Improving our Quality of Life

What Can We Do about these Quality of Life Issues?

To eliminate the human contribution to both the greenhouse effect and urban pollution, a new fuel and new ways of using it must emerge. Over the last 150 years, the trend in energy use, from wood to coal to oil, and perhaps to natural gas, has been to more and more hydrogen and less and less carbon. Each successive fuel has been cleaner and more powerful. The better environmental fuel efficiency has, however, been offset by the growth in energy consumption worldwide. This can only accelerate as the standard of living of the emerging economies of China, India and others increases.

Lifestyle Options

The only way to deal with the serious threats to our environment is to opt for a new energy system based on renewable, clean energy. This can be found by following the trend to its natural limit and use pure hydrogen, a fuel with zero carbon content and the largest energy of combustion per unit of mass. The byproducts of hydrogen combustion are electricity, water and heat. Combustion of hydrogen at high temperatures in internal combustion engines causes some formation of nitrogen oxides. However the PEM fuel cell, which operates at much lower temperatures, does not produce nitrogen oxides and is a perfectly clean energy conversion device.

What is yet to come ...

At the present, the cheapest way to produce hydrogen gas is steam reforming of natural gas. The cost of purified hydrogen obtained this way is about twice that of the natural gas used. Because methane is not a renewable source of hydrogen, steam reforming is not a sound long-term basis for a new hydrogen energy system. Clean and renewable hydrogen for transportation will most likely be produced by water electrolysis: breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources, such as solar energy, wind energy or hydroelectric power. Electricity, is not cheap, and neither is the infrastructure required to electrolyze, compress and store large amounts of hydrogen. The price of hydrogen would be about four times the 1999 gasoline gallon equivalent. If surplus (or off-peak demand) electricity is used, the cost of hydrogen production would be lower. Thus, the cost of hydrogen will be higher, but when the negative consequences of fossil fuels are factored in, hydrogen may be our best alternative.