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Hydrogen cells – a green energy breakthrough?
JUST BEFORE THE war against Iraq began, George Bush
announced a new initiative to develop hydrogen fuel cells as a new form of power
for motor vehicles and other applications. At the launch ceremony Bush said that
‘if you’re interested in our environment and if you’re interested in doing
what’s right for the American people… let us promote fuel cells as a way to
advance into the 21st century’. This was met however by a barrage of
criticism from environmental activists, who labelled it a sham and a smokescreen
for doing nothing to tackle global warming.
A fuel cell is a device that uses hydrogen, or hydrogen rich
fuel, and oxygen to create electricity by an electro-chemical process, and if
pure hydrogen is used as a fuel, only water is produced as a by-product,
theoretically making it environmentally friendly. Fuel cells are currently being
developed to power passenger vehicles, homes, commercial buildings, mobile
phones and lap-top computers. They are more efficient than the combustion
engines used to power cars and in themselves do not produce the greenhouse gases
that cause global warming. Furthermore, Bush claimed that using hydrogen power
would cut US oil consumption by 11 million barrels a day by 2040, a reduction of
over 50% from present levels.
Readers of Socialism Today will understandably be
sceptical of anything the US president says, so it is worth looking in some
detail of the criticisms made of his initiative.
Firstly, hydrogen does not occur in a usable form naturally,
it has to be manufactured and stored and to do this requires energy. It would
only be a green energy source if the energy used to process it was itself
renewable. Bush however says that coal or nuclear power could be the primary
energy source, both of which create major environmental hazards. As Daniel
Becker, director of the global warming and energy programme at the Sierra Club,
an environmental pressure group, commented, ‘that’s like trying to lose weight
by running to McDonalds’. A report from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology said that producing the fuel itself would involve substantial carbon
dioxide emissions and concluded that these, coupled with the extra ‘green’ costs
of fuel distribution would cancel out any potential environmental advantages of
hydrogen cells. It is also necessary to include in the equation the
(non-renewable) energy expended in manufacturing new vehicles every few years,
as a result of their limited life due to planned obsolescence.
Even according to Bush, it will take 20 years to produce a
viable device and another 20 before there was a significant reduction in US oil
consumption. In the meantime the on-going hydrogen cell development programme
would provide a useful excuse for not developing renewable energy and continuing
the production of vast quantities of greenhouse gases by burning oil. During the
40-year period envisaged by Bush before significant benefits emerge, there will
be further massive, and possibly irreversible, damage done to the environment.
The scale of the proposed programme is relatively small with
only $720 million of new money committed, although part of it is to investigate
the production of hydrogen from petrol – making sure that Bush’s friends in the
oil industry have a place at the trough. An idea of the small scale of the
initiative can be grasped by comparing the $720 million available, to the $2bn
Ford spent to develop one new model in the US, its (non-green) Taurus. The
limited ambition of the programme was further emphasised by Dr Peter Wells from
the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University, quoted by BBC
News, who pointed out that even if one million fuel cell vehicles were on the
road by 2020, their numbers would still be dwarfed by 200 million conventionally
powered cars.
The most telling criticism of the US government proposals is
that they are completely voluntary, where no companies are obliged to implement
hydrogen cell technology in their products. An earlier voluntary government
programme to produce hybrid electrical/diesel cars, which would have
significantly reduced pollution, has resulted in no new production vehicles from
the US auto industry. This is despite the fact that many experts think this
approach has the most potential in the short-term to cut greenhouse gas
emissions from cars. The US auto industry is also lukewarm about fuel cells,
because they will only invest in the new technology if it is profitable to do so
and there is no prospect of that being the case without huge government
subsidies. Present neo-liberal thinking on the environment insists that all
initiatives should be voluntary, but companies will never ‘voluntarily’ agree to
adopt a policy that would reduce their profits significantly, as any policy
would have to do to have a real green impact.
If the hydrogen that drives them is produced with renewable
energy, fuel cells could be a useful green alternative to the present combustion
methods used in motor vehicles or electricity generation. However, a priority
should not be to spend resources on making cars greener, but rather on
increasing investment in public transport and in renewable energy sources such
as wind, wave and solar power. Private transportation is not wrong in principle,
but a voluntary switch to more use of public transport, encouraged by massively
greater investment, will be an essential component of a sustainable society.
Bush’s real motives in launching a programme to promote
hydrogen cell technology when he did, were to deflect criticism of his links to
the polluting big oil companies in the run up to the Iraq war, and to build some
environmental credibility in a pre-election period with minimum commitment and
cost. Bush’s focus on the pollution produced by individuals in their cars was
also a way of diverting attention from the real environmental culprits – the
corporations that produce the majority of greenhouse gas emissions.
There is also a longer-term geo-political strategic factor
involved, as hinted at in Bush’s comments that hydrogen is a good way to bolster
US ‘energy independence’. "Greenery is not the only attraction of fuel cells",
commented The Economist. His real intentions on the environment were shown by
the refusal of his government to sign the Kyoto treaty to reduce global warming,
in order to protect the profits of his friends in Big Oil and in other
multi-national companies.
Pete Dickinson
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