Geothermal power from facilities such as the Svartsengi Power Plant has helped Iceland all but eliminate oil and coal imports. | Photo by Rob Howard
A Viking range (right to left): Hjálmar Árnason, a former member of the parliament and an early supporter of pro-hydrogen legislation; hydrogen pioneer Bragi Árnason; and Icelandic New Energy's Jón Björn Skúlason and Thorsteinn Sigfusson. | Photo by Rob Howard
Icelandic Hydrogen's dispenser prototype, part of its plan to build small-scale stations able to fill three to four cars per day. | Photo by Rob Howard
Iceland is an anomalous place. First, thanks to the Gulf Stream, it isn't all that icy. That would be Greenland, named by Erik the Red, the inventor of travel marketing. That's not to say Iceland doesn't have weather -- I experienced four seasons in 30 minutes on a visit to the Gullfoss waterfall. There is an elemental war going on here: The clouds blot out every bit of light, then the sun stabs through in displays of horrible beauty; the postcard-perfect mountains look impermeable, but up close, it's clear they've been raked by watery claws of snow and rain; the ubiquitous lava fields wrestle with hummocks of grass and moss.
Depending on your point of view, Iceland was either the last part of Europe to be settled or the first part of North America to see Europeans. It sits on both continents, astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the earth's plates are gradually pulling apart, making Iceland a bubbling vessel of magma-heated water. Since its settlement by Vikings in AD 874, the country has remained remarkably isolated. The people -- all 300,000 of them, roughly the population of Aurora, Colorado -- are as homogeneous as the weather and the terrain are not. Iceland is Appalachia with different rocks.
Their remoteness, however, seems to have made Icelanders particularly resourceful. Faced with essentially no arable land, they built greenhouse farms to raise cucumbers and tomatoes and even bananas. In the fish-rich but almost uninhabitable north, Icelandic fishermen needed special clothing, which spawned 66° North high-tech outerwear, now sold in 15 countries. Icelanders have even managed to turn their own lack of diversity into an advantage:
But Iceland's primary innovation, the one that puts it on the map for some of the world's largest companies, centers on renewable energy. The country has no coal, no petroleum reserves, and no trees. (The Vikings leveled the timber centuries ago, leading to this bit of local wit: "What do you do if you're lost in an Icelandic forest? Stand up.") Rather than continue to import every calorie of fuel, Icelanders figured out how to heat their homes with their copious geothermal supply; before long, they were generating geothermal electricity as well. Today, Iceland imports essentially no coal or oil for heat and power: 70% of its energy is renewable. Reykjavik is at the center of this energy vanguard, filling all of its needs from green sources, either geothermal or hydroelectric.
It is here that Iceland's ambition becomes clear. Having shown that it knows what it takes to move from one fuel source to another, this rocky little outpost is ready for something bigger. "We would like to be the world's laboratory for exploring a carbon-neutral future," says Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, the country's foreign minister and former mayor of Reykjavik. Reykjavik Power, the world's largest geothermal heating company, and other local firms already export expertise to markets including China and the United States (which is the world's largest consumer of geothermal power and which hopes to boost that usage exponentially). The next step: Proving that cars can run on something other than gasoline. That they can run, in fact, on hydrogen.
On my trip to Iceland last November, I became the first person in the world to rent a hydrogen-powered car. That I could do so was testament to the sheer force of will exerted over 30 years by people like Bragi Árnason. A now-retired chemist at the University of Iceland, Árnason started arguing back in the 1970s that hydrogen could power cars. People mocked him, but he weathered the barbs and slowly won converts, including a wisecracking energy physicist named Thorsteinn Sigfusson, who took the hydrogen-fuel concept out of the faculty club and into the market. Sigfusson helped found Icelandic New Energy (INE), a consortium of energy companies, and was its chairman until recently, when he was asked to run the Icelandic Innovation Institute.
At 6 feet, 4 inches and weighing something like 300 pounds, Sigfusson is part offensive tackle, part Katie Couric. "I'm a people whisperer," he says. Which means he likes to suggest ideas to others and then get out of their way, letting them make it happen. His affable nature has made him Iceland's unofficial ambassador of energy, and he greets groups interested in the country's green-energy prowess with gigantic air bear hugs. "Welcome, friends," he intones in his friendly baritone. "Welcome to Energy Island." During a serious presentation about energy physics, he'll slip in a playful slide on the diet of an energy society, comparing renewables, oil, and coal to proteins, carbs, and fat.
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Recent Comments | 17 Total
March 20, 2008 at 11:27am by Troy Jensen
A demonstration of the safety of hydrogen power:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Hindenburg_burning.jp...
March 20, 2008 at 1:55pm by BW WE
Another characteristic of hydrogen fires is that the flames tend to ascend rapidly with the gas in air, as illustrated by the Hindenburg flames, causing less damage than hydrocarbon fires. Two-thirds of the Hindenburg passengers survived the fire, and many of the deaths which occurred were from falling or from diesel fuel burns
March 20, 2008 at 6:01pm by Kevin Quail
Study Sees Hydrogen Problems Requiring Decades To Solve
Use of hydrogen to transport and store enerfgy is still a distant prospect.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers conclude in an article to be published in June that it could take "several decades" to overcome daunting technical challenges standing in the way of the mass production and use of hydrogen fuel cell cars.
The article notes that "success is not certain" in efforts to develop inexpensive, hydrogen-powered fuel cells and to create the vast storage and transportation infrastructure needed for the vehicles, stressing that hydrogen's "wide-scale use is laden with potential technical, economic and societal impasses." In case fuel cells never do become practical for cars, the researchers conclude, it would be wise for the nation to "maintain a robust portfolio of energy research and development" in other areas.
"In my mind, developing practical hydrogen fuel cells for cars is definitely doable, but we must solve very daunting technical challenges," said Rakesh Agrawal, Purdue University's Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.
The article will appear as the cover story in the June issue of the AIChE Journal, a publication of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The article was written by Agrawal, Martin Offutt, from the National Research Council, and Michael P. Ramage, a retired executive from ExxonMobile Corp.
Fuel cells cost too much to build and have short operating lifetimes.
"Today's fuel cells generate power at a cost of greater than $2,000 per kilowatt, compared with $35 per kilowatt for the internal combustion engine, so they are more than 10 times more expensive than conventional automotive technology," Agrawal said. "At the same time, fuel cells have an operating lifetime for cars of less than 1,000 hours of driving time, compared with at least 5,000 hours of driving time for an internal combustion engine.
"That means fuel cells wear out at least five times faster than internal combustion engines. If I buy a new car, I expect it to last, say, 10 years, which equates to about 3,000 hours of driving time. If my fuel cell only lasts 1,000 hours, you can see that's not very practical."
Cheaper and longer lasting catalysts are needed. Plus, in order to use fuel cells to burn hydrogen the hydrogen transportation and storage problems need to be solved.
To bring down the cost of fuel cells, less expensive catalysts and membrane materials are needed, Agrawal said.
Developing an infrastructure of hydrogen storage and transportation represents other significant challenges.
"A fuel-cell car built with today's technology would cost about $250,000, but you would have no place to fill up the tank," Agrawal said.
Hydrogen is a light gas, which makes it more expensive to transport and store. Because its molecular weight is only 2 – compared with heavier gases, such as methane, which has a molecular weight of 16 – less hydrogen is contained in the same space as heavier gases, making its transport more expensive.
Agrawal sees hydrogen vehicles starting to show up on the road in the year 2020.
"I believe we can probably solve the technological problems related to making hydrogen fuel cells practical as a replacement for the internal combustion engine, but it won't be easy and it likely won't happen very soon," Agrawal said. "An optimistic prediction would be that a significant number hydrogen fuel cell cars will be entering the marketplace around 2020, and by 2050 everybody will be driving them."
But that is an optimistic prediction. A lot of problems must be solved to even start hydrogen deployment in 2020. In the meantime the market for gas-electric hybrid vehicles is going to become quite large. Many of those hybrids will be pluggable and some people will be charging them from their home outlets. Photovoltaics might drop to the point that a portion of that car battery recharging will be done using electric generated right at home.
Suppose nuclear power experiences a resurgence. Hydrogen could be generated at nuclear plants. But if superconductor technology continues to improve and battery technology does as well then superconducting power lines which suffer no resistance might deliver nuclear power to electric vehicle batteries more conveniently at home at a lower cost than a hugely expensive infrastructure for delivering hydrogen to fuel stations.
In my view hydrogen's eventual role as primary vehicle fuel is by no means assured. Future solutions to hydrogen's technological problems will not compete with today's other energy technologies. Hydrogen's supporting technologies will compete with tomorrow's batteries, superconductors, and other energy technologies. Those competing technologies will be delivering benefits decades before hydrogen begins to do so and therefore industry, academic, and government labs will continue to refine those other technologies. By the time hydrogen is ready the competiton might be too firmly entrenched and cheap to be dislodged.
Fuel cells have a future independent of hydrogen. If the cost and durability problems with fuel cells could be solved for burning hydrocarbon liquid fuels then fuel cels could be adopted much more rapidly as a more efficient way to burn fossil fuels. Liquid fuel burning fuel cells could even work in hybrid vehicles with batteries providing increased efficiency through regenerative braking.
April 17, 2008 at 3:33pm by
To the author, Michael Fitzgerald:
Your poorly written and researched article clearly demonstrates your lack of any basic level of science or economics.
Any junior high school student already knows hydrogen can power just about anything, ie: cars, homes, computers, etc.
Your poorly written article failed to address two fundamental problems with hydrogen power:
1) Making of hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen doesn't just grow on trees, nor can you just simply pull it out of your arse.
Natural gas is not a solution to the problem of making hydrogen because it is a limited resource just like oil. You basic understanding of economics is clearly lacking too since you failed to note the price of natural gas recently given the demand.
You failed to mention in your article that using electrolysis to split fresh water into hydrogen and oxygen requires an ENORMOUS amount of energy. Just where will this enormous amount of required energy come from Michael Fitzgerald, solar?, geothermal?, wind?, hydroelectric?, corn or sugar cane based ethanol?, oil?, coal? Again, you clearly demonstrate your lack of knowledge in science and economics.
2) Fresh water (not salt water) for electrolysis is also a very limited resource.
It is no secret that much of the world is already seeing a shortage of fresh water. Should you use electrolysis to make hydrogen to power cars and other things, Michael Fitzgerald, what happens to the world's already limited supply of fresh water?
Your article mentions Brazil's use of sugar cane to produce ethanol. The U.S. grows corn to produce ethanol. These are thoughtless energy policies as well. Have you noticed recently the rapidly inflating price of food since we have been using food to power our vehicles rather than putting it on the table to eat? Many poorer countries ie Haiti, Mexico, are suffering from riots and more instability recently due to the rapid inflation of food prices. (Do a little research next time will ya?) Study the macro economics of commodities while you're at it.
Don't get me wrong, I support hydrogen to power our vehicles as well, and I also support nuclear power with the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and breeder reactors.
To Michael Fitzgerald:
At least make an attempt to address these fundamental issues lacking in your article, or if that's too difficult for you, then you could always go back to writing about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton for the National Enquirer.
P.S. Between this article on hydrogen, and the cover of the magazine for April 2008, maybe the credibility of "Fast Company" magazine is close to that of the National Enquirer already.
April 17, 2008 at 4:34pm by Don Evans
To those opposed to using fresh water for hydrolysis, perhaps we should review basic science. The products that are obtained from hydrogen combustion, as I recollect from grade school science class, are LARGE amounts of energy and pure water vapor; which is returned to the atmosphere and ultimately produces rain clouds.
As to the storage of hydrogen, don't forget that the energy obtained from one unit of hydrogen is roughly 3 times that of gasoline, which is also (by definition) a combustible substance. The requisite storage, therefore, would only have to accommodate one third that of a standard gas tank.
Internal combustion engines are also well suited for hydrogen combustion, with modifications to the fuel delivery systems. We needn't be discussing the use of fuel cell systems, which utilize catalysts to produce electricity.
The only problem with hydrogen economies, thus far, has been the necessary energy needed for hydrolysis. This has been a costly process; especially since it has been affected with fossil fuel based energy production, somewhat mitigating the benefits. The use of solar, or other non-finite fuel based hydrolysis systems, however, make water hydrolysis far more economical in the long run; as fixed cost energy generation systems (so called "renewable" systems that are purchased/financed once, at a fixed interest rate and payment) are more economical than variable cost-based systems (i.e. energy generation systems which consume fossil fuels which, in turn, continuously increase in price over time) over time.
With gas at 3.50 per gallon (as a finite, aka fossil fuel example), and rising, the advantage of developing and using non-finite fuels will only increase with time, and accelerate with the growing consumption of fossil fuels by emerging economies such as China and India.
April 17, 2008 at 5:15pm by Don Evans
I apologize. I meant to say the required storage would be one third of the relative volume of a gas tank.
April 26, 2008 at 2:18am by Steven Straight
For a slightly different bend on this idea, check out:
http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/featlovin
Feel free to open commentary on how the two articles relate