Romm, a Department of Energy advisor, makes a compelling case that widespread use of hydrogen is still four to five decades away.

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Product Description

"Vital, very readable guidance for investors, environmentalists, and interested bystanders looking toward a future without fossil fuels." -BOOKLIST

"It's hard to argue with the relentless logic...." -E/THE ENVIRONMENTAL MAGAZINE

"Readers looking to separate facts from hype about cars running on hydrogen and large-scale fuel cell systems will find a useful primer here."-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Lately it has become a matter of conventional wisdom that hydrogen will solve many of our energy and environmental problems. Nearly everyone -- environmentalists, mainstream media commentators, industry analysts, General Motors, and even President Bush -- seems to expect emission-free hydrogen fuel cells to ride to the rescue in a matter of years, or at most a decade or two.

Not so fast, says Joseph Romm. In The Hype about Hydrogen, he explains why hydrogen isn't the quick technological fix it's cracked up to be, and why cheering for fuel cells to sweep the market is not a viable strategy for combating climate change. Buildings and factories powered by fuel cells may indeed become common after 2010, Joseph Romm argues, but when it comes to transportation, the biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions, hydrogen is unlikely to have a significant impact before 2050.

The Hype about Hydrogen offers a hype-free explanation of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies, takes a hard look at the practical difficulties of transitioning to a hydrogen economy, and reveals why, given increasingly strong evidence of the gravity of climate change, neither government policy nor business investment should be based on the belief that hydrogen cars will have meaningful commercial success in the near or medium term. Romm, who helped run the federal government's program on hydrogen and fuel cells during the Clinton administration, provides a provocative primer on the politics, business, and technology of hydrogen and climate protection.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #646209 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush seized the nation's attention with his advocacy of a "hydrogen economy," with fuel cells that produce energy and water taking the place of fossil fuels in cars that produce greenhouse gases. As Romm (Cool Companies), a former Department of Energy official in the Clinton administration, points out, however, hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source (at least until we tame nuclear fusion). Hydrogen can be extracted from biomass or seawater, but the primary source today is natural gas—which produces greenhouse gases as a byproduct. Romm expresses extreme pessimism about the potential for hydrogen fuel cells in automobiles, even as car manufacturers jump on the fuel cell bandwagon. Romm maintains that it will take decades to solve the infrastructure demands presented by a hydrogen-powered car, such as hydrogen's propensity to embrittle metal. There are also safety issues: an electrical storm several miles away can ignite hydrogen, as can a slight charge from a cell phone. Romm believes that stationary fuel cell systems to provide power to companies and homes hold much more potential (and he works with companies promoting this technology). His central chapter lays out the case for global warming and the potential for catastrophic climate change in the next few decades. Readers looking to separate facts from hype about cars running on hydrogen and large-scale fuel cell systems will find a useful primer here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The utopian quest for a pollution-free energy source has been knocking around since, at the very least, the advent of urban smog alerts and acid rain in the 1960s. With President Bush's 2003 pledge to earmark a billion-plus dollars for developing fuel-cell vehicles, the holy grail of clean energy has been looking more and more like hydrogen, a substance whose only waste product is water vapor. Yet Romm, a Department of Energy advisor during the Clinton administration, makes a compelling case for believing that widespread use of hydrogen is still four to five decades away. To begin with, hydrogen entrepreneurs face the chicken-or-egg dilemma of making fuel-cell vehicles marketable before the hydrogen infrastructure necessary for people to abandon gasoline engines is in place. Romm also warns that overenthusiasm for a still embryonic technology could delay its full flowering even further. Vital, very readable guidance for investors, environmentalists, and interested bystanders looking toward a future without fossil fuels. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

JOSEPH J. ROMM served in various positions in the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration. Currently the Executive Director of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, and a Principal with the Capital E Group, he is the author of Cool Companies: How the Best Businesses Boost Profits and Productivity By Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Island Press, 1999).

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Customer Reviews

The real deal on the future of the hydrogen economy
Having read Jeremy Rifkin's interesting, but rose-colored and somewhat tangential take on the future of the hydrogen fuel cell: The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World-Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth (2002), I was pleased to read something from a full-time energy professional.

Joseph Romm, author of this sobering volume, worked in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and has been involved intimately with hydrogen research and development for many years. His main point is that we must eventually have a hydrogen economy based on the hydrogen fuel cell, but that we must not expect this to happen without some major technological breakthroughs. His book is a warning that the global warming clock is ticking and ticking, and that we need to do something now if we hope to avoid a possible catastrophe.

The really scary thing about global warming is that we may pass over the point of no return without knowing it. Furthermore, a full-blown, runaway greenhouse effect would make nuclear winter look like a walk in the park. Look what happened to Venus, where on any spring day (or winter day for that matter) the surface is hot enough to melt lead. Could that happen here? The real and direct answer to that question is: we don't know.

Romm is not painting any such dire scenarios in this book, but he does state most clearly that "the primary reason why we should pursue fuel cells and a hydrogen economy is to help respond to global warming." (p. 188) He adds, "global warming is the most intractable and potentially catastrophic environmental problem facing...the planet this century." (p. 152) Romm identifies carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere as the primary cause of global warming.

What to do and how to do it? Because Romm addresses these questions in such compelling detail, this is the book I believe that will be--if it hasn't already been--read by high-ranking government officials and the CEOs of energy corporations throughout the world. I hope that Sen. John Kerry and President George W. Bush will read it. What they will find is that it will require a closely co-ordinated effort on the part of both government and the private sector to bring about a cost-effective hydrogen technology. This technology will include the building of an infrastructure for making and distributing hydrogen that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Romm makes it clear that none of this will happen until hydrogen becomes competitive with fossil fuels in terms of cost and efficiency. Right now hydrogen is most cheaply made from fossil fuels themselves, a process that does not reduce green house gases, and furthermore is much more expensive, no matter what currently-available technology is used, than gasoline itself, and will remain so for many years, probably decades, to come.

Ultimately the goal is to manufacture hydrogen from water using renewable resources such as biomass, wind, sun, downward running water, evaporation, ocean currents, etc. to split the water molecule into its component elements. Romm's immediate future scenario has us obtaining hydrogen from natural gas while using our renewable energy resources to produce electricity in an effort to begin to slow the belching of carbon dioxide into the air.

Romm believes that oil production will probably peak in the first half of this century. He adds that "Some believe this will occur by 2010." (p. 16) Given this, it is obvious that we will have to come up with some sort of fuel to replace oil. Since only "a limited number of fuels are plausible alternatives for gasoline" (p. 16), and since the one with the most going for it is hydrogen, it will be hydrogen. But transporting hydrogen the way we transport gasoline will be more expensive, perhaps prohibitively expensive since it has to be condensed and/or made into a very cold liquid under pressure. One might think we could transport water instead and make hydrogen at hydrogen stations, but the most efficient conversion methods require large scale operations at high temperatures.

There are several other very challenging problems to be faced, not the least of which is what Romm identifies as "the chicken or the egg" conundrum. That is, automakers will not make hydrogen fuel cell cars until the hydrogen infrastructure is in place, and the infrastructure will not appear until there are a sufficient number of fuel cell cars on the road.

While I think Romm maintains a cautious level of optimism in the face of these difficulties, he does on occasion let his pessimism show: "If the actions of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and record levels of oil imports couldn't induce lawmakers, automakers, and the general public to embrace EXISTING vehicle energy efficiency technologies...I cannot imagine what fearful events must happen before the nation will be motivated to embrace hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which will cost much more to buy...to fuel, and require massive government subsidies to pay for the infrastructure." (p. 162)

If you want to know where we really are vis-vis the so-called hydrogen economy, read this book.

An excellent book on energy alternatives and the CO2 issue
Hydrogen's major disadvantage as transportation fuel is it's low energy density. Compressed hydrogen requires heavy storage vessels and significant energy for compression. Liquid hydrogen suffers from evaporation losses and unacceptably high liquefaction energy. Hydrate storage of hydrogen is a long way from being practical for motor vehicles.

Fuel cells have been touted as the next big thing in transportation. However, fuel cells are extremely expensive and not durable. Especially discouraging is that automotive variety fuel cells will not be significantly more efficient than internal combustion engines.

Alternative hydrogen infrastructure systems are: 1) pipelines to fueling stations and 2) on site reforming of liquids such as methanol, ethanol of other hydrocarbons. All alternatives would require massive capital investment. Local reforming of alcohols or hydrocarbons would be inefficient (and wouldn't make sense because it would be more efficient to use them directly as fuel in internal combustion engines).

A strength of the book is that is deals with overall process efficiencies and carbon dioxide byproducts of various processes. Processes are briefly described for producing hydrogen from coal, natural gas and water + electricity, all of which are well known and energy intensive.

Electrical generation processes briefly discussed include nuclear, geothermal, combined cycle and combined heat and power. Wind and photovoltaic are mentioned but not given much coverage.

Romm makes a convincing case that hybrid diesel electric vehicles will be the logical successors to today's autos.

The concluding chapters deal with the carbon dioxide issue, which Romm finds extremely threatening.

The book is well written and easily readable. Although an engineering or scientific background is not necessary to understand it, not much is provided in the way of background.

Read critically and good info can be had
This book does read like a series of lectures which sometimes verge on contradicting one another. It is also easy, by disagreeing with some of his theses, to dismiss the entire book. But at the core are some sound premises:

- Hydrogen is not an energy source like oil, it is an energy carrier. One must expend considerable energy in making hydrogen suitable for use, then expend more energy to transport it.

- A hydrogen automobile is the last place to begin because of conversion efficiency and infrastructure issues. Instead the author advocates near-term development of proven solutions like hybrid cars. Note: Toyota, with hybrids now and fuel cells in development, made their own study of total efficiency. It shows that a fuel cell vehicle is less efficient than the current Prius and a fuel cell hybrid would only be equal. See a summary by going to http://www.autofieldguide.com/articles/030501.html The study is near the end of the article.

- The best place to start with hydrogen is with on-site industrial power generation with cogenereated heat. The author makes a good case for this, primarily that industrial fuel cells are much more efficient than the types being developed for automobiles and that the efficiency is quite good when the waste heat is consumed as well. As well the infrastructure issues are much easier to solve. He does a nice analysis of the market conditions which have slowed the development of this application.

Unfortunately not dissected in the book is the role of the all-electric vehicle. It has been written elsewhere that generating electricity to charge an autombile battery is much more efficient than generating electricity to separate out hydrogen to transport it to fill a car to make electricity in a fuel cell. Given the recent advances in battery technology this is not so far off as it seemed a few years ago. The best part is that the electricity can be generated by any means (including hydrogen fuel cells) without hydrogen delivery infrastructure issues. It would have been nice if he had covered this angle as it has relevance in deciding where public reasearch money should be allocated.

All in all, if read carefully one will find much to think about.