Hydrogen

If I were President, I would start building the nation's hydrogen infrastructure.

Everyone agrees we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Many agree that we need to reduce our dependence on oil altogether. Oil is a finite resource; There's only so much oil in the earth's crust and after we've pumped the last of it out it will be gone forever. When will that happen? No one knows for sure, but no one wants to be here when it happens.

What is certain is that right now the United States uses 25% of all the oil used in the world and if that were to suddenly disappear we would be in a world of hurt. We use more oil than we produce, and we use more than we can produce even if we "drill, baby, drill." Many say that the war in Iraq was never about WMDs, terrorist threats or freedom for the Iraqi people, but that the U.S. is there to secure oil supplies for the U.S. in the future. It wouldn't be the first war fought over oil.

Most everyone knows that Japan attacked U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, but almost no one remembers that this was in response to an oil embargo that the U.S. placed on Japan in July, 1941. At the time the U.S. was the world's largest oil producer and Japan, a tiny nation without much in the way of natural resources of its own, was as dependent on our oil then as we are dependent on oil imports now. Faced with the lack of oil starving their industrial capacity to a standstill they felt they had no choice but to fight us.

If the middle east were to suddenly cut off our oil supplies, don't you think we would go to war over it, too?

Our alternatives are to project our military might around the world to protect our oil interests, or to eliminate our reliance on oil and therefore eliminate the threat of having our livelihood in other nation's hands.

I'm a firm believer in hydrogen as the fuel of the future. The recipe is pretty simple: crack water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and release the oxygen. There have been large-scale experiments that show that the heat and energy of the sun can be used to crack water in a hydrogen factory. When you 'burn' the hydrogen fuel, the exhaust is clean water vapor. Sounds great, huh?

Well, it is great. There's no catch. Let's start today.

Ah, there's the catch. You can't just start today. First of all there needs to be an agreement between the government and automakers that this will be done, and done quickly. It takes automakers 5 - 20 years to develop a new technology for the market, so don't rush down to your Ford dealer just yet. Automakers and the government will need to decide on standards for safety and utility. It won't do any good if Ford's fuel tanks take a different nozzle than Chevrolet's.

Speaking of nozzles, there's no use buying a new hydrogen car if there's no place to fuel up. Imagine what our country looked like in 1908 when Henry Ford started building his Model T automobiles. Gasoline and benzene were little used up until then, and were the almost worthless by-products of oil refining. Entrepreneurial market owners set up filling stations for passing motorists, pumping the fuel into a measuring bucket and then pouring it through a funnel into the tank. As a car owner it was an adventure to drive away from your known area because you couldn't count on finding a place to fuel on your route. As the popularity of the automobile grew more and more filling stations sprouted up filling the needs of the market.

That was a different situation than we find ourselves in now. Americans are dependent on their cars for every facet of their life and no one will buy a hydrogen car if there aren't at least 2 fuel stations, one near their home and the other near their work. It took over 30 years for our current gasoline infrastructure to get to that point. We can't afford to take as long to build a hydrogen infrastructure.

Building an infrastructure entails building both the manufacturing capacity and the means of distribution. Our oil infrastructure includes deep water ports and off-shore oil transfer platforms, high-capacity pipelines to move the oil to refineries around the country, a fleet of tens of thousands of oil tanker trucks to move the product to fuel stations, and hundreds of thousands of gas stations to get the gasoline into your tank. All of this will need to be duplicated to some extent to make hydrogen fuel readily available.

Oil is also used for other purposes than to produce gasoline. It is used to heat homes, power manufacturing, and fuel aircraft too. How much research and experimentation would you want done before you felt safe flying on a hydrogen-powered jet aircraft?

All of this takes time. It will take years to build the infrastructure, years to design and manufacture the hydrogen cars, years to refit home furnaces and other oil-users to work with hydrogen. Many experts think that the oil crisis will peak in the next 5 to 10 years, when the rest of the world demands as much oil as the U.S. does, and there won't be enough to go around. That's how much time we have to end our reliance on oil, 5 to 10 years.

Can it be done? America is a can-do type of country and if anyone can accomplish this, we can do it together. But it needs to start now. Who should do the work? Should we cede future profits to the big oil companies because they provide the basic framework for the old system? Of course, the big oil companies have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in good times and in bad, and maybe they're in the best position to bear the cost of this conversion. It will be a new world out there, and there will be fortunes to be made.