already comes from coal, and power generation using coal is expanding. Even madder, the government is planning new coal-fired power stations. With oil and gas prices rising and energy security becoming increasingly problematic, the coal option looks more attractive to government. But if a new era of energy expansion is based on coal then we’re all toast.

Put bluntly, we can’t wait for Carbon Capture and Storage to save the day because it can’t arrive in time. We need to avert new coal generation. This means efficient use of all non-coal sources of energy, which more or less puts hydrogen out of the window automatically. Any solution that would inevitably produce a huge leap in energy demand as well as a massive increase in heavy industry should be squarely placed in the ‘absolute last resort’ pile.

Hydrogen requires large amounts of energy to produce, large amounts of energy to store and large amounts of energy to distribute. To increase the demand for natural gas by making it the primary fuel for hydrogen means the price of gas would go up, making coal even more viable for electricity generation.

Yet the gas supply is only temporary too. If we invest in the trillions of pounds of infrastructure to make a global hydrogen economy then we are committing to many decades of hydrogen use. When ‘peak gas’ hits by mid-century, coal – which there is plenty of – will become the cheapest way of making hydrogen.

In the meantime, the emissions figures for gas are underestimates; they presume gas is piped in gas form. However, as the European fields reach the end of their life, gas is being shipped in liquid form from the Middle East. (Once again, the talk of the hydrogen economy creating energy independence and security is shown up as a lie). To be liquefied, gas is cooled to minus 162 degrees centigrade then kept at that temperature, with all the energy consumption that implies, so the emissions from using gas effectively increase.

Increasing hydrogen production – from whatever source – will have a further climate impact. Having so much hydrogen at so many sites will invariably involve leaks. Once it gets in the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) it reacts with hydroxyl to form water vapour. This makes hydrogen indirectly become a greenhouse gas.

Not only is water vapour a greenhouse gas, but hydrogen affects methane levels too. Methane is a greenhouse gas over twenty times as potent as CO2. The primary ‘sink’ for reducing methane in the atmosphere is reaction with hydroxyl. The more hydroxyl has reacted with leaked hydrogen, the less there is to clear away the methane⁴².

THE HYDROGEN DREAM IS JUST THAT

The vision of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel isn’t new. In 1874, Jules Verne wrote in The Mysterious Island, ‘yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power… water will be the coal of the future.’

It’s easy to dismiss a novel as an inaccurate prediction, and those who do – like those in the year 1984 who said George Orwell was ‘wrong’ because we weren’t living in the place his novel described – miss the point of fiction entirely. Verne’s work is staggeringly visionary to the point of feeling plausible.

But from a literalist standpoint the glaring problem is the absence of the primary source of energy that will separate and compress the hydrogen and oxygen.

Still, Verne’s imaginative work is extraordinary, and as a fiction author his pipedreams do us no harm. The same cannot be said of those who know better and do act in the real world on a grand scale.

BEYOND PARODY

Aware of the rising need to reduce carbon emissions, the oil companies have responded in several ways to appear as if they’re taking it seriously. BP have got a pretty sunflower logo, but in their move to produce hydrogen they’ve been outpaced by the oil industry’s PR master, Shell.

Shell are the most visible company pushing the idea that Iceland will be ‘the world’s first hydrogen economy,’ implying that it’s just Iceland leading the way and proving we can all do it. They opened a Shell hydrogen filling station in Reykjavik, and proudly said that they’d immediately signed up 4% of the city’s bus fleet.

That, though, is only three buses. Because this is the thing. Iceland is not only peculiar because it is sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city. So all you need is three or four filling stations and you’re covered. That simply cannot be scaled up to the UK, or anywhere else. The rest of us need a different solution.

In 2001 Shell produced a report called Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities: Scenarios to 2050. They describe several possible futures. One talks of ‘developing a new “fuel in a box” for fuel cell vehicles’.

BMW’s admittedly inefficient hydrogen combustion car the H7 uses about a litre of fuel to go 2km⁴³, yet in Shell’s scenario ‘a six-pack of fuel (12 litres) is sufficient for 400 km,’ or over 16 times the efficiency of the H7. Even more curiously, they talk of this fuel in a box as being ‘distributed like soft drinks through multiple distribution channels, even dispensing machines’⁴⁴.

For Shell, all the safety problems of having hydrogen vending machines seemingly don’t exist. Presumably they disappeared around the same time as the mystery safe canister material was invented. They neglect to say whether these will be high-pressure gas canisters (with the risk of rupture and explosion), or ones holding liquid at-253 degrees (necessitating a hell of an electricity bill for the vending machine, or else a super-insulated canister that leaks the fuel and, if it’s been sat in some underused vending machine, may be empty by the time you buy it).

All this, remember, comes from the company whose current slogan is ‘real energy solutions for the real world’.

It’s all a load of fanciful nonsense made up out of thin air, deliberately ignoring the serious and presently insurmountable engineering and safety problems of hydrogen. It certainly isn’t a scenario that could possibly be in place by its projection of 2025. It’s a decoy to make the public think that there’s a safe, easy future and the oil companies have got it all figured out, so we leave them alone and don’t stop them producing oil, nor do we feel the need to cut back on our consumption of it.

Consumption itself is our problem. Even if there were some proven method of Carbon Capture and Storage that definitely locked it away for all eternity without major leakage, it would only address the carbon issue. Simultaneously, it would commit us not only to ongoing coal consumption and all the products that high energy use bring; all our other resource depletion and pollution issues would rampage onwards unchecked.

IT CANNOT HELP US

For hydrogen to be viable as a vehicle fuel it needs numerous technological breakthroughs in all major areas; production, distribution and storage.

The fuel and vehicles, even with some optimistic assumptions about technological breakthroughs, will be more expensive than conventional vehicles to buy, more expensive to refuel, and not last as long.

For it to be a climate technology, we need a glut of renewable electricity or universal effective Carbon Capture and Storage within a decade. The likelihood of the infrastructure that would make it work being put in place within four or five decades is slim. So, the technical and economic issues mean it cannot be a climate solution.

There won’t be enough renewable electricity to make carbon-free hydrogen possible for decades, if ever.

The hydrogen industry has no part to play in reducing emissions if there are fossil fuels anywhere in the equation. The emissions will be equivalent or worse than conventional vehicles, which are already enough to take us to hell in a handcart.

It cannot help us.

FOOTNOTES

Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003
A back of the envelope calculation. Electrolysis ‘requires 39 kWh of electricity to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen at 25 degrees C, and 1 atmosphere’ [J. Levene, B. Kroposki, and G. Sverdrup, Wind Energy and Production of Hydrogen and Electricity — Opportunities for Renewable Hydrogen, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, March 2006, p2. [link] ]
The BMW H7 has an 8kg hydrogen tank.

39×8=312kw/h

8kg=200km driving range [BMW press release, 14 May 2007 [link] ]

312 divided by 200 = 1.56 kw/h per km

UK grid emissions 480g kw/h (see footnote 8)

480 × 1.56 = 749g/km to make the hydrogen gas

Then it has to be liquefied:

With UK energy mix, 6-7.2kg CO2 emissions per kg hydrogen (see footnote 8)

8kg=200km, so 25km per kilo.

6-7.2kg for 25km, 240-288g for 1km for liquefaction

749 + 240-288 = 989-1033g/km

For comparison, a Toyota Prius emits 104g/km, a Renault Megane emits 117g/km, a vicious gas guzzler like the Porsche Cayenne emits 310g/km. The car the H7 is based on, the BMW 750, emits 271g/km.
George Monbiot, Heat: How To Stop The Planet Burning, Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006, p165
Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p4 [link]
United States Department of Energy, National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, November 2002, p11 [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p38 [link]
Raymond Drnevich of major American hydrogen supplier Praxair, Hydrogen Delivery: Liquefaction & Compression, May 2003, p8 [link]
UK CO2 emissions – 480 g/kwh
[table 3, Fuel Mix Disclosure Data Table, DBERR 2006-07, [link] ]

480g x 12.5-15(see footnote 7) = 6-7.2kg
This is a back of the envelope calculation. Dr Joseph Romm, (using that wonderful American mix of imperial and metric units that sees NASA craft shooting past Mars), calculates that with the USA’s electricity generation there are emissions of 17.5-21 lbs CO2 per kg hydrogen. Burning 1 gallon gasoline (about the same energy as 1 kg hydrogen) releases 20 lbs/CO2.

[Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003, p95]

20lb=9.071kg.
Manufacturing hydrogen from natural gas emits 9.1 kg CO2 per kg H2
(IPCC, Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 131. [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p38 [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p27 [link]
Alec Brooks, CARB’s Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004 [link]
See footnote 2.
Hell and Hydrogen, Technology Review, MIT, March 2007 [link]
Hell and Hydrogen, Technology Review, MIT, March 2007 [link]
Marianne Mintz et al, Cost of Some Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure Options, Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Technology R&D Center, January 2002 [link]
Don Huberts, testimony to House Science Committee, “The Path To A Hydrogen Economy”, March 5, 2003 [link]
For those born after 1975ish: In the early days of home video tape recorders there were three different competing formats: JVC’s VHS, Philips’ V2000, and Sony’s Betamax. You couldn’t play a tape of one format on the machine of another.
As a household would only buy one video machine, they would go for the one that had the best range of movies available, the longest record time on a blank tape, and cheapest retail price. Video rental shops found it expensive stocking every film on two or three formats. There was only going to be one winner. V2000 died a rapid death but Sony forged ahead for years throwing good money after bad plugging Betamax long after it was clearly going to lose.
Barry C. Lynn, Hydrogen’s Dirty Secret, Mother Jones, May/June 2003 [link]
Business Week, Fuel Cells: Japan’s Carmakers Are Flooring It, December 23 2002 [link]
Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003, p122
Marianne Mintz et al, Cost of Some Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure Options, Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Technology R&D Center, January 2002 [link]
Alec Brooks, CARB’s Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004 [link]
Looking Ahead: Fuel Producers Weigh in on Hydrogen’s Fit in Cleaner Energy Production, Fuel Cell Industry Report, January 2003
NASA, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, Safety Standard for Hydrogen and Hydrogen Systems, 1997, paragraph 601b(4) [link]
Arthur D. Little, Inc. for US Department of Energy, Guidance for Transportation Technologies: Fuel Choice for Fuel Cell Vehicle, Final Report Phase Two, appendix p107, 2001
James Hansel of Air Products and Chemicals Inc, Safety Considerations for Handling Hydrogen, presentation to the Ford Motor Company, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 12 June 1998
Toyota Recalls Fuel-Cell Cars Due to Hydrogen Leak, Agence France-Presse, 20 May 2003
Bossel & Eliasson, Energy and the Hydrogen Economy, 2003, p19 [link]
Jim Campbell, Hydrogen Delivery Technologies and Systems: Pipeline Transmission of Hydrogen, presentation to US Department of Energy, Strategic Initiatives for Hydrogen Delivery Workshop May 7-8, 2003, p6 [link]
Fabien Boudjemaa, The Onboard Reformer: A Transitional Solution?, CLEFS CEA, no 50-51, winter 2004-2005, p35 [link]
Weiss, M., Heywood, J., Schafer, A., Natarajan, V. Comparative Assessment of Fuel Cell Cars, Report LFEE 2003-001 RP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003 [link]
George Monbiot and Merrick Godhaven, Greenwash Exposed – Toyota, Turn Up The Heat website, 10 May 2007 [link]
Well-To-Wheels Analysis Of Future Automotive Fuels And Powertrains In The European Context, European Commission Joint Research Centre, January 2004 [link]
Introducing hydrogen power: BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy, BP press release, 30 June 2005 [link]
Jim Bliss, Oil Companies and Climate Change, The Quiet Road website, 17 January 2008 [link]
Introducing hydrogen power: BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy. BP press release, 30 June 2005 [link]
BP pulls out of green power plant, BBC News website, 23 May 2007 [link]
FutureGen – A Sequestration and Hydrogen Research Initiative, US Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy, February 2003 [link]
David Hawkins, director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, testimony to U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing on Future Options for Generation of Electricity from Coal, June 24, 2003 [link]
Anil Ananthaswamy, Reality bites for the dream of a hydrogen economy, New Scientist Magazine issue 2421, 15 November 2003 [link]

See also ‘Atmospheric Impact of Hydrogen’, Platinum and hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles, AEA Technology, 2003 [link, or full report as pdf]
A back of the envelope calculation. The 8kg tank gives around 200km driving range [BMW press release, 14 May 2007 [link] ]
According to Ecoglobe, liquid hydrogen 1.8kg=25litres [link], making the tank about 111 litres. (Wikipedia suggests hydrogen is 0.07kg/litre, making the 8kg tank about 115 litres).

111 divided by 8 = 13.875 litres per kilo.

13.875 divided by 25 = 1.8km/litre.
Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities: Scenarios to 2050, Global Business Environment, Shell International 2001, page 48 [link]