Energy notes from Bob Williams

On the renewable electric side we need, aside from R&D support, to find ways to get sustained 30-40% annual growth rates for both wind and PV for a period ~ 2 decades--using instruments such as RPS, net metering (important for PV), and reverse auctions. See attached PV paper. CAES needs focused attention--large scale for remote wind in the near term and small-scale (located in distribution networks) for backing up PV in the long term...CAES is on hardly anyone's radar screen.

For the next decade or so the name of the game for fuel cell vehicles is getting the costs of the vehicles down rather than widespread deployment and I think this should be done via buydown strategies in centrally refueled fleets (targeting cumulative production over a 10-15 year period of 1-2 million vehicles), so that refueling in distributed markets is a challenge that doesn't really need to be addressed for more than a decade. You should think instead about refueling strategies for fleet owners. The H2 for fleet owners can be merchant H2, H2 provided by small natural gas reformers, or H2 provided by electrolysis units...fuel cost is not really a big issue in this part of the overall strategy because vehicle costs will be so high in this period and the needed fuel infrastructure won't look anything like what will be needed subsequently (10-15 years in the future) for distributed refueling markets.

During the period of fuel cell vehicle cost buydown gasoline hybrids should be the focus for mass auto markets, making sure vehicle designs lead to at least double the fuel economy of today's typical new cars. Aside from the oil saving benefits hybrids would offer, this focus on hybrids would provide invaluable experience with electric drive trains that would benefit future fuel cell vehicle technology.

Despite having written a book "Solar Hydrogen" in 1989 with Joan Ogden (the numbers in which are as good today as they were when we wrote the book) I don't have confidence that renewables will play big roles in providing hydrogen for transport and other non-electric applications during this century unless the CO2 sequestration idea turns out to be fatally flawed (which I doubt will be the case--and we have plenty of time to find out one way or the other over the next decade before H2 is introduced as an energy carrier--see below). and thus I think that we must consider seriously that hydrogen from fossil fuels will come to play big roles in a climate change-constrained world, as you can see from the paper I sent you earlier.

Natural gas derived hydrogen produced at refueling stations might be important in launched hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the market but most hydrogen production from fossil fuels will have to be associated with geological sequestration of CO2 because of climate change concerns--and hydrogen from coal will probably be cheaper than hydrogen from natural gas when CO2 sequestration is required, as our work is showing.

So coal has to be given serious attention. Hydrogen from coal will probably be produced along with electricity as a major coproduct. This prospect should be considered in the context of the terrible health impacts of small particle pollution from coal steam electric power (mostly formed in the atmosphere from SOx and NOx gaseous precursor emissions). Most US coal plants are approaching their 40th birthday or are older. I would like to see really tough emissions regulations imposed on existing coal plants at 40th birthday to motivate a "scrap and build" strategy that would replace coal steam-electric plants with coal gasification plants (at the same sites) that provide both electricity and hydrogen, with the hydrogen fraction growing over time as markets grow for hydrogen. This scrap and build strategy is articulated in my Asilomar paper (attached)--still a draft.

We also need to gain experience with CO2 sequestration to get the needed better understanding as to the potential of this strategy, which I think is probably safe and very large. We don't need to wait for a hydrogen energy economy to gain this experience, because there are already substantial industrial markets for hydrogen that account for ~ 1% of US primary energy use--e.g.., for ammonia manufacture for fertilizer and for meeting oil refinery needs. The demand for hydrogen at refineries is growing ~ 10% per year in the US (e.g., for hydrodesulfurization and for compensating for the secular shift to heavier and heavier crudes). We should be developing incentives to get these industrial hydrogen users to sequester the CO2 coproduct of hydrogen manufacture. Some of this activity should target enhanced oil recovery or enhanced coal bed methane recovery. But we should also provide incentives to do demonstration projects in deep saline aquifers where CO2 injection gives no economic benefit other than climate change mitigation. We might also try to match enhanced hydrocarbon resource recovery via CO2 injection with coal gasification power plants equipped with CO2 removal technology and give them incentives to do aquifer disposal demo projects where there are no enhanced resource recovery opportunities.