The Hydrogen Economy

i n t e r n a t i o n a l j o u r n a l o f h y d r o g e n e n e r g y x x x ( 2 0 1 2 ) 1 e1 0
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Review
The hydrogen economy: Its history

John O.M. Bockris*
Haile Plantation, 10515 S.W 55th Place, Gainesville, FL 32608, USA
abstract
Keywords: Hydrogen Veziroglu International Methanol Global Warming The concept leading to a hydrogen economy lay in the work of a Nazi engineer, Lawaceck, 1968. I heard his suggestion of cheaper transfer of energy in hydrogen through pipes at a dinner in that year. A paper was published with Appleby in 1972 which was the rst published document concerning that title and involving the title of A Hydrogen Economy. The rst meeting was in Cornell University in 1973. In 1974 T. Nejat Veziroglu organized the rst big meeting on hydrogen (900 attendees). At this meeting I presented privately to Veziroglu the possibilities of a world development and he told me that he was ready to put his organizing ability to use in spreading the ideas worldwide. However, he not only proceeded to do this but he, also a professor at the University of Miami, contributed several papers of notes, particularly the one with Awad of 1974 about the cost of pollution. Gregory worked at the Gas Research Institute from 1971 and conrmed the expectations put down by Lawaceck. Veziroglu founded the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy in 1974. Research in hydrogen was relatively low cost and therefore was taken up most eagerly by those from the newer countries. The National Science Foundation awarded Texas A&M University in 1982 a ve year support for hydrogen as a fuel with the condition that half the costs be borne by at least ve industrial companies. I was appointed director of the research under the grant and chose to concentrate upon the decomposition of water by solar light via an electrochemical photo fuel cell. We were able to obtain considerable increases in efciency of decomposition of water by solar light, and at the time the work was interrupted we had 9.6 percent efciency for decomposition. S.U.M. Khan and R. Kainthla were the principal contributors to the theory of using light via electrochemical cells for this purpose. The Texas A&M University work on hydrogen was interrupted in 1989 by the arrival of claims that one of my former students had carried out electrolysis of deuterium oxide saying that an extra unexplained heat had been observed and he suggested this heat was nuclear in origin. Later, seeking to reduce the cost of hydrogen as a fuel I involved Sol Zaromb in discussions and we came across the idea that if one included a carbon dioxide molecule obtained
* Tel.: 1 352 335 3843; fax: 1 352 335 6925. E-mail addresses: schulz77870@aol.com, Bockris@cox.net. 0360-3199/$ e see front matter Copyright 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2012.12.026
Please cite this article in press as: Bockris JOM, The hydrogen economy: Its history, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2012.12.026
by removing it from the atmosphere in the structure of methanolAT, no increase in global warming would occur from the use of methanol with that condition, (published in 2008). By this condition methanol took on the largest advantage of gaseous hydrogen: That it did not cause global warming. The estimated cost of the new (anti-global warming) fuel, methanolAT was less than $30/GJ. This estimated cost could be compared with the $48/GJ which is now being supported by a French Canadian group who published an attractive book with six pages of calculations of costs. The difference between the cost estimated by this group and the costs which have been assumed by hydrogen enthusiasts in earlier times was that they took into account the auxiliary expenses which would come with the use of hydrogen, in particular the storage at high pressure. The characteristics of the new methanol to cause no global warming put that aspect of it on an equal footing to the gaseous hydrogen. The CO2 which was an essential part of the structure of methanolAT was necessary to be created in a stream, rather than directly from the atmosphere, but it was easily shown that this could be done by the use of biomass and by carbonaceous wastes. A German team under Weiderman and Grob appeared in 2008 and proceeded to suggest some extensions of the ideas which had been undergoing publication for some time. The aim of the German work was to reduce costs of a compound which they called Methasyn. The present situation is that the claim of methanolAT as a world fuel to be used without any concerns of exhaustion or pollution depends on the commercial point of view of the costs being less than that of obtaining oil from the tar sands. Copyright 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1.
Introduction, a beginning
The beginning thoughts which eventually led to a new eld, that of hydrogen as a fuel, and created the rst big movement to forego oil for something less destructive began in 1968 at a dinner in Stockholm during a scientic meeting. The people at the table were talking about the transmission of hydrogen through pipes. They were making a clear point: It might be cheaper to send energy in the form of hydrogen through a pipeline rather than sending it in copper wires.1 Returning to the USA full of eagerness to nd out whether this statement I had picked up in Stockholm could be true, the rst person I spoke to technically was Dr. Linden, a member of the research faculty at the Institute of Gas Technology in Chicago. Somewhat to my surprise, Linden did not react to my news with surprise. He mentioned that he had experimented with electric cars and thought of the use of hydrogen in connection with transportation.2 Linden thought the rumor that I had heard in Stockholm lacked detail. He had a good man coming from England, and when he arrived he would put him in charge of the analysis of the suggestion from Stockholm.
2.
The rst full publication
The next time I was asked for a contribution to a new journal, I chose to write about the need for a new fuel and how
The statement heard in Stockholm in 1968 is said to have been based upon the calculations of a Nazi Engineer, Lawaceck. 2 Linden of Gas Technology had been thinking about hydrogen in 1968.
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hydrogen would t the need. It was only a note and took up a column of the new journal, Environmental This Month [1]. I wrote a full paper and chose Dr. John Appleby for my coauthor and he happened to be in Paris at the time, whilst I was on a visit to Oxford University. By telephone we arranged to meet at the Savoy Hotel in London that day and remarkably enough we managed to make this happen and many of the ideas which came out of the discussion there were born whilst we were having dinner at the Savoy.3 The title of the paper which followed from this collaboration was called, The Hydrogen Economy e An Ultimate Economy [2]? This paper of six pages was a presentation of hydrogen taking over from gasoline and making it the basis of an action as industry was dependent upon it for justifying the use of the word Economy, particularly how you would make the hydrogen and what its cost would be as estimated in 1972. Hydrogen as a fuel was of course new at that time and it sparked off some interest as indicated by the fact that Cornell University held a meeting on the Hydrogen Economy as early as 1973. The Cornell meetings took place before the meetings under the organization of T. Nejat Veziroglu.4 The Cornell meeting had me as a lead speaker but I could not contribute until later on in the morning. My paper was called Electrochemical Production of Hydrogen as a Fuel [3]. The paper was concerned largely with electrocatalysis because the hydrogen production which was going on in the world at that time (big plants exist in various parts of the world, e.g., in the Aswan Dam System) were old in respect to their electrochemistry.
John Appleby tells me that we made notes on the table tops. Veziroglu wrote a letter to the President of the American Association of Hydrogen, stating clearly my earlier beginning with the concept of hydrogen as a fuel.
4 3
The rst time that the words Hydrogen Economy were published was in the 1972 paper with Appleby.
3. Contributors to the early stages of the hydrogen economy

3.1. T. Nejat Veziroglu and the rst Miami meeting on hydrogen
This was a noteworthy meeting largely because it was organized by T. Nejat Veziroglu, who later became the undoubted leader and organizer of the various functions connected with hydrogen, particularly on the biennial meetings which have taken place in a number of countries throughout the world. This rst meeting was an important meeting, because of its size, about 900 participants. It was also an opportunity for T. Nejat Veziroglu and I to have a private chat upon which I explained to him the background of the Hydrogen Economy that I had been writing about since 1971. I asked him if he would put all of his organizing power into spreading the idea of hydrogen.5 He assured me he would throw himself fully into it. I told him that I would be very interested to support him and continue to work on the development of all aspects of the Hydrogen Economy, but that I was going to continue my career as a Physical Electrochemist at the University of Pennsylvania and was probably going to spread my activities into various regions, many of which would have some connection with hydrogen. In support of this I recall being at meetings to which Veziroglu invited me to deliver lectures in places such as Paris, France; Moscow, Russia; Beijing, China; Lahore, Pakistan, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and in other places. At rst the content of such meetings were largely chemical and electrochemical, but gradually they opened out into something much broader. Certainly, water electrolysis was frequently discussed because one could make hydrogen pure and the anodic reaction was oxygen, for which there is a market, but the major thing is by using the electrolytic method one is able to produce from water any desired amount of pure hydrogen. Of course everything goes with a cost and the cost of hydrogen from electrolysis can be as low as 3 cents/ kWh (2010) but can be predicted as 2 cents/kWh if according to Roberts et al. [4], they can harness the energy from the winds available at 15,000 feet. The rst Veziroglu organized meeting in Miami turned out to set a theme which, largely due to his impetus, was carried on around the world. Nejat and I had been close in collaboration during much of the earlier meetings. Advances my collaborators made at the University of Pennsylvania in respect to the use of hydrogen went rstly to the International Journal of Hydrogen where they were published. I would like to take this opportunity of noting the honesty with which this remarkable leader made in being clear about the intellectual relationship between him and me and admitting in a letter, which I hold, that my early papers were
5 T. Nejat Veziroglu, a Turk, and a graduate of Imperial College, London University (my own alumni) came from his native land after experience of being president of a company in Turkey.
a stimulus to him to get in the eld. On my side, I would like to say that I am sure that the eld of the Hydrogen Economy, which I suggested in 1972, would never have bloomed on towards becoming an event of international importance without the effort consistently made by Veziroglu.
3.2. Other contributions of T. Nejat Veziroglu and others in the development of a hydrogen economy 3.2.1. T. Nejat Veziroglu and his contributions in the early stages
Because of the stress I am putting here on the role of Veziroglu as an organizer, I must also mention that he was an active professor at the University of Miami, taught classes, and had graduate students. Important scientic papers arose from these collaborations. What comes to mind here is a paper by Veziroglu and A. H. Awad [5] on the cost of pollution among the more important. I used the information of this paper in my second book on hydrogen which I published in 1980 [6]. It was called Energy Options and differed from the rst book on hydrogen in 1975 [7] called Energy: The Solar Hydrogen Alternative,6 and analyzed most of the alternatives to a Hydrogen Economy, particularly talking into account for the rst time the cost of pollution from the use of fossil fuels associated with each.
3.2.2.
The work of Gregory, Ng and Long, 1973
The work which had been foreseen by Linden after I had returned from Sweden was eventually carried out, under Gregory and showed a number of lines of costs as a function of distance [8]. The graph (Fig. 1 below) shows the cost up to 1000 miles. The basic idea is to show the cost of transporting hydrogen which lies along the line of least slope versus the cost of carrying the energy by electricity at various potentials shown on the graph. The hydrogen way seemed to be the lowest cost assuming that the kilovolts used in the transmission of the electricity would be 500. Under those conditions the advantage of going via hydrogen starts at 400 miles. At any distance greater than that, it would be better rstly to transform the energy via electrolysis into hydrogen and push this through a pipe. The Gregory, Ng and Long graph for some time reigned high. The workers in the eld took it as an indication that, for long distance, transfer of energy via hydrogen was the way to go. However, many considerations have changed the signicance of this once very important gure. For example the cost of sending the electricity over signicant distances in hydrogen is not only the loss of IR as is assumed in the graph but also the cost of the nickel steel pipes which have to be of that composition because of hydrogen embrittlement. This is considerable so that the actual cost of longer distances is quite prohibitive. Other reconsiderations have been made too. What about the cost of the hydrogen to be reconverted to electricity? The graph shows the cost of transmitting hydrogen, but that is not
Until the early seventies, the only alternative which most energy planners in the United States saw to the exhaustion of gasoline (then thought to be fty years away) was natural gas and coal. When I published the book the Solar Hydrogen Alternative, it was a novel alternative and the forerunner of much which was to follow.
6
Fig. 1 e Relative costs of energy transmission by electricity cables and by hydrogen pipeline. From Gregory, Ng, and Long, 1971.
what receivers want. They want their electricity back again and that would cost the fuel cell efciency of 50 percent, i.e., a loss of half of the value of the energy transported. The present attitude is to minimize the advantage of sending hydrogen over long distances. Were hydrogen to be used as a medium of energy in the future, one would have to minimize the distance between source and sink because of the cost of transfer through the pipes, including the cost of the pipes of special steel and need to end up with electricity rather than hydrogen using fuel cells at 50 percent efciency.
3.2.3.
The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
This journal was founded in 1974, and the Editor at that time was T. Nejat Veziroglu. He remained in that position until his retirement in 2011. There is no doubt that the journal is remarkable in the sense of its rate of growth. Nothing abnormal was seen until around about the beginning of the new century and from that time onwards the journal has taken off and an indication of the growth of IJHE is the increase in the total pages published each year. The number of pages published in the year 2000 was 1230 (12 issues), and the number of pages published in 2012 will be 19,426 (24 issues).7 Also, each paper on average is eight pages long. This means that in 2000 IJHE published some 150 papers, and in 2012 IJHE shall have published more than 2400 papers. Consequently, IJHE has grown some 16 times over a period of 12 years! However, the number of copies published does not change too much and it is around 3500. Most engineers and scientists have access to Science Direct as their organizations subscribe for that electronic system of Elsevier. Then, they can easily access the IJHE electronically. Hence, they do not have to subscribe to IJHE. The reason for this certainly does not indicate a great increase in the subject in the United States where the Department of Energy specically noted that it no longer gives special
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attention to the growth of hydrogen as a fuel, but it comes from one of the fruits of Veziroglus widely-given lectures in which he has not only been the origin of so many meetings in far off countries, but also lectured in still more, and it seems that his efforts have attracted a number of people who perhaps were deterred by other substances needing a greater number and more expensive apparatus for their research. This is to say that, e.g., high class spectroscopy is used in examining the surface [9] of electrodes containing adsorbed hydrogen. But on the whole there are many research subjects where the starting price is $100,000, and in the case of hydrogen research its possible to start and publish work for an initial capital outlay of, say, $10,000. There is another aspect and that is the spontaneity of the choice of subjects is much a matter of the country. In Italy, for example, there are what Italian scientists call the rain which is a certain amount of money given to all professorial ranked scientists to work in whatever direction they want. Some of them have seen the virtues of hydrogen as the basis of a revolutionary change in the supply of non-polluting fuels. This has attracted them to contribute. Another aspect of the widespread frequency of hydrogen research work outside the USA is the origin of the abnormally rapid growth of the journal comes from the organization of research funding. In the United States this sits in the hands of the Department of Energy and they divide themselves into numerous branches and of course one is then dependent upon the opinion of the scientists in those government groups as to the work which will be regarded as suitable for funding. This makes the research carried out in the United States on hydrogen much more restricted and dependent on the inuence which special interests have on research funding.8 If the DOE group dealing in hydrogen doesnt like it anymore this
This information was given by Dr. T. Nejat Veziroglu in private email Correspondence on November 26, 2012.
8 A scientist working in the DOE group on hydrogen emphasized this after his retirement. Funding is little dependent on the quality of the proposal.
means a government control over what is developed. Its clear that there may be outside inuences here. For example, obtaining useable oil from tar sands came to the fore and it may be cheaper to the consumer than hydrogen because of the neglect of the environmental costs. Veziroglus way of going about things in hydrogen provided a spreading effect on interest in developing countries in favor of clean hydrogen, and a lessening interest in highly-polluting production of tar sands. These statements may be modied by alterations in the state of play which have occurred due to the entry of Professor George Olah and his team and the two remarkable books which they have written about the use of methanol [10]. M. Weidemann has formed a company for the development of a liquid which he calls Silent Power which seems to be something near to the idea of methanol [11] which I had suggested in 1975. The strength of the case for a methanol economy has been radically uplifted by Olahs books.
3.2.4. The National Science Foundation and its hydrogen program at Texas A&M University
In the early eighties the NSF had a scheme which was meant to take subjects which seemed worth developing from the point of view of industry and giving it support which depended upon the principal investigator, a University Professor, to whom they gave the grant. The professor accepted the task of attracting at least ve companies willing to contribute to the work. There was a competition for funds and after the Foundation had talked to us by telephone, we had to go to Washington to make presentations. I took with me William Craven, my former business manager, and I think that this impressed our NSF committee because it was unusual for a professor to employ a business manager for his work, most physical chemists having small groups of only ve or six people. My group at Texas A&M University averaged 20 collaborators. Bill Craven was a calm and reasonable man who was welltrained in management including particularly bookkeeping. Of course the university kept tabs on the grant that we were going to get as well, but we found that we wanted to know the state of each grant at any time (Craven plotted graphs of each grant as a function of time so that we could see how we were doing at any time during a given academic year.) We did get the NSF grant. It was a ve year grant, though there was a but in it that the funds would be canceled if we did not keep up at least ve companies being interested in the work and contributing nancially to it. It didnt mean they had to be all the same companies for ve years, but for any one year we had to start off with assurances from ve that they would fund us for another year. Obviously, we had given thought to what would be the best topic to present to the Foundation and show progress in a relatively short term. My main thought at this time originated in work that I had done in Australia [12] in which we had shown that by using two photo-electrodes in our cells that we were able to get hydrogen and produce electricity. This seemed to be a good idea to investigate, so we spent most of our time with the Foundations money in that direction. We discovered the elds of photo-electrochemistry. Now, the whole thing was to nd out what efciency we could get, meaning, the amount of hydrogen fuel we could generate
from a certain amount of incoming solar light. One has to be careful because the temperature in the system must remain constant and the solar light tends to heat the solution so that one has to have an IR lter to reduce the fraction of solar light which is in the infrared which would cause a heating effect. There are several variables in work like this. One of them is the rate at which you can run the cells. The higher the current density (i.e., rate of production of hydrogen) that you can produce is the goal and there are limiting factors. Some chemists made an error by going to tables of electrode potentials in books and nding out what the thermodynamic potential is for a given reaction and basing their calculations on this. This is erroneous because it neglects the overpotential, which is a wasting factor. We had a lot of difculty with the anodes and our main theorists at this time were S.U.M. Khan [13,14] and Ramesh Kainthla [15]. We produced several full papers on the theory of the amount of hydrogen we could get taking into account the properties of these electrodes. But the striking thing that came to us was that we could not nd any n-type semiconductors, i.e., photo anodes which would work because they ran into situations where instead of evolving oxygen, they would anodically destroy the electrodes. We tried to get around this by coating the electrodes with layers of an oxide thin enough to allow passage of light through the coating which reacts then only to the photoactivated semiconductor. In such cases the solar light does not interact with the covering material at all but goes straight through it to the semiconductor underneath and what happens then is up to the interaction of the light with the semiconductor [16]. We then found a peculiar thing which put us in contact with Kohei Uosaki who by then had gone back to Japan. We found that if you covered the p-type electrodes completely with the catalyst the cathodic properties were suppressed instead of being enhanced [17]. What we learned empirically was that we had to have partial coatings on the cathodes with the catalyst. The metal catalyst reached to the semiconductor on one-half of the electrode whilst the light can get through and activate the photovoltaic properties of the electrode, but for the anodes it is essential to have inactive coverage and for both electrodes to have a scattering of catalyst, i.e., partial covering with catalyst. Kohei Uosaki who had worked with us earlier was quite negative to what we were doing and told me it wouldnt work, but we found it did work and we were able to raise the efciency of conversion of light to hydrogen and electricity from one percent up to values pretty near ten percent. (The maximum we got was 9.6 percent and that needed a temperature rise to about 50 C.) This took us further away from conventional theory which had already been worked out by Gerisher, without the use of surface states.9 The most elementary and basic presentation
H. Gerischer: The leader of German electrochemistry for thirty years, always thought to treat the semiconductoresolution interfaces as though they had no surface states and no double layer in the solution. In addition this person used a Gaussian distribution law instead of a Boltzmannian one for many years until corrected by S.U.M. Khan.
of semiconductors is an electrode with valency bands and conduction bands, but in between is supposed to be an energy gap and should not be active at all from the point of view of light. This is how conventional workers in this area tend to regard the energy gap and the surface states in it with disdain and as a negative aspect of the electrode. One of the graduate students working with me in this area, Anuncia Gonzales, with whom we worked out the surface state question used surface states in a positive way, i.e., we could have states in the energy gap which also took place in charge transfer reactions and increased the overall efciency of the reaction. 9.6 percent our maximum this time was not enough to make a practical working electrode (one would read 15 percent) but it was a signicant advance [18].
3.2.5.
The contributions of Hampton Robinson
Those who come to work at universities in Texas attempt to nd private means for their work. This is not as easy as it might seem because wealthy people tend to surround themselves with a protective coating of lawyers to whom any request for money is given for examination and seldom survives the lawyers look because the lawyers, who never understand the science involved, employ scientists to comment on it. If the idea in research is a new one, the scientist nds it easier to be negative. So a request for support of a scientic project is not great. We were lucky because Dr. Robinson (who had wealth from oil) was somewhat different. I dont know what he would have done had we asked for large sums of more than a million dollars but we were quite modest and he himself told us that hed much rather give us money on our request rather than a contract to give us a certain amount per month. We learned as time went on that it was necessary to create some kind of emotional aspect to his gifts and this was not difcult because he regarded the way the universities treated their researchers as open to criticism. He would never understand why a university didnt fund all the research money itself rather than leaving the researchers to nd the money. Once Robinson had got the idea that we wanted something there was no formality. He took out his checkbook and wrote the check. This might be for $100,000, ethis was the order of magnitude. These were sums which he disbursed, not only to us but to others. He was reasonably called a philanthropist. We used the Robinson money largely in addition to the National Science Foundation grant. Indeed he was the owner of one of the companies which funded us.10 Robinson used to make regular visits to our laboratories to see how his work was getting on and we turned these into proper scientic consulting meetings and had a coworker who was supported by his money give 20 min talks when he was there and of course we went to the laboratory and showed him
the results and the apparatus and equipment we were using and what it did, etc. We also created on one occasion a Grand Reception for Hampton and his family which lasted a full day and involved a major banquet. Would we have been able to succeed without Hampton Robinsons money? Probably not, but we should have been able to do something in ve years. Its a matter of how many people you can employ and their quality. We were fortunate in having Dr. Kainthla who was already well versed in photovoltaics and S.U.M. Khan who had been a theorist right from the beginning with his training with me in his Ph.D. days, so he was very ready to orient his interests into quantum kinetics and also photo-kinetics. I would say Khan was the most creative theorist we had [19]. It is sad to say that we had to interrupt all the work we had started with Hampton Robinson and the National Science Foundation, but the fact is we were overwhelmed with this totally new and surprising idea that came to us through a former student of mine, Martin Fleischmann, that one could carry out nuclear reactions not only as generally thought at that time at very high temperatures as in a nuclear reactor, but were we able to do it in aqueous solutions [20]. This was a revolutionary step that I had to reorient as many of my coworkers that could agree to work in the new direction for half a year and after that we were down to a much lesser number on hydrogen.
4. Contributors to the present stages of the hydrogen economy (2006 to present)

4.1. The publication of Tappan Bose and Pierre Malbrunot
Since the beginning of Veziroglus attempt to put hydrogen forward as a fuel to avoid pollution, there has been opposition to it because of costs. Thus, the attitude of most of the enthusiasts in the hydrogen eld was that the relevant cost was the cost to produce the gas itself, ethe several auxiliary costs which were necessary to use the hydrogen in practice were neglected. For most of the use of hydrogen for example, you need storage. The basic idea of using sporadic sources of energy such as solar and wind automatically ensures that there must be a carrier gas and of course hydrogen is the obvious one because it is plentiful from water and non-polluting. So the cost of storage has to be taken into account which may be quite considerable because clearly it has to be in special vessels and at high pressure, as much as 500 atm. Then, there is the question of transport through pipes and here I think is the greatest reason as to why the earlier workers based on Gregorys estimates went wrong. One tends to say, Steel pipes cant be very expensive. Theyre everywhere. But this unfortunately is not a true statement because as we are contemplating using hydrogen as a fuel, weve got to take into account a life of ten years at the least for the pipes. Hydrogen passes through steel pipes and the steel embrittles after only one to two years so you have to go to steel which has been developed just because of the hydrogen embrittlement problem. Nickel steels are more expensive
One particular month we had the industrial contributors down to four and it was vital to nd another company that would fund us. Dr. Robinson found this easy to do and he already owned several companies which were inactive and therefore he simply made one active and it was then considered part of the group, half funded by NSF.
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than ordinary pipes made of iron and therefore the number of miles that you have to pass the hydrogen through in pipes becomes an important part of the cost. Then there is another most important point and that is one has to get the hydrogen back to electricity. Its a matter of a fuel cell, but its cost is quite considerable not because the fuel cells are so much but because the efciency is not much more than 55 percent. One normally says 50 percent, ea doubling of cost!11 All this adds up and the people who have done the best analysis of it all in detail was a French Canadian group led by Tappan Bose, and Pierre Malbrunot [21]. Their 2006 book was a shocker and I studied it very carefully. I redid the calculations and came out with not quite the same, but something which was not importantly different, and I have stuck to it ever since. In dollars per Giga Joule (GJ), hydrogen could be obtained by electrolysis as the gas for about $20 by electrolysis, and that is the way one needs to do it because it has to be clean. The only way to do that is by electrolysis. So the table of Bose/Malbrunot, Table V, page 87 of their book [22], but even that doesnt get you to electricity again. It gets you back to the cost of hydrogen, and its going to be more than $40/GJ compared with $20/GJ if you take the hydrogen without considerations of storage, transport and reconversion.
looking at ways in which we could make practical hydrogen to avoid these constantly reiterated criticisms which hydrogen had received, that in practice it was just too expensive.12 I had published before on methanol, rst in 1975 and then in 1980, but when you think of it without the change that Zaromb13 and I have made, the importance of completing the cycle and avoided the fact that methanol does have the great advantage of liquidity, but its normal method of manufacture does co-produce CO2 of which there is no special attention paid to the matter of zero carbon to produce CO2 in its combustion and therefore in this way it is no better than gasoline. I suppose it must have been over three months or so that Sol Zaromb and I came to the conclusion that the key to it all was the origin of the CO2. We took up a reaction which had been practiced in Japan for some time, namely the direct combination of hydrogen and CO2 to form the methanol. 3H2 CO2At ! CH3 OHAt H2 O 1
As one creates the methanol in this way, the CO2 in which one uses has denitely come from the atmosphere. In making methanol one removes CO2 from the atmosphere, whilst burning it replaces the CO2. This is what is called zero carbon and it means that if you stick to the point here and make the methanol in that way that you can assert and prove that the
Table V Net cost of compressed hydrogen at delivery as a function of feedstock and production process, from Tappan Bose, Malbrunot, et al. book, 2006, Table V page 87. Feedstock Cost of the feedstock ($/GJ) Natural gas (steam methane reforming) 9.30 Before CO2 sequestration
15.30 1.70 2.00 15.70 34.7
Coal (gasication) 2.60
Biomass (gasication) 2.60
Electricity (electrolysis) 17.80
After CO2 sequestration

17.60 1.70 2.00 15.70 37.0
Before CO2 sequestration

16.80 1.70 2.00 15.70 36.2 19.50 1.70 2.00 15.70 38.9 29.40 1.70 2.00 15.70 48.8
Production cost ($/GJ) Storage ($/GJ) Transportation ($/GJ) Distribution ($/GJ) Net cost H2 ($/GJ)
From my dinner with John Appleby in London in 1971, I have carried on with vigor and extreme effort by Veziroglu from the 1970s until the present, but after I studied Bose and Malbrunot it may be too expensive. Professor Olah and his group came in and have changed the entire eld of hydrogen studies.
5. The contributions and ideas of a methanol economy made by Bockris and Zaromb
Before I get to present Professor Olahs contributions in more detail, let me just bring up one more of those who have contributed to the present position. In fact, the Tappan Bose and Pierre Malbrunot book gave rise to several discussions which Sol Zaromb and I had in
If the fuel cell can be used also as a heat source, the efciency of the reconversion jumps to 90 percent.
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CO2 you put into it is equivalent to the same as the CO2 you took out, one has a zero carbon fuel. We came to this conclusion in 2006, but unfortunately the delays in publication and so forth came down to the fact that it did not get into the journal until 2008 and since then I have been for methanol from the atmosphere [23]. Let us come to the question of the name in a moment. Now, Sol Zaromb and I have to say at the end of the article that it was with Sol Zaromb that I came to the idea, but that we wouldnt publish together because in the end we could not agree. It is easy to say what held up and it comes down to the fact that Sol Zaromb wanted to use automotive exhausts as a source of CO2. It would help immediate acceptance of the idea. It doesnt mention the possible doubt of the origin of
12 13
JOMB in discussion with S. Zaromb 2006. JOMB with acknowledgements to S. Zaromb.
this automotive CO2 but that it could be an excellent and immediately applicable idea for getting rid of global warming. But I couldnt accept CO2 from car exhausts as from the atmosphere fuel: I had often been thrown into the study of where fossil fuels were made and how. Thats a long story and also an uncertain one, but I could trace them back to low beneath the earth at high temperatures and pressures and very long ago. Id thought it was stretching to say that this was CO2 from the atmosphere. It certainly isnt true that I could prove it is not from the atmosphere, but it seemed to me to use automotive exhausts is one of the main reasons exhaust of CO2 is asking for counter criticism.
8.
From where comes CO2
6. The contributions of Meyer Steinberg and V.D. Dang on ideas of a methanol economy
The rst proposition for the use of methanol as a major fuel to replace gasoline was made by J. OM. Bockris in the book, Energy: The Solar Hydrogen Alternative. This made a six page presentation of methanol, but it was taken up a few years later by Meyer Steinberg and Vi-Duong Dang [24,25]. Steinberg and Dang developed the theme of the methanol in considerable detail compared with what was done later with Olah (see below) and the present author. The two authors give a full development of the synthesis of methanol from hydrogen in CO2, but they have some difculty with the CO2 which they want to obtain from seawater. Qualitatively its possible to take the CO2 out of seawater. Its certainly easier than taking it out of the air, but its much less good if one wants a stream of CO2 to match that from the electrolyzer than to take it from the biomass or even from organic wastes. The massive use of nuclear power which was popular in the 1970s, of course, is out today and both these things would make the Steinberg and Dong proposal inapplicable or less favorable now than when they initially proposed it. However, much detail is given in their paper and also in the economic analysis and of course this is favorable to the case in the economics of the seventies.
One of the ideas which came primarily from Sol Zaromb and has been presented by Olah, is to use the properties of magnesium oxide if one leaves out momentarily the source of the air which would have to be a considerable one in order to make sufcient CO2 per unit of time, but if that is not a consideration it could be the origin of the stream of air which the Zaromb method needs and this stream of air could then go through powdered magnesium oxide at a temperature of 300 C and should form magnesium carbonate, but if you have magnesium carbonate, the dissociation of that by heat (about 900 C) will give the stream of CO2 that one needs. So that is the big way of doing it. One takes it from the atmosphere literally and eventually that is the nal source we would regard as inexhaustible. After all it is returned to the atmosphere and that is the key to the idea. But there is another type of way that I have been pushing and that is to take the CO2 from biomass or any other source of trapped CO2. Thus: H2 OAt CO2At / CH2 OPolymer O2 2
Thus, CH2O represents polymers such as grass, wood, etc. But there are other ways where CO2 has been trapped, apart from biomass is rubbish. Its easy to get the metal out of wastes and then the rest of it is carbonaceous and upon burning would present CO2 (plus impurities which would have to be made into bricks and exported to gas stations and be part of the methanol forming machinery when the hydrogen electrolyzes water and its combined into the CO2 from the biomass, whatever the source is. Another source would be sewage, sometimes available from farms).
9. What should the new use of methanol, including Co2 from the atmosphere, be called
It was Olah who rst suggested that the properties of methanol are sufciently similar to the properties of hydrogen, ebut with the important and positive exception that it is a liquid, ehe suggested that it should be called Liquid Hydrogen. This is good enough except it is confusing for some because it might be thought that it was the real liquid hydrogen which is too expensive to produce, but I think that we can accept the phrase Liquid Hydrogen if we always use quotation marks on it, i.e., Liquid Hydrogen and then in the rst use of this. the name Olah should be appended. The advantage of making methanol into a zero carbon fuel needs not only the inclusion of the CO2 from the atmosphere in the synthesis of the methanol, but one has to ensure a non-carbon producing the electricity to electrolyze the water and obtain the hydrogen. Any zero carbon production of electricity will do (solar, wind, enhanced geothermal) but the cost of electricity is a vital factor. It is predicted to be 3 to 4 cents/kWh as the cost given for enhanced geothermal. There are windy places in Michigan where 3 cents/kWh is quoted as a price for wind-based electricity. In 2012 dollars there is the American Wind Association who predicts 2 cents/kWh in 2011 currency. It is using the cost
7. The revolutionary contributions of Olah, Geoppert and Prakash

Professor Olah is clear about the fact that hydrogen and a Hydrogen Economy are burdened by the cost of handling a gas. (The Bose, Malbrunot paper was published in the same year as the work of Olah et al. [10].) Now, the rst Olah book does not stress the problem of CO2 and the need to create the methanol the right way so that it has the CO2 in it and the synthesis reaction is given by Reaction 1 above. The most important point is the quality of the Olah book. That is why I think it is a revolutionary change and I believe that it will be the means to the future distribution of energy. It is of course clear that Professor Olahs status as a Nobel holder played a powerful effect on his books.
(2 cents/kWh) that the estimate of enhanced methanol can be made for < $30/GJ.
methanol from the atmosphere a motor fuel, its CO2 could perhaps be used directly from the exhaust pipe.
10.
The methanol economy
12.
Conclusions
We invented a New Age of zero carbon fuel by suggesting hydrogen and then methanol and enhanced methanol, a derivation of hydrogen. I want to take the attitude that we are passing from a Hydrogen Economy to a Methanol Economy because methanol is a liquid and easily available but also can be placed into a zero carbon fuel. At at the bottom of the methanol to indicate that this has CO2 in it which has to come indeed from the atmosphere, and therefore upon being burned would not give rise to net CO2. That name of Liquid Hydrogen was rst used by Professor Olah.
Ideas which are yet to come such as energy from the atmosphere, which some claim to be a theoretical concept: Well, yes, one must follow up and test out every concept and where the economics are reasonable we should not wait too long because if we go on a sufcient delay we might never get there. We dont want to be like the ancient occupiers of Easter Island who kept on making new canoes and sending off young people in pairs to nd new islands, but one day they had no more wood.
10.1.
The Swiss invasion
Acknowledgments
In 2011 there appeared upon the scene an Herr Weidemann and he proclaimed that he was going to make methanol the world fuel. Its unclear in advertising material from Mr. Weidemann how he is going to get the CO2 but perhaps that will come in a later story. Id like to thank my assistants and my secretary for their continued help, without which I would not be able to continue writing publications on my work. The information gathering in 2012 for this paper was carried out by Joanna Kern who also contributed some clarication of the text. Ms. Kern is to be thanks for improving the document. Mrs. Patricia Schulz also edited all the versions, making clarifying changes to the text and is also to be thanked.
11.
Possible uses of liquid hydrogen
One thing which one can add to the story of the new liquid hydrogen prepared from the atmosphere, is use in bicycles. There are about a billion bicycles in China and at the moment many of them work on batteries, but of course batteries run out and you have to charge them. It would be much more interesting if one could have a fuel cell made bicycle and then carry around in ones pocket a bottle of enhanced methanol. I think that methanol for a bicycle fuels is a much better idea than having to go and try and nd a plug in, and so long as the methanol is made truly from CO2 in the atmosphere and hydrogen from renewable energy, preferably safe for the environment. With a billion bicycles utilizing liquid hydrogen as a fuel, this would cause no problem to the atmosphere. This seems to me a most helpful to the Chinese and one could set up a company to achieve necessary technology and get large sales at once. The methanol described above can be made with ease virtually anywhere in this world by utilizing any renewable energy to give hydrogen through water electrolysis and then, as mentioned above, biomass or any other trapped form of CO2 can be burned to provide the needed substance. This can all be done except for the transfer and packaging of the CO2 underneath the gas station. It already has the water and the electricity and so its an easy conversion without the large amounts of money that any other fuel would take. After that, its a matter of good mini-engineering to reduce the cost and we shall be on to the new fuel. Theres no reason why we should ever change it. It will live so long as there is water, air and wind. When methanol from the atmosphere is available, and gasoline taxed off the market, and with
references
[1] Bockris JOM. Environment This Month 1971;13(51). [2] Bockris JOM, Appleby AJ. The hydrogen economy: an ultimate economy? Environment This Month 1972;1:29. [3] Bockris JOM. Electrochemical production of hydrogen as a fuel, hydrogen and the future. IJHE 1999;24:1e15. [4] Bryan W. Roberts, David H. Shepard, Ken Caldeira, M. Elizabeth Cannon, David G. Eccles, Albert J. Grenier, et al. IEEE transactions on energy conversion, vol. 22, No. 1, March 2007. [5] Awad AH, Veziroglu TN. Hydrogen versus synthetic fossil fuels. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy May 1984; 9(5):355e66. [6] Bockris JOM. Energy options. New York: Wiley; 1980. [7] Bockris JOM. Energy: the solar-hydrogen alternative. New York: Wiley; 1975. [8] Gregory DP, Ng DYC, Long CM. In: Bockris JOM, editor. The electrochemistry of cleaner environments. New York: Plenum Press; 1971. [9] Chandrasekaren K, Bockris JOM. In Situ, FTIR reection spectroscopy for semiconductor-solution interfaces. Surface Science 1986;178. p. 613. [10] Olah G, Goeppert A, Prakash S. The methanol economy. 1st ed. 2006 and 2nd ed. 2009. Wiley-VCH Verlag; 2009. [11] Weidemann UR. Ch. 8330. Silent power, vol. 11. Switzerland: Gewerbestrasse; 2012. [12] Ohashi K, McCann J, Bockris JOM. Energy Research 1977;1(259). [13] Bockris JOM, Khan SUM, Uosaki K. Discussions of the Faraday Society 1981;70(98). [14] Bockris JOM, Khan SUM. Journal of Physical Chemistry 1984; 88(2304). [15] Kainthla RC, Bockris JOM, Khan SUM. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 1987;12(381).
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[16] Kainthla RC, Zelenay B, Bockris JOM. Journal Electrochemical Society 1986;133(248). [17] Szklarczyck M, Bockris JOM. IDEM, Applied Physics Communications, 2, 295, 1983. Applied Physics Letters 1983; 42(1035). [18] Kainthla RC, Zelenay B, Bockris JOM. Journal Electrochemical Society 1987;136(841). [19] Bockris JOM, Khan SUM. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 1986;11(373). [20] Fleischmann M, Pons S, Hawkins M. Electrochemically induced fusion. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 1981;261(301). [21] Bose T, Malbrunot P. Hydrogen. Esher, KT009 Q.Y., UK: John Libby Euro Texts; 2006.
[22] Bose T, Malbrunot P. Hydrogen. Esher, KT009 Q.Y., UK: John Libby Euro Texts; 2006. Table 5, p. 87. [23] Bockris JOM. Stressing discussion with Zaromb, S. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 2008;33(2129). [24] Steinberg M, Dang V-D. Production of synthetic methanol from air and water using controlled thermonuclear reactor power e I. Technology and energy Requirements. Pergamon Press, Great Britain. Energy Conversion 1977;17(97). [25] Steinberg M, Dang V-D. Production of synthetic methanol from air and water using controlled thermonuclear reactor power e II. Capital investments and production costs. Pergamon Press, Great Britain. Energy Conversion 1977; 17(133).

The Hydrogen Economy

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i n t e r n a t i o n a l j o u r n a l o f h y d r o g e n e n e r g y x x x ( 2 0 1 2 ) 1 e1 0

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/he

The hydrogen economy: Its history

The rst full publication

3. Contributors to the early stages of the hydrogen economy

The work of Gregory, Ng and Long, 1973

The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

The contributions of Hampton Robinson

4. Contributors to the present stages of the hydrogen economy (2006 to present)

Coal (gasication) 2.60

Biomass (gasication) 2.60

Electricity (electrolysis) 17.80

After CO2 sequestration

Before CO2 sequestration

JOMB in discussion with S. Zaromb 2006. JOMB with acknowledgements to S. Zaromb.

From where comes CO2

7. The revolutionary contributions of Olah, Geoppert and Prakash

The methanol economy

The Swiss invasion

Possible uses of liquid hydrogen

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