Hydrogen-Based Energy Merits Research

Making the transition from a fossil fuel–based economy to one based on hydrogen will require “revolutionary, not evolutionary” scientific advances, according to a Department of Energy report that details the challenges in developing a large-scale hydrogen-based energy system. The Bush administration is promoting hydrogen as the clean, efficient energy source of the future, but the report makes clear that such a future may be quite distant.

“Bridging the gaps that separate the hydrogen- and fossil fuel–based economies in cost, performance, and reliability goes far beyond incremental advances,” the report notes. “Fundamental breakthroughs are needed in the understanding and control of chemical and physical processes involved in the production, storage, and use of hydrogen.”

The report is the result of DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences workshop on hydrogen production, storage, and use. The May workshop was chaired by MIT physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, who directed DOE’s Office of Science in the last year of the Clinton administration.

Although there is a “large gap between present knowledge and technology, and that required by a hydrogen economy,” the report says, the scientists on the workshop’s three study panels became more optimistic as they “noted the many recent advances in chemistry, materials research, and computation that are opening up exciting new research opportunities.” The report concludes that a hydrogen economy offers such a “grand vision” that there should be a major, innovative basic research program in support of a broad effort across the applied research, development, engineering, and industrial communities.

Dresselhaus said she went into the workshop aware of past studies indicating that conversion to a hydrogen-based economy would be next to impossible in the foreseeable future. “As physicists, we read these things and assume they are right, that the problem of using hydrogen [as an everyday energy source] is so hard that it can’t be solved,” she said. “But there are a lot of advances and new developments out there that haven’t been applied to hydrogen problems, and many people in relevant fields haven’t been thinking of hydrogen as a research focus,” Dresselhaus continued. “I’m hoping this report will get the word out in the community.”

To move toward a viable hydrogen-based economy, the report says that significant advances are needed in materials science, nanotechnology, catalysts and catalytic performance, biological and “bio-inspired” energy conversion designs, and instrumentation. Beyond those issues, the report says there must be a hydrogen infrastructure “that provides seamless transitions from production to storage to use.” Such a system must be “equivalent to those now in place for the production and use of fossil fuels and for electricity.”

Hydrogen must also be economically competitive with existing energy systems and, at the moment, the gaps are enormous, the report says. Currently, proton-exchange membrane fuel cells for automobiles deliver power at about $3000 per peak kilowatt compared with $35 for the same unit of energy from an internal combustion engine, the report says.

One of the defining problems that indicates how far research has to progress, said workshop associate chair George Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory, “is a system that would store enough hydrogen in a vehicle for a 300-mile trip and be fast enough to allow for acceptable acceleration of the vehicle.”

Such a vehicle isn’t likely for many years, but Crabtree said scientific advances in computing, nanotechnology, and other fields are providing hydrogen research with tools “that weren’t there 10 years ago.” Whether a hydrogen economy is really feasible remains an open question, “but we want to make the basic research community aware of the opportunities in this field,” he said.