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Zubrin is not an honest interlocutor in this issue, though the basic message is probably sound. Examples of his dishonesty: 1) The price argument. Hydrogen wil

Zubrin is not an honest interlocutor in this issue, though the basic message is probably sound. Examples of his dishonesty: 1) The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product. 2) The delivery argument: this doesn't even begin to make sense. Straw man argument where he claims it couldn't be delivered efficiently in the domains he suggests. It is harder to deliver hydrogen than hydrocarbons, but the numbers he quotes are just garbage. 3) Limiting the vehicle storage to compressed gas (muh hindenberg) and cryo. No serious people really talk about this to my knowledge. Metal hydrides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...) are the way hydrogen probably would be transported in a hydrogen economy. It's still less efficient volumetrically than hydrocarbons, but then so is everything else. The argument that it must be as dense as hydrocarbons is just goalposting. People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. At least at one point, the envisioned hydrogen economy was you just retrofit hydride "gas tanks" to existing internal combustion machines. If you can make everything else work, that's a fairly reasonable thing to do. Which is probably why Zubrin never mentions it. 4) Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. I think this is Zubrin's biggest fear. His goalposting about fuel cell efficiency is silly: so what if they're not more efficient on some measurement than an ideal diesel motor? They don't smell as bad either. Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
Wait, are you telling me that someone who complains about backwards Islamic cultures and government wasting money before he even starts addressing his main point is not completely fair and impartial?! Colour me surprised. The use of emotional language and pejoratives almost had me convinced it was a genuine science article! (Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).
- zenexer 7y ago
  I nearly closed the article after reading his off-topic intro. I was expecting to read about hydrogen, not a rant about other cultures. It really detracts from the quality of the article. I do have to wonder whether this was intentional, though. The author appears to be targeting the government administration at the time. He's buttering them up by starting with a rant with which they're likely to agree. I'm not sure that it was intentional, but if it was, it was a smart move.
- MisterTea 7y ago
  No, you misread that. It's not the author breaking out into a rant. That illustrated the rhetoric used in the hydrogen pitch given by Bush post 9-11. The idea was to drum up hydrogen as a way to fight terrorism and radical islam which was being funded by oil. (edit: clarify)
bcoates 7y ago
Do hydrides have any advantages at all over synthetic hydrocarbons or biofuels? It seems like an effort to shoehorn hydrogen in there somewhere instead of just admitting that it has literally no place at all in the energy economy
- kortex 7y ago
  Carbon-free. Synthetic hydrocarbons and biofuels still give off carbon dioxide. Hydrides are just a vector for hydrogen. The advantage of hydrides over hydrogen is you don't release all the flammable gas at once, improving safety.
  - extropy 7y ago
    Giving off carbon dioxide might be fine if it's collected back from atmosphere in the manufacturing process.
  - dTal 7y ago
    Is that a problem, though? CO2 emissions aren't locally toxic. The main issue with it today is the fact that the carbon comes from the ground and doesn't get put back. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas too!
    - petra 7y ago
      Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it is always kept in balance and the air cannot hold more than it is. All that will happen is that it rains. And no amount of water vapor from hydrogen cars compares to what all the oceans contribute to the water vapor. It will basically have no effect. Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qhj31/eli5wont_hydrogen_cars_produce_a_lot_of_water/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qhj31/e...
      - dTal 7y ago
        Right, I wasn't actually suggesting that water vapor emissions from hydrogen vehicles would be a climate issue - on the contrary, I was drawing the comparison to illustrate that greenhouse gas emissions aren't necessarily a problem, if part of a closed loop (or other stabilizing influences like you point out).
extropy 7y ago
Random fact: gasoline was initially a waste product of producing kerosene - essentially free. So yes prices of gasoline went up once it started being widely used. IMO the storage and transportation issue is what kills hydrogen. Also compression losses are nontrivial. Assuming we need to manufacture fuel in renewable way methane or ethanol sounds like good ways to go. Both can be done in scale by abusing bacteria/algee. Overall I want my car to just have a standard form factor "power unit" and swap it out to whatever the new hotness is.
rm445 7y ago
Robert Zubrin is a visionary, who I'm sure wouldn't compromise his credibility to churn out some paid-propaganda. I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.
gridlockd 7y ago
> The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product. Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. The comparison is totally sound. The hydrocarbons for gasoline are readily drilled out of the ground. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured either from these hydrocarbons (which is pointless for fuel, you can just use the hydrocarbons directly) or via electricity (which is far more expensive). A mass market for carbon could not reduce the price below that of its inputs. Even if we had abundant cheap electricity it's unclear that hydrogen would really be economical against all alternatives. > People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. He's comparing fuels, you're comparing batteries to fuels, which doesn't make sense. > Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. So the six billion dollars of investment mentioned aren't enough? > Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. This habit of putting people into ideological boxes inhibits your ability to make rational assessments. > For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. You must have overread the part where he argues for ethanol fuel as a means to break up OPEC. > I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source. That's not the message though. The message is "it doesn't work, period" and "it is a hoax". I'm not in the position to say that his calculations are right or wrong, but given the lack of progress on hydrogen as a fuel, it's probably not far off the truth.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  I agree with Zubrin that the hydrogen economy is rather silly and said so. I disagree with virtually all of his reasons and calculations as to why, and many of them are extremely deceptive. It's almost like he doesn't think anyone else knows anything about chemistry. >>Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. ... twenty million metric tons of hydrogen a year made from natural gas versus a couple billion of gasoline made from oil; not comparable at all for the suggested economic uses of hydrogen as a fuel. If hydrogen were used, it would be produced in a different way. Otherwise people could just burn the natural gas. People invested more than 6 billion in fracking. Fuel cells are promising, and of course I compare fuel cells and the proposed hydrogen economy to batteries; they're used to store energy. I loathe war mongering neocons, and Zubrin absolutely is one and as such has discredited himself as any kind of policy wonk who expects to be listened to by serious people. That said, some of his martian speculations are amusing, and I might even have an amusing conversation if I were in the same room with him, where the more prominent ones (Bill Kristol) I would be in danger of clubbing to death like a baby seal.
ThenAsNow 7y ago
Agree with most of your points. There are some valid observations that he then smoothly extrapolates to invalid conclusions. There has been considerable progress in fuel cell vehicles, for example. The Honda Clarity fuel cell version has an estimated 360+ mi (US EPA) range: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-clarity-fuel-cell-first-drive-review/ https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-cl... . Fill times are significantly better than current high-rate battery electric vehicle charging. It seems to me the key will be in whether we make advancements faster in higher energy-density batteries vs. scale up of direct hydrogen production (e.g., https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells ) . Electrolysis using grid power probably does not make sense. It would be valid to question, even if we could directly scale up hydrogen production from renewable sources, wouldn't it make more sense to use the same area for electricity production? If we're talking about ground transportation, the only advantages would be in range and fill time of FCVs over BEVs. Simplicity strongly favors BEVs over FCVs. Hydrogen combustion for ground transportation (although neat!) just does not seem compelling. It will take a lot of plumbing refits, fuel injector changes, ECU recalibration, etc. to make an existing IC car burn hydrogen. And if you're designing from scratch, why continue the burden of using an Otto cycle reciprocating machine over fuel cells? Absent compelling reasons to do otherwise (which the Zubrin article does not present), it seems like continuing the research relevant to BEVs and renewable hydrogen production on parallel paths is the prudent thing to do.
tom_mellior 7y ago
> the numbers he quotes are just garbage. Could you be more specific? > the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. How is this measured? Are you saying that a gasoline car has 100x the range of an EV car with a battery volume equal to the gas tank's volume? That seems excessive.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  >How is this measured... Watts per kilogram. A kilo of gasoline contains about 100x the energy of a lithium ion battery. https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_199.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_199.shtml It's virtually impossible to beat hydrocarbons for chemical potential energy density. Diesel is the most dense commonly available such fuel. You put a liquid in a tank and move the complexity to the heat engine (which is 20-50% efficient depending on the size of the motor). Batteries don't even come close. Which is why if you put a fuel tank in a tesla with 1200lbs of gasoline in it (about 170 gallons), and operated it at comparable performance, its range would be considerably longer, despite lack of woo like regenerative braking and more efficient electric motors. It's one of the things Zubrin is complaining about in his mendacious article. Fair complaint; "gee the periodic table won't cooperate" -though metal hydrides are not terrible either, and in conjunction with fuel cells (potentially 100% efficient, despite his saying "nuh uh"), could be considerably better than a hydrocarbon car.
garmaine 7y ago
> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source. This credibility attack doesn't wash at all. Zubrin is a conservative thinker, yes, but he's not a spokesperson for the defense industry. He is a staunchly independent aerospace consultant whose project is humans-to-Mars. He's actually worked against industry interests since his plans are vastly less profitable than the cost-plus boondogles the traditional industry lobbies for (SLS, etc.). I think he might be speaking outside his element here, but I also think the date (2007) is very important. This was back in the middle of the worst parts of the Iraq war, with rising oil prices. Oil we got then was mostly from the middle east. People felt we needed to get off oil for economic and national security reasons, not because of climate change per se. The predictable result was blue-sky research into the hydrogen economy on things that really couldn't be deployed at that time (and still are barely deployed now, 12 years later). Zubrin's argument at the time, which this essay is a part of, was that we should switch to "flex fuel" engines which can take diesel or biofuels. Then we wouldn't be dependent on the sweet crude from the middle east. Now, in 2019, most of the oil we get is from relative friendlies in Canada and Venezuela, and we have better refineries for converting poor-quality crude from these sources into gasoline for cars. Improved battery efficiencies driven by mobile phones and notebooks have made electric storage for cars actually feasible. Solar efficiencies make locally produced energy economically viable. In short, energy world in 2019 looks nothing like 2007, and I don't think this article is very interesting at this point in time.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

Wait, are you telling me that someone who complains about backwards Islamic cultures and government wasting money before he even starts addressing his main point is not completely fair and impartial?! Colour me surprised. The use of emotional language and pejoratives almost had me convinced it was a genuine science article! (Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).

zenexer 7y ago
I nearly closed the article after reading his off-topic intro. I was expecting to read about hydrogen, not a rant about other cultures. It really detracts from the quality of the article. I do have to wonder whether this was intentional, though. The author appears to be targeting the government administration at the time. He's buttering them up by starting with a rant with which they're likely to agree. I'm not sure that it was intentional, but if it was, it was a smart move.
MisterTea 7y ago
No, you misread that. It's not the author breaking out into a rant. That illustrated the rhetoric used in the hydrogen pitch given by Bush post 9-11. The idea was to drum up hydrogen as a way to fight terrorism and radical islam which was being funded by oil. (edit: clarify)

bcoates 7y ago

Do hydrides have any advantages at all over synthetic hydrocarbons or biofuels? It seems like an effort to shoehorn hydrogen in there somewhere instead of just admitting that it has literally no place at all in the energy economy

kortex 7y ago
Carbon-free. Synthetic hydrocarbons and biofuels still give off carbon dioxide. Hydrides are just a vector for hydrogen. The advantage of hydrides over hydrogen is you don't release all the flammable gas at once, improving safety.
- extropy 7y ago
  Giving off carbon dioxide might be fine if it's collected back from atmosphere in the manufacturing process.
- dTal 7y ago
  Is that a problem, though? CO2 emissions aren't locally toxic. The main issue with it today is the fact that the carbon comes from the ground and doesn't get put back. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas too!
  - petra 7y ago
    Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it is always kept in balance and the air cannot hold more than it is. All that will happen is that it rains. And no amount of water vapor from hydrogen cars compares to what all the oceans contribute to the water vapor. It will basically have no effect. Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qhj31/eli5wont_hydrogen_cars_produce_a_lot_of_water/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qhj31/e...
    - dTal 7y ago
      Right, I wasn't actually suggesting that water vapor emissions from hydrogen vehicles would be a climate issue - on the contrary, I was drawing the comparison to illustrate that greenhouse gas emissions aren't necessarily a problem, if part of a closed loop (or other stabilizing influences like you point out).

extropy 7y ago

Random fact: gasoline was initially a waste product of producing kerosene - essentially free. So yes prices of gasoline went up once it started being widely used. IMO the storage and transportation issue is what kills hydrogen. Also compression losses are nontrivial. Assuming we need to manufacture fuel in renewable way methane or ethanol sounds like good ways to go. Both can be done in scale by abusing bacteria/algee. Overall I want my car to just have a standard form factor "power unit" and swap it out to whatever the new hotness is.

rm445 7y ago

Robert Zubrin is a visionary, who I'm sure wouldn't compromise his credibility to churn out some paid-propaganda. I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.

gridlockd 7y ago

> The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product. Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. The comparison is totally sound. The hydrocarbons for gasoline are readily drilled out of the ground. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured either from these hydrocarbons (which is pointless for fuel, you can just use the hydrocarbons directly) or via electricity (which is far more expensive). A mass market for carbon could not reduce the price below that of its inputs. Even if we had abundant cheap electricity it's unclear that hydrogen would really be economical against all alternatives. > People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. He's comparing fuels, you're comparing batteries to fuels, which doesn't make sense. > Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. So the six billion dollars of investment mentioned aren't enough? > Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. This habit of putting people into ideological boxes inhibits your ability to make rational assessments. > For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. You must have overread the part where he argues for ethanol fuel as a means to break up OPEC. > I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source. That's not the message though. The message is "it doesn't work, period" and "it is a hoax". I'm not in the position to say that his calculations are right or wrong, but given the lack of progress on hydrogen as a fuel, it's probably not far off the truth.

scottlocklin 7y ago
I agree with Zubrin that the hydrogen economy is rather silly and said so. I disagree with virtually all of his reasons and calculations as to why, and many of them are extremely deceptive. It's almost like he doesn't think anyone else knows anything about chemistry. >>Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. ... twenty million metric tons of hydrogen a year made from natural gas versus a couple billion of gasoline made from oil; not comparable at all for the suggested economic uses of hydrogen as a fuel. If hydrogen were used, it would be produced in a different way. Otherwise people could just burn the natural gas. People invested more than 6 billion in fracking. Fuel cells are promising, and of course I compare fuel cells and the proposed hydrogen economy to batteries; they're used to store energy. I loathe war mongering neocons, and Zubrin absolutely is one and as such has discredited himself as any kind of policy wonk who expects to be listened to by serious people. That said, some of his martian speculations are amusing, and I might even have an amusing conversation if I were in the same room with him, where the more prominent ones (Bill Kristol) I would be in danger of clubbing to death like a baby seal.

ThenAsNow 7y ago

Agree with most of your points. There are some valid observations that he then smoothly extrapolates to invalid conclusions. There has been considerable progress in fuel cell vehicles, for example. The Honda Clarity fuel cell version has an estimated 360+ mi (US EPA) range: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-clarity-fuel-cell-first-drive-review/ https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-cl... . Fill times are significantly better than current high-rate battery electric vehicle charging. It seems to me the key will be in whether we make advancements faster in higher energy-density batteries vs. scale up of direct hydrogen production (e.g., https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells ) . Electrolysis using grid power probably does not make sense. It would be valid to question, even if we could directly scale up hydrogen production from renewable sources, wouldn't it make more sense to use the same area for electricity production? If we're talking about ground transportation, the only advantages would be in range and fill time of FCVs over BEVs. Simplicity strongly favors BEVs over FCVs. Hydrogen combustion for ground transportation (although neat!) just does not seem compelling. It will take a lot of plumbing refits, fuel injector changes, ECU recalibration, etc. to make an existing IC car burn hydrogen. And if you're designing from scratch, why continue the burden of using an Otto cycle reciprocating machine over fuel cells? Absent compelling reasons to do otherwise (which the Zubrin article does not present), it seems like continuing the research relevant to BEVs and renewable hydrogen production on parallel paths is the prudent thing to do.

tom_mellior 7y ago

> the numbers he quotes are just garbage. Could you be more specific? > the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. How is this measured? Are you saying that a gasoline car has 100x the range of an EV car with a battery volume equal to the gas tank's volume? That seems excessive.

scottlocklin 7y ago
>How is this measured... Watts per kilogram. A kilo of gasoline contains about 100x the energy of a lithium ion battery. https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_199.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_199.shtml It's virtually impossible to beat hydrocarbons for chemical potential energy density. Diesel is the most dense commonly available such fuel. You put a liquid in a tank and move the complexity to the heat engine (which is 20-50% efficient depending on the size of the motor). Batteries don't even come close. Which is why if you put a fuel tank in a tesla with 1200lbs of gasoline in it (about 170 gallons), and operated it at comparable performance, its range would be considerably longer, despite lack of woo like regenerative braking and more efficient electric motors. It's one of the things Zubrin is complaining about in his mendacious article. Fair complaint; "gee the periodic table won't cooperate" -though metal hydrides are not terrible either, and in conjunction with fuel cells (potentially 100% efficient, despite his saying "nuh uh"), could be considerably better than a hydrocarbon car.

garmaine 7y ago

> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source. This credibility attack doesn't wash at all. Zubrin is a conservative thinker, yes, but he's not a spokesperson for the defense industry. He is a staunchly independent aerospace consultant whose project is humans-to-Mars. He's actually worked against industry interests since his plans are vastly less profitable than the cost-plus boondogles the traditional industry lobbies for (SLS, etc.). I think he might be speaking outside his element here, but I also think the date (2007) is very important. This was back in the middle of the worst parts of the Iraq war, with rising oil prices. Oil we got then was mostly from the middle east. People felt we needed to get off oil for economic and national security reasons, not because of climate change per se. The predictable result was blue-sky research into the hydrogen economy on things that really couldn't be deployed at that time (and still are barely deployed now, 12 years later). Zubrin's argument at the time, which this essay is a part of, was that we should switch to "flex fuel" engines which can take diesel or biofuels. Then we wouldn't be dependent on the sweet crude from the middle east. Now, in 2019, most of the oil we get is from relative friendlies in Canada and Venezuela, and we have better refineries for converting poor-quality crude from these sources into gasoline for cars. Improved battery efficiencies driven by mobile phones and notebooks have made electric storage for cars actually feasible. Solar efficiencies make locally produced energy economically viable. In short, energy world in 2019 looks nothing like 2007, and I don't think this article is very interesting at this point in time.