Big Oil is the Biggest User of Hydrogen
Hydrogen is a multi-billion dollar business. 50 million metric tons of
hydrogen is sold annually. World hydrogen production is doubling every
decade. The biggest growth driver is oil refineries' need to make
lower-sulfur fuels. Other growth drivers are the use of hydrogen in
making fertilizer, food processing, semiconductor manufacturing, and by
other growth industries. You use hydrogen in your vehicle. Gasoline is
a hydrocarbon. Hydrogen is used to make gasoline achieve high-octane
efficiency. Hydrogen is also used to make modern gasoline burn with
far-less damaging emissions. The food you eat was probably grown with
fertilizers that were processed with hydrogen. Many food oils are
processed with hydrogen.
Most hydrogen is reformed from natural gas and oil. The United States
creates as much as one-third of the world's total hydrogen. Most of
the current U.S. production is from steam reformation of natural gas,
where hydrogen is extracted from CH4 and H20.
About half of the United States hydrogen is used in the oil refining
process. Praxair, a world leader in supplying industrial hydrogen
explains, "By using hydrogen, heat and a catalyst, refineries can
improve gasoline yields by cracking heavy oil molecules into lighter,
more valuable fuels." Praxair includes these benefits of hydrogen in
oil refining:
Higher gasoline yield
Environmentally clean - no flue gas
Improved gasoline octane quality and sensitivity
Enhance feedstock
Helps meet Clean Air Act regulations
Lowers sulfur content of fuels
Improves production flexibility
Critics of the Hydrogen Economy tend to ignore its multi-billion dollar
success. Instead they focus on a worst case scenario - use coal
generated electricity to reform natural gas, and then put the hydrogen
in a truck that must drive one thousand miles, and then put the
hydrogen in a million-dollar demonstration fuel cell vehicle. Call this
dumb hydrogen.
With this type of scenario planning, IBM would never have made a
computer. The initial market was seven computers in the planet.
Computers were too expensive, slow, and unreliable. Today, of course,
over one billion people hold more computing power in the palm of their
hands than the first vacuum-tube monsters.
In transportation, smart hydrogen will drive growth, not dumb hydrogen.
Smart hydrogen starts by making gasoline and diesel increasingly clean.
Volumes increase. Production cost of hydrogen decreases. Smart hydrogen
then expands by going into increasingly cost-effective hydrogen
vehicles at reasonable costs. In Torrance, California, hydrogen is
being pipelined to the fueling pump. $500 per month Honda FCX cars will
use the hydrogen. $59,000 modified Toyota Priuses will use the hydrogen
in conventional engines. Fuel costs will be competitive with gasoline.
>From where does this smart hydrogen come? It comes from the same
hydrogen pipeline being used by the oil refiners. There are 1,500 km of
hydrogen pipelines in the USA.
Armory Lovins, in his paper Twenty Hydrogen Myths states that
"Producing hydrogen is already a large and mature global industry....
Globally, about 50 million metric tons of hydrogen is made for
industrial use each year. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reports
that about 48% of global hydrogen production is reformed from natural
gas, 30% from oil, and 18% from coal. Only 4% of the world's hydrogen
comes from electrolysis."
Half of the California hydrogen fueling stations make hydrogen on-site,
using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Most use
photovoltaics to power the electrolysis. In Palm Springs, wind is used
for one station. Solar and wind hydrogen is green. It is also more
expensive than the hydrogen in Torrance. It will take volume and
improved technology to make green hydrogen cost-effective.
The United States has the potential to replace its dependency on
foreign oil with fuel that is created at home. Short term, biofuels
promise to be a big part of the equation. Long term, hydrogen could be
a major fuel.
John Addison is the author of the book Revenue Rocket (Executive
Summary at http://www.optimarkworks.com/ ) and the upcoming book
Cleantech Marketing. Since 2002, John has been a Board member of the
California Hydrogen Business Council (www.californiahydrogen.org). John
Addison is president of OPTIMARK Inc. a firm that helps with marketing
strategy and partner development. He is a popular speaker in the
Americas, Europe and Asia.
XML site map