From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 09:54:24 MST
http://nationalreview.com/comment/comment-georgia013103.asp
<<The "hydrogen economy" has been promoted for years by environmental
activists and alternative-energy gurus like Amory Lovins. But hydrogen is not
a source of energy, something which hydrogen advocates either don't
understand or refuse to acknowledge. Since hydrogen does not exist in
geological reservoirs it must be extracted from fossil-fuel feedstocks or
water. The process of extracting hydrogen uses energy, which means that using
hydrogen is less efficient that burning fossil fuels. And if you're worried
about global warming you certainly don't want to go that route. As a recent
energy-technology review in Science magazine pointed out last November, "Per
unit of heat generated, more CO2 is produced by making H2 [hydrogen] from
fossil fuel than by burning the fossil fuel directly." >>
<<Honda, for example, is leasing five of its FCX fuel-cell vehicles to the
city of Los Angeles. It is clearly a PR ploy since the cost to the company
for each car is $1.6 million. Honda has also constructed a bank of solar
panels in Torrance, California for the purpose of generating "clean"
electricity to produce the hydrogen. But it takes a whole week to generate
enough power to produce one tank of hydrogen at a cost of $40,000 per tank.
Call me crazy, but that's a long way from affordable transportation.>>
<<Moreover, wind farms are incredibly land intensive. Three newly proposed
wind farms in West Virginia would occupy 30 to 40 square miles but would
produce slightly less electricity than a new 265 MW gas-fired combined-cycle
generating plant, which would occupy a few acres. Sallie Baliunas at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimates, using very
conservative assumptions, that producing enough hydrogen with wind power to
replace just one-third of the vehicles on the road today would require
210,000 square miles. In reality, that number would likely be much higher.>>
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