Government Funding for Hydrogen Fuel Cells Program Reinstated
Just this morning, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water approved $190 million for the hydrogen and fuel cell program office which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This action, in effect, restores the program to current year funding levels. Earlier this year, the administration demonstrated its lack of support for the future of hydrogen by pulling programs for hydrogen and fuel cell development. In addition, another $54 million was approved for the SECA program. The full appropriations committee meets tomorrow. This funding is for 2010.
“Congress recognized and embraced the role hydrogen fuels cells and their fuels play in the portfolio of energy technologies for the 21st century,” said Bob Rose, Executive Director for the U.S. Fuel Cell Council. “We hope that the Secretary of Energy (Steven Chu) and his staff embrace this as a spirit of goodwill.”
- » See also: Copenhagen Opens First Hydrogen Fueling Station, Unveils Fleet of Fuel Cell Cars
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The Council has been working with both the Department of Energy and its subcommittees to reinstate support for the hydrogen fuel cell program which was literally stopped dead in its tracks in 2009. Rose noted that this is a great opportunity to re-evaluate the current programs and make changes.
According to Senator Byron L. Dorgan, (D-N.D.) and Chairman for the committee, “The Energy and Water Appropriations bill makes investments in our nation’s efforts to develop safe, homegrown energy sources that will reduce our reliance on foreign oil. To enhance our nation’s energy security, we’ve made short-term, mid-range, and long-term investments in building efficiency, vehicle technologies, wind, and solar energy programs. And, because ongoing research and development is necessary to develop game-changing technologies, this bill also restores funding for Hydrogen energy research.”
The refunding of the hydrogen and fuel cell program is part of a larger appropriations bill passed today by the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. They passed a $27.4 billion appropriations bill for energy and security programs. The intent is to boost funding for hydrogen, environmental clean-up programs and fossil-fuel programs. The measure to re-introduce funding for hydrogen programs is a direct break from the administration’s current energy direction.
Dorgan was quoted in an E&E article today saying, “Most of what we do is not spending … it’s investing in the future. Vehicles that run on hydrogen fuel cells will be important in the future and “abandoning” DOE’s 189 hydrogen projects “does not serve our interest well,” he said. The House committee bill also reinstated funding for the hydrogen program.
While we slowly wean ourselves from fossil fuels, the bill actually funds fossil-fuel development programs such as carbon capture and storage programs (note if the Climate Bill passes, this will be the first cap-and-trade legislation passed, just in time for the Copenhagen Climate talks in December) and emission reduction programs. Hmmm…are they supporting research for clean coal?
There are still several hurdles to clear before the funding for the hydrogen programs are “officially” approved. Last night, the full House Appropriations Committee met to review the proposed 2010 budget that was passed by their Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on June 25th. This budget contains similar funding numbers for hydrogen transportation systems ($40 million) as does the senate version but has a total number of $108 million Rose told me, versus the $190 million set aside in the senate version.
Once the full senate committee passes their version, the house and senate will need to negotiate any differences in funding numbers. Rose said that the final numbers will end up somewhere between $108 to $190 million and hopes that they are closer to the higher number rather than the smaller number. He doesn’t expect to hear any final numbers until after the August recess.
There is still a long-way to go to finalize the details for the hydrogen fuel cell program (and other hydrogen programs. “We’re in the third inning, ” explained Rose. “There will be complex decision making and complex discussions before the program moves forward.”
hydregen fuel cells never seems wise idea. It just waste of money. internal combustion engines efficiency
can be improve to 80% percent if combine cycle design is researched. there very few places to fuel up with hydrogen. Plus hydrogen fuel does not come cheap Eclectic cars will be economical in just few years. I can charge up home.
Excellent news! We need hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles, and battery vehicles and biofuels. We’d be a foolish country to put all our energy eggs in one basket again. Consumers need to choose the car they want to drive and the fuel they want to use, not have government choose for us.
3. Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2007
Source: Mother Jones, March /April, 2006, Title: The Fate of the Ocean, Author: Julia Whitty
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel
Student Researcher: Charlene Jones
Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.
According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world’s largest communal life source.
In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.
One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.
Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore drilling.
Along with mercury, the Mississippi delivers nitrogen (often from fertilizers). Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial growth in the water that consume oxygen, creating a condition known as hypoxia, or dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable portion of the Gulf of Mexico has become a dead zone—the largest such area in the U.S. and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles in 2001. It is no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lay at the mouths of rivers. Nearly fifty fester off U.S. coasts. While most are caused by river-borne nitrogen, fossil fuel-burning plants help create this condition, as does phosphorous from human sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto exhaust.
Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp decline despite progress in seagoing technologies and intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies in fishing have stimulated unprecedented decimation of sealife. Long-lining, in which a single boat sets line across sixty or more miles of ocean, each baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is thrown back to the ocean either dead or dying. Additionally, trawlers drag nets across every square inch of the continental shelves every two years. Fishing the sea floor like a bulldozer, they level an area 150 times larger than all forest clearcuts each year and destroy seafloor ecosystems. Aquaculture is no better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded, based on data dating from the 1950s, that in the wake of decades of such onslaught only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish) and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are left anywhere in the ocean.
Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish, manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying at alarming rates.
While at no time in history has science taught more about how the earth’s life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on the seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world’s largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and surely reach a point of no return.
Comment:
After release of the Pew Oceans Commission report, U.S. media, most notably The Washington Post and National Public Radio in 2003 and 2004, covered several stories regarding impending threats to the ocean, recommendations for protection, and President Bush’s response. However, media treatment of the collective acceleration of ocean damage and cross-pollination of harm was left to Julia Whitty in her lengthy feature. In April of 2006, Time Magazine presented an in-depth article about earth at “the tipping point,” describing the planet as an overworked organism fighting the consequences of global climate change on shore and sea. In her Mother Jones article, Whitty presented a look at global illness by directly examining the ocean as earth’s circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive system.
Following up on “The Last Days of the Ocean,” Mother Jones has produced “Ocean Voyager,” an innovative web-based adventure that includes videos, audio interviews with key players, webcams, and links to informative web pages created by more than twenty organizations. The site is a tour of various ocean trouble spots around the world, which highlights solutions and suggests actions that can be taken to help make a difference.
UPDATE BY JULIA WHITTY
This story is awash with new developments. Scientists are currently publishing at an unprecedented rate their observations—not just predictions—on the rapid changes underway on our ocean planet. First and foremost, the year 2005 turned out to be the warmest year on record. This reinforces other data showing the earth has grown hotter in the past 400 years, and possibly in the past 2,000 years. A study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research found ocean temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic in 2005 nearly two degrees Fahrenheit above normal; this turned out to be the predominant catalyst for the monstrous 2005 hurricane season—the most violent season ever seen.
The news from the polar ice is no better. A joint NASA/University of Kansas study in Science (02/06) reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are surging towards the sea and melting more than twice as fast as ten years ago. This further endangers the critical balance of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which holds our climate stable. Meanwhile, in March, the British Antarctic Survey announced their findings that the “global warming signature” of the Antarctic is three times larger than what we’re seeing elsewhere on Earth—the first proof of broadscale climate change across the southern continent.
Since “The Fate of the Ocean” went to press in Mother Jones magazine, evidence of the politicization of science in the global climate wars has also emerged. In January 2006 NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, accused the agency of trying to censor his work. Four months later, Hansen’s accusations were echoed by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as by a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, who claimed their work on global climate change was being censored by their departments, as part of a policy of intimidation by the anti-science Bush administration.
Problems for the ocean’s wildlife are escalating too. In 2005, biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service found polar bears drowned in the waters off Alaska, apparent victims of the disappearing ice. In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center researchers found polar bears killing and eating each other in areas where sea ice failed to form that year, leaving the bears bereft of food. In response, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources revised their Red List for polar bears—upgrading them from “conservation dependent” to “vulnerable.” In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would begin reviewing whether polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Since my report, the leaders of two influential commissions—the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy—gave Congress, the Bush administration, and our nation’s governors a “D+” grade for not moving quickly enough to address their recommendations for restoring health to our nation’s oceans.
Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to discern good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when they give any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and our own future, develops beyond the ken of the public, who forge ahead without altering behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.
What ever happened to the Frenchs air motor.
The most abundant element in the universe needs to be studied for use as a fuel; fuel for transportation, fuel for energy requirements, fuel for plant growth, fuel for animal growth. Hydrogen has many unique properties, and is essential to everything. Any research of it is an investment in the future of the human race. He who controls the knowledge…
Michael Bryant, you obviously do not know what you are talking about. First of all Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe. It can be self produced by an unmanned production facility/fueling station. The Government just has to stop holding it back due to all of its intrests in “big oil” and follow the lead of other nations such as Canada, British Columbia, Scandinavia, Japan Norway, Sweeden, and Denmark who have already implemented the “Hydrogen Highway”. Improving the internal combustion engine is just conceeding our dependence on fossil fuels and to say you can “charge up at home” is just ridiculous. Where do you think is the main product used to make that electricity that most electrical utility companies send to your house? That is right, Fossil Fuels. Not to mention the higher electrical bill you will get. I don’t know about you, but I pay close to $250.00 a month as it is, and the electrical utilities seem to be asking for rate increases just about every year around here. I don’t even want to start going into how the only emission from a hydrogen fuel vehicle is pure water. Not CO2 that supposidly effects the ozone, but PURE WATER.
In my opinion, hydogen fuel technology is WAY past due for as many benefits that it has and it is time for OUR country to wake-up and pay attention to what is already being developed by several smaller Countries as well as smaller companies within the United States. If you just do a little research, you will find people comming up with excellent ideas all the time.
When it comes to Automobiles the American public doesn’t know what they want. They either want something that is big, comfortable, fast, and good looking (or any combination of the aforementioned). Rarely do they think of gas mileage or the environment (of course there is always the exception). The government has been trying to improve gas mileage on automobiles since the 70’s with little success. I remember the US government passing the gas guzzler tax, and fleet gasoline average legislation, with little success.
The reality of 4 dollar per gallon of gasoline has awaken many Americans that the auto must also be fuel efficient so that we are not so dependent on the remainder of the world to fuel them. The only way to have a clean planet is for the American public to want it, and that will only happen when we are driven from our current way of life. Then we will want it instantly. This means that the technology must already be available for this to happen. I think the government should fund programs such as this so that the technology is available when people demand it.
$190 million? In a year? Are you joking? Oil executives will probably spend more money in 2010 on restaurant waiters tips. Car companies spend more money designing a new bumper curve for the next year’s model. We have probably spent more money in a week in Iraq. I guess it is time to share our opinions with our local congressmen. Or we can continue to eat dust behind advanced Japanese cars and proudly drink Bud and watch WWF on imported TVs. Am I only one feeling stupid?
Lets not forget that cars are not the only use for hydrogen. Fuel cells can be made to power everything from your ipod to the Freedom Towers.
http://www.mtimicrofuelcells.com/
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2218895/freedom-tower-tap-green-fuel
There is no end to number of products and industries who can benefit from using fuel cells to power their equipment. Investments in any renewable energy source is an investment in our future and the faster we can stop using oil the better.
*sigh* I can’t believe that funding for hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market cars might come back. DOE director Steven Chu was right when he originally cut this funding.
There is of course interesting ancillary R&D (such as work on non-platinum catalysts or improved membranes for PEM fuel cells), but having fuel cells in cars fails for a host of reasons, not the least of which is materials cost. The required specifications for operating conditions (temperature, humidity) are more than PEM fuel cells can handle. And there’s the tremendous issue of hydrogen storage. And the fueling infrastructure. And…
Yes, fuel cells might have niche markets that are interesting (although the example of MTI above isn’t relevant here as it is a direct methanol fuel cell which is a type that isn’t useful for cars). The military can make effective use of fuel cells in unmanned planes, soldier power packs, and remote long-term low-power applications. You might be able to argue that fuel cells are useful for backup power. Very large fuel cells also have a place in power production for buildings (such as phosphoric acid or molten carbonate), but those systems are apples compared to the oranges required by automotive applications.
The truth is that most portable fuel cell “devices” are lab curiosities, and what the companies say tends to be full of marketing fluff.
I’m a tremendous advocate of alternative energy (having dedicated the vast majority of my working career in the industry), but this is not funding that deserved to be resurrected. Better to see it invested in the types of fuel cell devices listed above, redirected at the research programs that show the most promise — or into solar/wind technologies that can more directly address the country’s energy needs.