Download to read offline
![8 Chapter 1
As a fuel, it doesn’t pollute. As an energy-storage medium, it would
answer Fuller’s call for some method “to store [energy] when it is available
for use when it is not available.”
Hydrogen is not an energy “source,” a mistake still made fairly often by
otherwise sophisticated, well-informed people. That is, it is not primary
energy (like natural gas or crude oil), existing freely in nature. It is an ener-
gy carrier—a secondary form of energy that has to be manufactured (like
electricity, which doesn’t exist freely in usable form either). Hydrogen can
be generated from many primary sources—an advantage in itself, since it
reduces the chances of creating a hydrogen cartel similar to OPEC (which,
for a while at least, was able to dictate global energy prices).
Today, hydrogen is made (that is, extracted) mostly from fossil fuels. But
efforts to clean up these fuels (to “decarbonize” them, in the jargon of ener-
gy strategists of the 1990s) will increase. To decarbonize really means to
adapt techniques long used in the chemical, petroleum, and natural gas
industries to strip out the carbon or CO2 and store (“sequester”) it out of
harm’s way, leaving hydrogen.
In the future, hydrogen will be made from clean water and clean solar
energy—and just possibly (though it seems unlikely from the anti-nuclear
perspective of the late 1990s) from “cleaner” versions of nuclear energy,
including fusion. Since it can be made from both nonrenewable and renew-
able sources, it can be phased into the overall energy structure by whatev-
er method is most convenient and least wrenching to a given country, state,
region, or economy—perhaps, for example, coal gasification in the western
United States and solar-based electrolysis in deserts in the Middle East or
in the southwestern US. Israeli scientists are testing direct solar water split-
ting, in which the sun’s concentrated heat would break up water molecules
into hydrogen and oxygen. Water could be electrolyzed with electricity pro-
duced by geothermal resources in some areas, and perhaps also from the
oldest form of renewable energy: hydropower.
In the simplest terms, the broad outlines of a future “hydrogen economy”
run something like this:
Clean primary energy—probably solar energy in its many variations;
possibly an advanced, environmentally more benign version of nuclear
energy—would produce electricity to be used to split water into hydrogen](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-22-2048.jpg)
![Why Hydrogen? 15
had to pay $10/gallon for gasoline or 30 cents/[kilowatt-hour] for electricity to
cover fossil fuel damages to our health and environment, then suddenly hydrogen
fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen produced by wind, solar or biomass would look
like a bargain. Investors would flock to hydrogen equipment manufacturers. People
would convert their SUVs to run on clean-burning hydrogen derived from wind
energy at only $2.50/gallon of gasoline equivalent.
A truly sustainable energy future has two attributes: no pollution or greenhouse
gas emissions, and no consumption of non-renewable resources. There are only
two energy options that meet this sustainability goal: renewable hydrogen and
fusion.
Pessimistically, Thomas adds:
Sustainability requires the intervention of governments. Governments alone have
the responsibility of protecting the commons. Industry has no major incentive
(other than public relations) to build a sustainable energy system. Their overriding
objective is return on investment, and burning fossil fuels is very profitable. At best,
they will sponsor renewable energy R&D or fuel-cell programs with an infinitesi-
mally small fraction of their profits to give the appearance of preparing for a sus-
tainable future. But most governments do not have the vision or leadership to look
into the future and to implement policies that will provide for the welfare of future
generations. Certainly, the US federal government is effectively paralyzed, barely
able to pass all 13 appropriations bills, let alone tackle any significant societal prob-
lem. No US leader has the vision to state the need for sustainability and to follow
that vision up with bold implementation programs.
Summarizing, Thomas says:
. . . all the key decisions makers who could influence a transition to clean energy
carriers like hydrogen have a very short time horizon: industries have to show a
return on investment within a few years, and most elected officials feel that they
must show results before the next election—at best six years for a Senator, four
years for a President, and only two years for a Representative.
He asks plaintively:
Where do we find the visionary leaders who will look two or three decades into the
future and imagine a better world for their children, grandchildren or even great
grandchildren?
David Hart is more sanguine. He believes the time is finally at hand
when hydrogen will start to make major inroads because of “a confluence
of drivers that all point in the same direction—towards hydrogen.” The
“drivers” include the requirement for a reduction in CO2 emissions,
appalling urban air quality, legislation dictating zero-emission vehicles,
progress in fuel cell technology, a move toward the use of local resources
for energy production, the need to store intermittent renewable energy,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-29-2048.jpg)
![Why Hydrogen? 17
Hawaii (home of one of the world’s most important atmospheric CO2-mon-
itoring posts) as follows: “We don’t know at this point whether [CO2] will
build up so that it can do damage. The oil crisis may have slowed it a little.
. . . A lot of people believe we could get into trouble, irreversible trouble, in
about ten years’ time.”
Hydrogen contains no carbon at all. Burning it and converting it to ener-
gy produces no CO2 and no greenhouse gas. Used as a fuel, it would reduce
and eventually eliminate at least the man-made share of CO2 deposited in
the atmosphere. Switching to hydrogen energy—even perhaps to hydrogen
from fossil fuels as a stopgap measure—may help save our children’s health
and perhaps their lives.
The sky isn’t falling—so far. But unless something is done on an interna-
tional scale, with measures that prove we can actually use our collective
human intelligence and wits to guarantee our survival, the time may come
when the sky will turn so gray, poisonously yellow, or red from heat and
pollution that it might as well be falling. Time will undoubtedly tell.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-31-2048.jpg)
![3
A History of Hydrogen Energy: The
Reverend Cecil, Jules Verne, and the
Redoubtable Mr. Erren
On November 27, 1820, the dons of Cambridge University assembled to
hear a clergyman’s proposal. It is recorded in the transactions of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society that Rev. W. Cecil, M.A., Fellow of
Magdalen College and of the society, read a lengthy treatise, titled On the
Application of Hydrogen Gas to Produce Moving Power in Machinery,
describing an engine operated by the “Pressure of the Atmosphere upon a
Vacuum Caused by Explosions of Hydrogen Gas and Atmospheric Air.”
Cecil first dwelt on the disadvantages of water-driven engines (which could
be used only “where water is abundant”) and steam engines (which were
slow in getting underway). The utility of a steam engine was “much dimin-
ished by the tedious and laborious preparation which is necessary to bring
it into action.” Furthermore, “a small steam engine not exceeding the power
of one man cannot be brought into action in less than half an hour: and a
four-horse steam engine cannot be used [without] two hours preparation.”
A hydrogen-powered engine would solve these problems, Cecil averred:
“The engine in which hydrogen gas is employed to produce moving force
was intended to unite two principal advantages of water and steam so as to
be capable of acting in any place without the delay and labour of prepara-
tion.” Rather prophetically, Cecil added: “It may be inferior, in some
respects, to many engines at present employed; yet it will not be wholly use-
less, if, together with its own defects, it should be found to possess advan-
tages also peculiar to itself.”
According to Cecil’s explanations, the general principle was that hydro-
gen, when mixed with air and ignited, would produce a large partial vac-
uum. The air rushing back into the vacuum after the explosion could be
harnessed as a moving force “nearly in the same manner as in the common](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-39-2048.jpg)
![A History of Hydrogen Energy 35
about 100 trucks were running between Berlin and the industrial Ruhr area
in the west—a distance of some 350 miles—switching from one fuel to
another along the way (“with the truck fully loaded, on a steep incline with
a switch in the cockpit,” Weil recalled). In an late-1970s interview, Weil
recalled that the engine adaptation was not especially difficult, but it was
easier for some engine types than for others: “For a six-in-line it was much
easier than for a V-type engine.” In regard to the conversion costs, he esti-
mated that “under [late 1970s] conditions the cost would have been a few
hundred dollars per engine.” Erren believed that more than 1000 cars and
trucks were converted to his multi-fuel system; however, one British report
put the total at between 3000 and 4000.
The German railway system tested a hydrogen-powered self-propelled
rail car in suburban operations out of Dresden. The train was powered by
a 75-horsepower six-cylinder gasoline engine. It was “much worn” and
running harshly, according to a 1932 report by a Reichsbahn maintenance
depot; however, when primed with hydrogen the engine developed up to
83 bhp—an increase of 9.7 percent. Powered by pure hydrogen, the engine
produced 77 bhp.
Errenization was catching on in England, too. Erren converted Carter-
Paterson delivery vans and buses with Beardmore diesel engines to run on
hydrogen for better fuel consumption and less pollution. Erren told of an
incident involving an Australian commission that spent 2 or 3 weeks in his
shops checking his claims and his engines. Eventually, the commission
wanted to conduct an open-road speed test with a bus. The site chosen was
a hill outside London. According to Erren:
The police there were always on the lookout because the gentlemen from a nearby
club drove faster than the thirty miles per hour speed limit. Well, we wanted an
official confirmation. . . . The police were pretty well hidden, but we saw them
anyway, switched to hydrogen and instead of driving at 30 miles we did 50 or 52
miles up the hill. The police stopped us, told us that they had timed us with a stop
watch and we had exceeded the speed limit, which we had to admit. We paid our
fine but thanked them profusely, which in turn astonished them until we explained
that we now had official proof of our claims.
In 1935, Erren made headlines in the popular British press with news
that warmed the hearts of Jules Verne fans. “Secret Fuel to Smash Air
Record” headlined the Sunday Despatch of March 24, 1935, subheading
the one-column story “Non-Stop Round the World with Liquid Hydrogen.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-47-2048.jpg)
![A History of Hydrogen Energy 41
The reasons for the renewed interest in hydrogen were, of course, differ-
ent for different people, but the idea of a “totally benign energy metabo-
lism,” as Lawrence Jones of the University of Michigan once put it, was
certainly a large factor. Hydrogen, Jones observed, had “a kind of gut
appeal to people.” Jones, a particle physicist, put it more formally in a 1971
article in Science magazine, writing that the possibility of using liquid
hydrogen as an ultimate replacement for fossil fuels had occurred to him in
a casual conversation “related to the logistics and use of large quantities of
liquid hydrogen in a cosmic-ray experiment.” “In remarking on the drop in
price of liquid hydrogen in recent years,” Jones recalled, “I noted that the
cost per liter was about the same as that of gasoline.” As he began reading
up on hydrogen in the available literature, he reports, “I recognized that
. . . it had an inherent self-consistency and appeal which warranted broader
discussion. The conclusion I have reached is that the use of liquid hydrogen
as a fuel not only is feasible technically and economically, but also is desir-
able and may even be inevitable.”
In another article, published 2 years later in the Journal of Environ-
mental Planning and Pollution Control, Jones said: “It soon became appar-
ent that a surprising number of widely separated individuals and groups
had very similar thoughts.” That phenomenon broke into the open in 1972
at a spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, where
Cesare Marchetti and a co-worker, Gianfranco De Beni, presented their
first thermochemical water-splitting process, and again at the Seventh
Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference in San Diego that
autumn.
In its September 22, 1972 issue, Business Week ran a multi-page article
on international hydrogen developments.10
(Its effect on the scientists assem-
bled in San Diego was apparently quite riveting. Marchetti later wrote, in
a personal note, that “out of 650 participants about 500 were concentrated
in the [session] on H2.”) Fortune carried a longer story 2 months later, and
that was followed by articles in Readers Digest, Time, Popular Science, and
other periodicals.
Hydrogen researchers’ recognition that they were not alone reached a
climax of sorts on May 6, 1972—the 35th anniversary of the Hindenburg
disaster—with the creation of the informal H2indenburg Society, a group
dedicated “to the safe utilization of hydrogen as a fuel.” Bill Escher, whose](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-53-2048.jpg)
![that he still carried about him; wrote a letter to that effect to his
Prime Minister, and directed the oath of allegiance to be taken to his
nephew, and that his brother, Prince Henry, should be regent; but
finding that the Russians, who had lost twenty thousand men, were
actually drawing off, he again took courage, was soon at the head of
thirty thousand men, and with these was hastening to the relief of
Dresden, when he was paralysed by the news that General Finck,
with twelve thousand men, had suffered himself to be surrounded at
Maxen, and compelled to surrender. Despairing of relieving Dresden
during this campaign, Frederick eventually took up his winter
quarters at Freiberg, in Saxony, and employed himself in raising and
drilling fresh soldiers; compelled, however, to pay his way by
debasing both the Prussian coin, and the English gold which he
received in subsidy, by a very large alloy.
DEATH OF WOLFE. (After the Painting by Benjamin West, P.R.A.)
[See larger version]
Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick was more successful. He was at the
head of an army of fifty-five thousand men, including ten or twelve](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-61-2048.jpg)
![MARTELLO TOWER ON THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM, QUEBEC.
[See larger version]
GEORGE WHITEFIELD PREACHING. (See p. 143.)
[See larger version]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-68-2048.jpg)
![JOHN WESLEY.
[See larger version]
The literature of this period is more distinguished for learning and
cleverness than for genius. There are a few names that rise above
the smartness and mere accomplishment of the time into the regions
of pure genius; but, with very few exceptions, even they bear the
stamp of the period. We have here no Milton, no Shakespeare, no
Herbert, no Herrick even, to produce; but De Foe, Addison, Steele,
Thomson, and Pope, if they do not lift us to the highest creative
plane, give us glimpses and traits of what is found there. For the
rest, however full of power, there hangs a tone of "town," of a
vicious and sordid era, about them, of an artificial and by no means
refined life, a flavour of the grovelling of the politics which
distinguished the period, and of the low views and feelings which](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28194366-250517181006-ef739398/75/Tomorrows-Energy-Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-And-The-Prospects-For-A-Cleaner-Planet-Peter-Hoffmann-75-2048.jpg)
More Related Content
Similar to Tomorrows Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet Peter Hoffmann
Tomorrows Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet Peter Hoffmann
- 1. Tomorrows Energy HydrogenFuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet Peter Hoffmann download https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-energy-hydrogen-fuel- cells-and-the-prospects-for-a-cleaner-planet-peter- hoffmann-56388732 Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com
- 2. Here are somerecommended products that we believe you will be interested in. You can click the link to download. Tomorrows Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet Revised And Expanded Edition Peter Hoffmann https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-energy-hydrogen-fuel-cells- and-the-prospects-for-a-cleaner-planet-revised-and-expanded-edition- peter-hoffmann-4149534 Tomorrows Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet Revised Edition Peter Hoffmann https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-energy-hydrogen-fuel-cells- and-the-prospects-for-a-cleaner-planet-revised-edition-peter- hoffmann-11843104 Tomorrows Energy Hydrogen Fuel Cells And The Prospects For A Cleaner Planet 2nd Edition Peter Hoffman https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-energy-hydrogen-fuel-cells- and-the-prospects-for-a-cleaner-planet-2nd-edition-peter- hoffman-10425048 World Energy Outlook 2001 Assessing Todays Supplies To Fuel Tomorrows Growth Oecd https://ebookbell.com/product/world-energy-outlook-2001-assessing- todays-supplies-to-fuel-tomorrows-growth-oecd-6779302
- 3. Energy Efficient CitiesOf Today And Tomorrow Jukka Heinonen https://ebookbell.com/product/energy-efficient-cities-of-today-and- tomorrow-jukka-heinonen-50655488 Cogeneration And District Energy Sustainable Energy Technologies For Today And Tomorrow Oecd https://ebookbell.com/product/cogeneration-and-district-energy- sustainable-energy-technologies-for-today-and-tomorrow-oecd-6822872 Tomorrows Systems Engineering Commentaries On The Profession Howard Eisner https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-systems-engineering- commentaries-on-the-profession-howard-eisner-46503020 Tomorrows God Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-god-our-greatest-spiritual- challenge-conversations-with-god-neale-donald-walsch-46844984 Tomorrows Never Promised 1st Edition Luna Everly https://ebookbell.com/product/tomorrows-never-promised-1st-edition- luna-everly-48624670
- 6.
- 7. Tomorrow’s Energy Hydrogen, FuelCells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet Peter Hoffmann The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
- 8. © 2001 PeterHoffmann All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Sabon by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoffmann, Peter, 1935– Tomorrow’s energy : hydrogen, fuel cells, and the prospects for a cleaner planet / Peter Hoffmann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-08295-0 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Hydrogen as fuel. I. Title. TP359.H8 H633 2001 333.79'4—dc21 00-054613
- 9. Contents Foreword by SenatorTom Harkin vii Acknowledgments ix 1 Why Hydrogen? Buckminster Fuller, Sheikh Yamani, and Bill Clinton 1 2 Hydrogen’s Discovery: Phlogiston and Inflammable Air 19 3 A History of Hydrogen Energy: The Reverend Cecil, Jules Verne, and the Redoubtable Mr. Erren 27 4 Producing Hydrogen from Water, Natural Gas, and Green Plants 53 5 Primary Energy: Using Solar and Other Power to Make Hydrogen 79 6 Hydrogen for Cars and Buses: Steaming Tailpipes 99 7 Fuel Cells: Mr. Grove’s Lovely Technology 141 8 Hydrogen in Aerospace: Clean Contrails and the Orient Express 161 9 Hydrogen as Utility Gas: The Invisible Flame 187 10 Non-Energy Uses of Hydrogen: Metallic H2, Biodegradable Plastics, and H2 Tofu 211 11 Safety: The Hindenburg Syndrome, or “Don’t Paint Your Dirigible with Rocket Fuel” 233 12 The Next 100 Years 247 Notes 265 Index 283
- 10. Foreword Senator Tom Harkin WhenI was born, in 1939, there were 2 billion people on the earth. When I turned 60, there were 6 billion. When my daughter turns 60, there will be 9 billion. Many of these people will want heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. They will want to use refrigerators, radios, televisions, and cars. The question is not whether nations like China and India will develop or whether they will consume more energy than they do now. They will and they should. They have a right to seek a better life just as we did. The question is: What kind of world will we create? If we continue to base our economies on coal and oil, we will create a world with toxic air, filthy water, and debilitating diseases. Global warming will likely bring droughts and hurricanes, tropical diseases in the North, and widespread coastal flooding. There is an alternative. We can replace coal and oil with clean, renewable energy sources that can generate electricity, heat buildings, and power cars. Renewable energy sources are abundant throughout the world. India is flooded with sunlight, and China’s entire current electricity consumption could be powered by the wind in Inner Mongolia. In the United States, the Midwest is sometimes called the Saudi Arabia of wind. However, we must remember that solar, wind, and most other renew- able energy sources are intermittent and regional. They can only become major power sources if we find a way to store and transport their energy efficiently. Hydrogen can make the renewable vision real by storing renewable ener- gy and making it available where and when it is needed. Hydrogen, the sim- plest molecule, is non-toxic and can be made from plain water using
- 11. viii Foreword electricity fromrenewable sources. Used in fuel cells, hydrogen generates electricity and emits only water vapor. And cars run on hydrogen fuel cells are 2 to 3 times more efficient than gasoline engines. Fuel cells can be made in any size to fit everything from pocket-held devices to large power plants. They are perfect for a dispersed and robust energy infrastructure. This book is the culmination of Peter Hoffmann’s work over the past three decades to chronicle the progress of hydrogen energy from a vision to a niche market to its position today on the brink of full commercialization. He describes the various ways hydrogen can be made, stored, and used, and offers insightful analyses of the remaining technical and economic obstacles to the widespread use of hydrogen. Throughout my career in the Senate, I have worked to promote the devel- opment of a hydrogen economy. I’m glad to say I’ve seen tremendous progress. Today there are hydrogen fueling stations and fuel cell buses scat- tered in cities around the world. DaimlerChrysler intends to sell fuel cell cars commercially by 2004, with other automakers close behind. The First National Bank of Omaha is using fuel cells to provide secure power for its credit card service operations. And recently, the New York City Police Department installed a fuel cell to power its Central Park Police Station because it was cheaper than extending power lines. Hoffmann’s vast knowledge and insight on hydrogen will be an invalu- able tool for continuing these efforts, and an important resource for any- one who cares about our environment. After reading this book, one can see the dream of a hydrogen-based economy becoming a reality. I am confident that I will one day walk from my hydrogen-heated office through clean air to my hydrogen fuel cell car. And when I do, I will be carrying this book.
- 12. Acknowledgments This book startedout as a revision and an update of The Forever Fuel— The Story of Hydrogen, published by the Westview Press in 1981. I hadn’t really intended to ever put myself through the wringer of writing a book again, but I gave in to the entreaties of a few people who thought such a book was needed because hydrogen and fuel cell energy have in fact made progress since The Forever Fuel and because a new and improved version might help accelerate the process a bit more. As I began gathering new mate- rial (aided greatly by having to report each month for The Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter, which I and my wife, Sarah, had started in 1986), the book just sort of grew beyond a revised edition. The MIT Press and I think it’s a new book, although quite a bit of the historical material has been retained in condensed form. Thanks are due to many people for all sorts of reasons—providing infor- mation and input, suggesting new areas, reading early parts critically, sug- gesting changes, offering moral support when I was ready to chuck it all. Some of them are mentioned in the book. They include, in no particular order, Alan Lloyd, Shannon Baxter, Sandy Thomas, Jesse Ausubel, Henry Linden, Dan Brewer, Gary Sandrock, Joan Ogden, Bob Williams, Bob Zweig, T. Nejat Veziroglu, Bob Rose, Frank Lynch, Karl Kordesch, Peter Lehman, Oliver Weinmann, James Provenzano, Chris Borroni-Bird, Venki Raman, Firoz Rasul, Neil Otto, Debby Harris, Carl-Jochen Winter, Ulrich Schmidtchen, Ron Sims, Cesare Marchetti, Hjalmar Arnason, Heinz Klug, Hans Pohl, Reiner Wurster, Ulrich Buenger, Vahe Kludjan, Martin Hammerli, Karen Miller, Bob Mauro, Lowell Ungar, Ranji George, Barbara Heydorn, Olof Tegström, Curtis Moore, Marcus Nurdin, John Turner,
- 13. x Acknowledgments Paul Weaver,Sandy and Andrew Stuart, Glenn Rambach, James Cannon, John O’Sullivan, Jeff Bentley, and Dr. Ulrike Gutzmann. Special thanks for helping me obtain financial assistance are due to Bill Hoagland, Susan Leach, Neil Rossmeissl, and Cathy Gregoire Padro of the US Department of Energy. Finally, I want to thank Clay Morgan and Paul Bethge of The MIT Press, my wife, Sarah, and Taylor M. Briggs, who spent untold hours checking copy, making suggestions, removing some of the more egregious errors, and in general helping to pound the manuscript into shape. Without them, there would have been no book.
- 14.
- 15. 1 Why Hydrogen? BuckminsterFuller, Sheikh Yamani, and Bill Clinton There are two prime sources of energy to be harnessed and expended to do work. One is the capital energy-saving and storage account; the other is the energy-income account. The fossil fuels took multimillions of years of complex reduction and con- servation, progressing from vegetational impoundment of sun radiation by photo- synthesis to deep-well storage of the energy concentrated below the earth’s surface. There is a vast overabundance of income energy at more places around the world, at more times to produce billionsfold the energy now employed by man, if he only knew how to store it when it is available, for use when it was not available. There are gargantuan energy-income sources available which do not stay the processes of nature’s own conservation of energy within the earth’s crust “against a rainy day.” These are in water, tidal, wind, and desert-impinging sun radiation power. The exploiters of the fossil fuels, coal and oil, say it costs less to produce and burn the sav- ings account, This is analogous to saying it takes less effort to rob a bank than to do the work which the money deposited in the bank represents. The question is cost to whom? To our great-great-grandchildren who will have no fossil fuels to turn the machines? I find that the ignorant acceptance by world society’s presently deputized leaders of the momentarily expedient and the lack of constructive, long-distance thinking—let alone comprehensive thinking—would render dubious the case for humanity’s earthian future could we not recognize plausible overriding trends. —R. Buckminster Fuller, 19691 The big powers are seriously trying to find alternatives to oil by seeking to draw energy from the sun or water. We hope to God they will not succeed quickly because our position in that case will be painful. —Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani, oil minister of Saudi Arabia, 19762 A shift to solar energy could create 2.9 million jobs and cut spending for conven- tional fuels by $11.8 billion by 1990, according to a study released yesterday by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. —United Press International, April 22, 1979 Hydrogen as fuel? It’s still Buck Rogers stuff. —energy expert, Bonn, February 1980
- 16. 2 Chapter 1 BallardPower and United Technologies are leading pioneers in developing fuel cells that are so clean. Their only exhaust is distilled water. Right now, Ballard is work- ing with Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota to introduce fuel cells into new cars. —President Bill Clinton, 19973 In the twenty-first century hydrogen might become an energy carrier of importance comparable to electricity. This is a very important mid- to long-range research area. —President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, 19974 We believe that hydrogen fuel cell powered cars are likely to make a major entrance into the vehicle market throughout Europe and the US by 2005. In addition, we see potentially enormous opportunities opening up in the domestic fleet, bus and taxi market as government encourages cleaner alternatives to conventionally powered vehicles. This trend poses a real challenge to a company like Shell to develop new products, new technologies and to prepare and inform our customers for the changes that lie ahead. . . . I can assure you we are in this for the long haul. —Chris Fay, chief executive, Shell UK, London, 19985 Our long-term goal is very simple: zero emissions in the air. To meet that goal, California has teamed with some of the best automotive manufacturers and energy providers in the world to develop an exciting new technology that is both environ- mentally safe and commercially viable. —Gray Davis, Governor of California, 19996 Now analysts say that natural gas, lighter still in carbon, may be entering its heyday, and that the day of hydrogen—providing a fuel with no carbon at all, by definition—may at last be about to dawn. —New York Times, 19997 These quotes give some idea as to what this book is all about: hydrogen as a non-polluting, renewable form of energy. Hydrogen—an invisible, taste- less, colorless gas—is the most abundant element in the universe. It is the fuel of stars and galaxies. Highly reactive, it is essential in innumerable chemical and biological processes. It is an energetic yet (by definition) non- polluting8 fuel. Even before Buckminster Fuller’s observations, many people had been calling for the use of nature’s “current energy account” (solar power in its various manifestations) as an alternative to robbing the world’s energy “savings account” (coal, oil, gas). As Fuller pointed out, the problem has been to a large extent not only how to collect this essentially free energy but how to store it. Tapping into solar energy for purposes other than basic solar heating usually means producing electricity. But electricity has to be
- 17. Why Hydrogen? 3 consumedthe instant it is produced. It is difficult to store in large quanti- ties. Hydrogen, a storable gas, solves that problem. In past decades, efforts to harness renewable energies were driven part- ly by idealism but more by concerns about “energy security”—fears about the eventual drying up of the world’s petroleum resources and about the increasing vulnerability of the long supply lines from the politically unsta- ble Middle East. But as the twentieth century drew to its close, environ- mental concern had become a much stronger impetus driving the world toward renewable, alternative forms of energy. Curbing and eventually doing away with pollution has become a universal concern. Dying forests in Europe and acid rain everywhere were among the initial wake-up calls to the need to curb sulfur, nitrogen oxides, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), particulate emissions, and other pollutants. At last it had begun to dawn on policy makers and large parts of the general population—less so, and more slowly, in the United States than in other parts of the world—that the very process of combusting fossil fuels, the interaction of carbon in hydrocarbon fuels with the air’s oxygen, and the consequent release into and accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other climate-changing gases far above pre- industrial levels was raising the world’s temperature—the famous Green- house Effect—and threatening to play havoc with the world’s climate. “Zero emissions” from cars and buses, industry, ships, and home fur- naces is becoming the new world standard—a standard to which industri- alized countries and emerging economies are aspiring with varying degrees of intensity and dedication. To the minds of many, taking the carbon out of hydrocarbons and relying on the “hydro” part—hydrogen—as a zero- emission chemical fuel is the obvious though technically difficult way to minimize and, it is hoped, eventually eliminate global warming. The basics of global warming are as follows: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is pro- duced by the burning of fossil fuels as well as by nature’s carbon cycle. (Humans and animals exhale it into the atmosphere as part of their meta- bolic process; green plants absorb it and turn it into plant matter.) CO2, methane, and other gases act like a greenhouse in the atmosphere: They let solar radiation through the atmosphere to heat the Earth’s surface, but they prevent the reradiation of some of that energy back into space, thus trap-
- 18. 4 Chapter 1 pingheat. Some heat entrapment is good; otherwise we would have never evolved in the first place, or we would freeze to death. But the more green- house gases are swirling around the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped. Because of decreases in the world’s forests and consequent decreases in glob- al CO2 absorption, and (more important) because of increasing burning of fossil fuels in our ever-more-energy-demanding machinery, the atmosphere’s CO2 content has been going up steadily and increasingly steeply since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Aside from other fundamental climate cycles stretching over thousands or tens of thousands of years (such as ice ages, believed to be caused in parts by changes in sunspots and therefore beyond man’s ability to influence), Earth’s climate has been reasonably stable for 10,000 years or so. But this equilibrium is being upset by man-made carbon emissions. The question is how much. Opinions, basic assumptions about the future course of the cli- mate and the amount of expected heat increase, closely related assumptions about global economic development, and faith in the complex computer models that attempt to forecast climate developments vary widely even among the majority of experts who believe that our planet is facing an unprecedented crisis.9 As more heat is being trapped, and as temperatures climb all over the world, the mainstream opinion among the climate experts of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts widespread and drastic impacts on ecosystems, water resources, food and fiber production, coastlines, and human health: The polar ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise, large stretches of coastline (including some of the world’s biggest cities) will be inundated, and scores of islands in the Pacific may dis- appear. Agricultural patterns are likely to change, with grain-growing belts migrating northward. The middle to high latitudes may become more pro- ductive as plants absorb more available CO2. The agricultural yields of the tropics and the subtropics are expected to decrease. Climate change could produce more deaths through heat stress, the spread of tropical diseases, and worse urban air pollution. In a special sup- plement dedicated to the December 1997 Global Climate Change confer- ence in Kyoto, the New York Times reported that one IPCC working group had summarized its findings as follows: “Compared with the total burden of ill health, these problems are not likely to be large. In the aggregate, how-
- 19. Why Hydrogen? 5 ever,the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human health do constitute a hazard to human population health, especially in the develop- ing countries in the tropics and subtropics.”10 A recent study11 that looked at the generation of ozone in four metro- politan areas (Sacramento, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles) conclud- ed that a future doubling of global atmospheric CO2 would likely result in higher daily temperatures, which in turn would “dominate the meteoro- logical correlations with high tropospheric ozone concentrations”—in other words, higher temperatures would increase the ozone concentrations. More ozone, in turn, would increase the incidence of premature mortality, hospital admissions for respiratory diseases, and respiratory symptoms, the authors said. But some aspects, especially the relationship between ozone levels and premature mortality, are still subject to ongoing research, one author cautioned. In the case of Los Angeles, doubled CO2 concentrations were expected to increase the annual average daily maximum temperature from the base-case 20.7°C to 24.9°C and the annual average daily mini- mum from 14.1°C to 18.2°C, the researchers calculated. In Chicago, dou- bled CO2 would increase the corresponding maximum from 13.5°C to 19.3°C and the minimum from 3.78°C to 10.0°C. For Los Angeles, a table of anticipated extra health costs for one such warmer future year listed $2.552 billion (in 1990 dollars) for premature mortality, $14.19 million for hospital admissions, and $168,000 for respiratory-symptom days rela- tive to the same cost categories for a typical recent year. For Chicago, the corresponding numbers were $979 million, $2.38 million, and $28,000. The other principal form of clean energy, electricity, has two strikes against it: (1) It is the minority component in the world’s energy production and consumption—chemical energy accounts for almost two-thirds. (2) Most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels—coal, natural gas, petrole- um. According to the 1997 edition of the US Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook, the world’s total energy consumption in 1995 was close to 364 quads (quadrillion British thermal units).12 Of that, 140 quads (38 percent) consisted of electricity. Of that electricity, 62 per- cent was produced by burning oil, coal, or gas. (Coal accounted for the biggest slice—51.6 quads.) Renewable energy—mostly hydroelectric— accounted for only 29.7 quads, and nuclear energy only 23.3 quads. Oil,
- 20. 6 Chapter 1 widelyseen as the root cause of our energy woes because of its familiarity as fuel for our vehicles and because of the periodic political antics of the Middle Eastern countries and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, actually accounted for the smallest share of the world’s energy consumption, with 12.9 quads. Thus, it is safe to say that, in general, we work and play with—and, environmentalists would say, more frequently than ever die from—fossil- fueled chemical energy. Gasoline, diesel fuel, heavy oil, jet-grade kerosene, natural gas, wood, biomass, and coal propel airplanes, cars, trains and ships, run plants, and heat homes, offices, hospitals, and schools. Hydrogen, also a form of chemical energy, can do all those things, and can do them essentially without polluting. When burned in an internal-combustion engine (piston, rotary, or gas turbine), hydrogen produces as exhaust virtually nothing but harmless water vapor (plus, admittedly, trace emissions from tiny amounts of engine lubricants that are oxidized in the process, and some nitrogen oxides).13 When hydrogen is combusted with atmospheric oxygen in an engine, no carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide is emitted, no unburned hydrocarbons, no stench, no smoke, nor any of the other carbon-bearing, Earth-befouling discharges we suffer today. Hydrogen performs even better in fuel cells (electrochemical engines that, by electrochemically combining hydrogen and oxygen in a flameless process, produce electricity, heat, and pure, distilled water—the mirror image of electrolysis, in which water is split into hydrogen and oxygen by running a current through it). Unlike internal-combustion engines, fuel cells produce no nitrogen oxides at all.14 Fuel cells have no moving parts. Nearly silent, they can be as much as 2.5 times as efficient as internal-combustion engines. In the 1990s they became widely and publicly recognized as a vanguard technology that may launch hydrogen energy on its way to becoming a major, environmentally benign, sustainable, renewable component of the world’s energy mix for both transportation and stationary applications. “Hydrogen, H2, atomic weight 1.00797 . . . is the lightest known sub- stance,” reports the Encyclopedia of Chemistry. “The spectroscope shows that it is present in the sun, many stars, and nebulae. Our galaxy . . . plus
- 21. Why Hydrogen? 7 thestars of the Milky Way is presently considered to have been formed 12 to 15 billion years ago from a rotating mass of hydrogen gas which con- densed into stars under gravitational forces. This condensation produced high temperatures, giving rise to the fusion reaction converting hydrogen into helium, as presently occurring in the sun, with the evolution of tremen- dous amounts of radiant thermal energy plus the formation of the heavier elements. Hydrogen gas has long since escaped from the Earth’s lower atmosphere but is still present in the atmosphere of several of the planets. In a combined state, hydrogen comprises 11.19 percent of water and is an essential constituent of all acids, hydrocarbons, and vegetable and animal matter. It is present in most organic compounds.”15 Hydrogen is used in many industries as a chemical raw material, espe- cially in the production of fertilizer, but also in making dyes, drugs, and plastics. It is used in the treatment of oils and fats, as a fuel for welding, to make gasoline from coal, and to produce methanol. In its supercold liquid form, in combination with liquid oxygen, it is a powerful fuel for the Space Shuttle and other rockets. Hydrogen is produced commercially in almost a dozen processes. Most of them involve the extraction of the “hydro” part from hydrocarbons. The most widely used, least costly process is “steam reforming,” in which nat- ural gas is made to react with steam, releasing hydrogen. Water electroly- sis, in which water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by running an electrical current through it, is used where electricity is cheap and where high purity is required. Hydrogen can be stored as a high-pressure gas or as an integral compo- nent in certain alloys known as hydrides, but also (a recent development) in and on microscopic carbon fibers. As a cryogenic liquid fuel, it promis- es to lead to better, faster, more efficient, environmentally “clean” airplane designs. Metallic hydrogen, a laboratory curiosity so far, holds promise as an ultra-energetic fuel and as a zero-resistance electrical conductor in all sorts of electrical and electronic technologies. Since the 1930s, environment-minded scientists, academics, and energy planners (inside and outside government), industrial executives, and even some farsighted politicians have been thinking of and supporting the concept of hydrogen as an almost ideal chemical fuel, energy carrier, and storage medium.
- 22. 8 Chapter 1 Asa fuel, it doesn’t pollute. As an energy-storage medium, it would answer Fuller’s call for some method “to store [energy] when it is available for use when it is not available.” Hydrogen is not an energy “source,” a mistake still made fairly often by otherwise sophisticated, well-informed people. That is, it is not primary energy (like natural gas or crude oil), existing freely in nature. It is an ener- gy carrier—a secondary form of energy that has to be manufactured (like electricity, which doesn’t exist freely in usable form either). Hydrogen can be generated from many primary sources—an advantage in itself, since it reduces the chances of creating a hydrogen cartel similar to OPEC (which, for a while at least, was able to dictate global energy prices). Today, hydrogen is made (that is, extracted) mostly from fossil fuels. But efforts to clean up these fuels (to “decarbonize” them, in the jargon of ener- gy strategists of the 1990s) will increase. To decarbonize really means to adapt techniques long used in the chemical, petroleum, and natural gas industries to strip out the carbon or CO2 and store (“sequester”) it out of harm’s way, leaving hydrogen. In the future, hydrogen will be made from clean water and clean solar energy—and just possibly (though it seems unlikely from the anti-nuclear perspective of the late 1990s) from “cleaner” versions of nuclear energy, including fusion. Since it can be made from both nonrenewable and renew- able sources, it can be phased into the overall energy structure by whatev- er method is most convenient and least wrenching to a given country, state, region, or economy—perhaps, for example, coal gasification in the western United States and solar-based electrolysis in deserts in the Middle East or in the southwestern US. Israeli scientists are testing direct solar water split- ting, in which the sun’s concentrated heat would break up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Water could be electrolyzed with electricity pro- duced by geothermal resources in some areas, and perhaps also from the oldest form of renewable energy: hydropower. In the simplest terms, the broad outlines of a future “hydrogen economy” run something like this: Clean primary energy—probably solar energy in its many variations; possibly an advanced, environmentally more benign version of nuclear energy—would produce electricity to be used to split water into hydrogen
- 23. Why Hydrogen? 9 asfuel, with oxygen as a valuable by-product. Alternatively, heat produced by solar or nuclear power plants would be used to crack water molecules thermochemically in processes now under development. More exotic methods in which hydrogen is produced from genetically engineered microbes, from algae, and from other biological processes are likely can- didates further down the road. Hydrogen would be used as an energy-storage medium—as a gas under pressure, in hydrogen-absorbing alloys (the above-mentioned hydrides), as a cryogenic liquid, or in activated-carbon materials and carbon nanostruc- tures; but also in the form of relatively conventional fuels, such as methanol. Hydrogen would fulfill the indispensable storage function of smoothing the daily and seasonal fluctuations of solar power. Hydrogen could be burned in modified internal-combustion engines— jets, turbines, four-strokes, two-strokes, Wankels, diesels. This was the vision, conviction, and message of hydrogen’s supporters from the 1970s through the mid 1990s. Since then, with sudden and rapid advances in fuel cell technology, the emphasis has shifted dramatically toward fuel cells as the future engines of choice for transportation16 and also as clean, efficient, decentralized sources of electricity for buildings. Fuel cells running on reformed17 gasoline or methanol would produce trace amounts of carbon emissions—much less than internal-combustion engines of comparable power—plus, perhaps, small amounts of nitrogen oxides from fuel proces- sors that generate hydrogen from these carbonaceous fuels. Ultimately, fuel cells operating on pure hydrogen would be quintessentially clean, pro- ducing no nitrogen oxides and no hydrocarbons. The only stuff coming out an exhaust pipe would be harmless water vapor (steam), which would immediately return to nature’s cycle of fog, clouds, rain, snow, ground- water, rivers, lakes, and oceans. That water could then be split again for more fuel. As a gas, hydrogen can transport energy over long distances, in pipelines, as cheaply as electricity (under some circumstances, perhaps even more efficiently), driving fuel cells or other power-generating machinery at the consumer end to make electricity and water. As a chemical fuel, hydrogen can be used in a much wider range of ener- gy applications than electricity. (For example, it is difficult to envision a large commercial airliner powered by electric motors of any conceivable
- 24. 10 Chapter 1 type.)In addition, hydrogen does double duty as a chemical raw material in a myriad uses. And unlike other chemical fuels, it does not pollute. Two major goals of international hydrogen research have been to find economical ways of making the fuel and to find out how to store it effi- ciently onboard a space-constrained car, bus, or truck. During the 1970s and the 1980s, much if not most of the hydrogen-production research was aimed at splitting large volumes of water molecules. This was per- ceived as the crucial prerequisite to using hydrogen as a fuel. In the 1990s, the emphasis shifted to making hydrogen energy—not necessari- ly ultra-pure hydrogen—an industrial and commercial reality. Thus, much more attention has been paid to improving the steam reforming of natural gas. The efforts of carmakers to use methanol as a sort of hydro- gen carrier for fuel cell vehicles are another example. The latter has intrinsic ecological appeal because methanol, today produced industrially from natural gas, can also be made without major impact on the atmo- sphere (“carbon dioxide-neutral” is the catchphrase) from green plants (biomass) that, in their growth phase, absorb CO2.18 A third approach is exemplified by the US Department of Energy’s logistics-driven strategy of developing, in cooperation with major carmakers, onboard fuel proces- sors that would extract hydrogen from gasoline and other fossil fuels. The managers of the DoE’s “Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles” (PNGV) argue that this approach would spur a shift toward cleaner energy by using the existing fuel infrastructure as a transitional alternative long before an efficient, widespread hydrogen infrastructure could be put in place. In past decades, hydrogen advocates believed that a global “hydrogen economy” would begin to take shape near the end of the twentieth centu- ry, and that pure hydrogen would be the universal energy carrier by the middle of the twenty-first century. Hydrogen may not completely attain that lofty status in that time frame, but it is certain to play a much larger role—directly as a fuel for fuel cells, indirectly as an increasingly large com- ponent of carbon-based fuels such as methanol and other conventional fuels—in the decades ahead. Many see it as an increasingly important com- plement to electricity; electricity and electrolysis can break water down into
- 25. Why Hydrogen? 11 hydrogenand oxygen, and hydrogen recombined with oxygen can produce electricity and water again. Each will be used in areas where it serves best— and for a long time to come it will have to compete with, and in fact be dependent on, conventional fossil fuels as its source. What about nuclear power as a primary energy source for the production of hydrogen? The instinctive short answer from most hydrogen support- ers and environmentalists probably is that nuclear power’s days have come and gone. As one American anti-nuclear protester (Claire Greensfelder, coordinator of the Berkeley-based group Plutonium Free Future) put it in a CNN interview during the December 1997 Kyoto climate negotiations, “trying to solve climate change with nuclear power is like trying to cure the plague with a dose of cholera.” But that wasn’t always so. In fact, in the 1970s many in the hydrogen community counted on atomic energy as a source of cheap power with which to split the water molecule. As a cosmic energy dance combining the elementary force that heats the sun and the other stars and the elementary building block of all matter, the concept had an almost mystical elegance. But while a nuclear fire burning far away in the cosmos is one thing, building a nuclear reactor in a populated area is quite another—or so it seemed to the increasingly powerful anti-nuclear forces around the world. In the mid 1970s, orders for new nuclear plants began a sharp decline. And then came Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). It looked as if those two accidents would be the grave- stones of the nuclear age. The debate is not over, though. Some long-term energy thinkers, including some with very good environmental credentials, believe that a second wave of environmentally much more acceptable nuclear power stations may well be inevitable and may become a reality in the twenty-first century.19 The 1980s were a bad time for environmentalists and clean energy advo- cates. In the United States, the Reagan administration was basically apa- thetic to their long-term planetary concerns, focusing instead on military and geopolitical matters. Interest in clean, renewable energy, including hydrogen, didn’t really pick up again until the early 1990s, when worries over environmental issues were mounting. It is probably impossible to give an exact date when that interest got started again, but as good a landmark
- 26. 12 Chapter 1 asany is the publication of Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Houghton Mifflin, 1992). For the international community of hydrogen researchers and support- ers, a defining moment came in the spring of 1993, when Japan’s govern- ment announced its WE-NET (World Energy Network) project, a truly long-range project to help launch hydrogen as the world’s clean energy currency of choice. WE-NET was an outgrowth and a redefinition of Project Sunshine, a national multi-dimension alternative energy project begun in 1974. The original announcement said that Project Sunshine was to extend until 2020. It would spend the equivalent of about $2 billion on most aspects of hydrogen energy technology—a level of funding and a truly long-term planning horizon, appropriate to the momentous task of addressing a planetary issue such as global warming, that the governments of Western Europe and North America were neither capable of nor par- ticularly interested in at the time. As it has turned out, however, Japan’s annual funding for hydrogen programs so far has been more modest than was expected in the first rush of enthusiasm, both because WE-NET’s plan- ners decided to start slowly and modestly, first analyzing what was need- ed, and because Japan’s once seemingly unshakable economy suffered severe setbacks in the ensuing years. Still, WE-NET was, and still is, prob- ably the world’s first major hydrogen-centered response by a major indus- trial country to the growing concerns about global climate deterioration caused by fossil fuels. Also in the early 1990s, the threat that CO2 and other trace gases might heat up our planet excessively began to command much more public atten- tion, perhaps (as has already been noted) faster in Europe and elsewhere than in the United States. Since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (which many regarded as grandstanding but ineffectual), global warming has been reported, discussed, analyzed, dissected, argued, and fought over in countless news stories, interviews, magazines, op-ed pieces, scholarly and popular books, TV programs, and Internet postings. Whether global warming is a real threat to our world is still somewhat inconclusive. But supporters of renewable, alternative, carbon-neutral, zero-emission energy technologies say it is better to be safe than sorry. In view of the uncertainties about the expected course of the climate, they say it is foolhardy to believe there is no problem at all and to continue
- 27. Why Hydrogen? 13 withbusiness as usual. Yet the business-as-usual course is the one much preferred and vigorously lobbied for by the world’s traditional energy industries and their allies. Ross Gelbspan documented this exhaustively and persuasively in The Heat Is On (Addison-Wesley, 1997), outlining the machinations of these industries and their front men to subvert the needed shift to clean energy technologies in order to maintain the prof- itable status quo. Greenhouse gases exist in tiny fractions in the atmosphere—only parts per million and even per billion. A minuscule change in concentrations could, it is feared, trigger big, unanticipated, and possibly traumatic change in the atmosphere. The Kyoto supplement of the New York Times cited John Firor, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, as comparing the situation to that of a corporation vulnerable to a takeover, where a change in only a few shareholders’ votes can mean the difference between the corporation’s surviving and being swallowed. “It is a highly leveraged situation,” Firor said, nicely adopting Wall Street’s jargon to the uncertainties of our collective planetary future. Alan Lloyd, appointed in early 1999 as chairman of the California Air Resources Board and one of the 1990s’ pivotal personages on the American hydrogen scene, put it another way. In March 1998, addressing a Society of Automotive Engineers fuel cell workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lloyd said: “Environmental pollution will likely represent the ‘cold war’ of the next century.” If hydrogen’s benefits as a fuel are so great, the average person might rea- sonably ask, why didn’t hydrogen make significant inroads into our ener- gy systems years or even decades ago? There is no single, simple answer to that question; there is a complex array of interlocking factors. For one, there was no real use for hydrogen as long as there were ample supplies of oil and natural gas and as long as environmental worries were the concerns of a tiny minority. Hydrogen’s principal advantage over conventional fuels is that it is emission-free. That, by itself, was not thought to merit a society- wide switch to alternatives of any sort. Fossil fuels were cheap, and hydro- gen was as much as several times more expensive. Liquid hydrogen, the coldly exotic stuff that powers the Space Shuttle and experimental BMW sedans today, was a laboratory curiosity four or five decades ago.
- 28. 14 Chapter 1 Technologically,the level of development was such that producing, han- dling, and storing hydrogen was complex, difficult, and perhaps beyond the routine abilities of the routine consumer. It still is. Even today, some of the major players in the accelerating “hydrogen sweepstakes,” including DaimlerChrysler, argue that hydrogen may have to be made available in some form such as liquid methanol to be user-friendly. The technology is still not perfect, and it is still evolving. Bringing a technology to maturity takes time. As David Hart of the Imperial College Centre for Energy Policy and Technology in London has observed, “we have only recently become able to operate really well with natural gas.” Automobiles have been around for more than 100 years, yet even the best-engineered examples have their occasional glitches and break- downs. Perhaps most important, societal issues have prevented major progress. For one, replacing an entire technologically advanced energy sys- tem with something else is a huge undertaking, spanning decades. It is like trying to change the course of a supertanker with kayak paddles. According to one expert, “the energy system consists of an immense infrastructure, enormous physical and human capital, not only tanks and pipelines and motors, but also people—bankers, auto mechanics, drillers, etc. (and politi- cians, he might have added), hence it evolves slowly.”20 Phasing in hydro- gen would require “innumerable replacements”; substituting fuel cells for internal-combustion engines is only one small aspect. Perhaps the biggest impediment to change for the better is our value sys- tem—what are we willing to pay for. By and large, environmental health is not high on the list. As one American expert with experience in the hall- ways of Congress and in hands-on alternative energy research (C. E. Thomas, Vice President for Energy and Environment of Directed Tech- nologies, Inc., a consulting group based in Arlington, Virginia) summarizes the issue, hydrogen has not taken off because society does not yet place value on sustainability: In economic terms, the cost of fuels does not include the externalities of health effects due to urban air pollution, oil spills, ground water contamination, the mil- itary cost of defending oil, and, most important, the potential risks of major climate change. Put another way, society has a very high discount rate—we discount any adverse effects that occur in the future. If the price of coal, oil, and, yes, even natural gas included a full accounting of externalities, then hydrogen would look much more promising overnight. If people
- 29. Why Hydrogen? 15 hadto pay $10/gallon for gasoline or 30 cents/[kilowatt-hour] for electricity to cover fossil fuel damages to our health and environment, then suddenly hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen produced by wind, solar or biomass would look like a bargain. Investors would flock to hydrogen equipment manufacturers. People would convert their SUVs to run on clean-burning hydrogen derived from wind energy at only $2.50/gallon of gasoline equivalent. A truly sustainable energy future has two attributes: no pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, and no consumption of non-renewable resources. There are only two energy options that meet this sustainability goal: renewable hydrogen and fusion. Pessimistically, Thomas adds: Sustainability requires the intervention of governments. Governments alone have the responsibility of protecting the commons. Industry has no major incentive (other than public relations) to build a sustainable energy system. Their overriding objective is return on investment, and burning fossil fuels is very profitable. At best, they will sponsor renewable energy R&D or fuel-cell programs with an infinitesi- mally small fraction of their profits to give the appearance of preparing for a sus- tainable future. But most governments do not have the vision or leadership to look into the future and to implement policies that will provide for the welfare of future generations. Certainly, the US federal government is effectively paralyzed, barely able to pass all 13 appropriations bills, let alone tackle any significant societal prob- lem. No US leader has the vision to state the need for sustainability and to follow that vision up with bold implementation programs. Summarizing, Thomas says: . . . all the key decisions makers who could influence a transition to clean energy carriers like hydrogen have a very short time horizon: industries have to show a return on investment within a few years, and most elected officials feel that they must show results before the next election—at best six years for a Senator, four years for a President, and only two years for a Representative. He asks plaintively: Where do we find the visionary leaders who will look two or three decades into the future and imagine a better world for their children, grandchildren or even great grandchildren? David Hart is more sanguine. He believes the time is finally at hand when hydrogen will start to make major inroads because of “a confluence of drivers that all point in the same direction—towards hydrogen.” The “drivers” include the requirement for a reduction in CO2 emissions, appalling urban air quality, legislation dictating zero-emission vehicles, progress in fuel cell technology, a move toward the use of local resources for energy production, the need to store intermittent renewable energy,
- 30. 16 Chapter 1 concernsabout fossil-fuel resources, and the security of energy supplies. Hart concludes: There is only one common thread running through these, and that is hydrogen. While other energy carriers can assist in achieving some of these objectives, none of them meet all of the requirements. That is why even the major oil companies are predicting that the energy future is hydrogen. Equally, the costs are changing. Fossil fuels will not be cheaper to find, and renewables are definitely getting cheaper to use. Storage and use tech- nologies such as fuel cells are already much cheaper, though they have some way to go. However, the advantages seem to be forcing development in the right areas, and the costs of conventional fuels are going up—though not always at the pump. Health and damage costs are much higher than ever before, and people are now starting to consider them, though they may not be added to the price of a gallon of diesel. Concern that environmental issues may create new and serious global polit- ical conflicts does not yet appear to have shown up on Washington’s political event horizon or in Washington’s parochial politics, but it is discussed among political elites elsewhere. A case in point is that of a young German diplomat, Marcus Bleinroth, a cousin of Frederick Kempe, editor and asso- ciate publisher of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. In his recent book Father/Land (Putnam, 1999), a highly personal investigation of his German roots, Kempe says of Bleinroth: “As a trained economist, he is convinced the twenty-first century will bring some of the most difficult negotiations ever on ecological matters with developing countries, partic- ularly China. Bleinroth has made himself fluent not only in Chinese but also in environmental issues.” Kempe quotes his cousin as follows: If China continues to grow and develop, global CO2 emissions will double by the year 2020 because of China alone. That would be catastrophic for the world cli- mate. Ecological problems, however, are finally a question of economic policy. Without an international redistribution of wealth and a greater transfer of resources to developing countries, we have no future. That will require compli- cated negotiations whose importance and strategic weight might compare with dis- armament talks during the Cold War. Fears about global warming and CO2 buildup in the atmosphere surfaced decades ago. In 1979, for example, a British Broadcasting Corporation TV documentary about hydrogen energy quoted a meteorologist stationed in
- 31. Why Hydrogen? 17 Hawaii(home of one of the world’s most important atmospheric CO2-mon- itoring posts) as follows: “We don’t know at this point whether [CO2] will build up so that it can do damage. The oil crisis may have slowed it a little. . . . A lot of people believe we could get into trouble, irreversible trouble, in about ten years’ time.” Hydrogen contains no carbon at all. Burning it and converting it to ener- gy produces no CO2 and no greenhouse gas. Used as a fuel, it would reduce and eventually eliminate at least the man-made share of CO2 deposited in the atmosphere. Switching to hydrogen energy—even perhaps to hydrogen from fossil fuels as a stopgap measure—may help save our children’s health and perhaps their lives. The sky isn’t falling—so far. But unless something is done on an interna- tional scale, with measures that prove we can actually use our collective human intelligence and wits to guarantee our survival, the time may come when the sky will turn so gray, poisonously yellow, or red from heat and pollution that it might as well be falling. Time will undoubtedly tell.
- 32. 2 Hydrogen’s Discovery: Phlogistonand Inflammable Air Water is everything. So taught Thales of Miletos (a settlement on the west- ern coast of Asia Minor). Thales, who lived from about 624 B.C. to 545 B.C., was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, reputedly the founder of the Milesian school of philosophy. Although he apparently wrote nothing, he was regarded as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece in his time. The first Western philosopher of record, he is said to have introduced astronomy to ancient Greece. Before Thales, the universe was explained mostly in mytho- logical terms. For Thales, however, water was the primordial material and the essence of everything else in the world. The ideas of Thales, said to be traceable to Babylonian beliefs, are “easily understandable in that the observation of water turning into rigid ice and its transformation into an air-like state led to the thought that all things were derived from matter of middle characteristics.”1 Other early philosophers added air (Anaxi- menos of Miletos), fire (Heracleitos of Ephesus), and earth (Empedocles of Agrigentum) to the list of elements. In a way, Thales was not far off the mark. We know now that water con- sists of two elements: hydrogen and oxygen. Nevertheless, the preponder- ant part of water is hydrogen (in German, Wasserstoff—the stuff of water). Hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe, the simplest and lightest of the elements. Hydrogen is believed to make up about 75 percent of the mass of the universe and to account for more than 90 percent of its molecules, according to the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The Harvard astrophysicist Steven Weinberg says that 70–80 percent of the observable universe consists of hydrogen and the rest mostly of helium.2 Hydrogen was first produced, more or less unwittingly, around the end of the fifteenth century, when early European experimenters dissolved
- 33. 20 Chapter 2 metalsin acids. However, its classification and description took about 200 years. Many scientists contributed to the unlocking of hydrogen’s charac- teristics, an effort that was closely intertwined with the identification and chemical isolation of oxygen. Not until the seventeenth century was doubt cast on the notion that air was one of the basic elements. A Dutch physician and naturalist, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), was the first to suspect that there is some life- supporting ingredient in the air that is the key to breathing and combus- tion. “The chemists will find out what it actually is, how it functions, and what it does; it is still in the dark,” Boerhaave wrote in 1732. “Happy he who will discover it.”3 In England, the brilliant scientist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) also maintained that “some life-giving substance,” probably related to those needed for maintaining a flame, was part of the air. The English physician and naturalist John Mayow (1645–1679) claimed that “nitro-aerial corpuscles”4 were responsible for combustion. The realization that both oxygen and hydrogen are gases was long delayed by the phlogiston theory, an early, erroneous attempt to explain the phenomenon of combustion. Promulgated by the German physician and scientist Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) and first published in 1697, the theory held that a substance called phlogiston, which disappeared from any material during the combustion process, imparted burnability to matter. It was believed to be impossible to reduce phlogiston to a pure state. Modern chemistry tells us that to burn a material is to add a substance—oxygen— to it. Stahl held the reverse: that combustion was the release of phlogiston from the burning material. Similarly, he interpreted the reverse chemical reaction (reduction, in which oxygen is removed) as the addition of phlo- giston. Even the increase in weight during oxidation, a fairly clear indica- tion that something was added rather than removed, was explained in an altogether artificial fashion: Stahl claimed that phlogiston was so light that it was repelled by the Earth. When phlogiston was removed from a com- pound, Stahl claimed, the material gained weight because it had lost a component that had lightened it. Stahl, wrote one biographer, “did not hesitate to exclude facts if they violated his ideas: unity of thought was his ultimate goal above all factuality.”5 Meanwhile, the British preacher Joseph Priestley (1733–1864), the Swedish-German apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786), and other
- 34. Hydrogen’s Discovery 21 scientistshad discovered oxygen but had not named the element. Scheele isolated the burnable component of the atmosphere and labeled it “fire air.” Sometime between 1771 and 1772, he was the first to produce pure oxy- gen. It was Scheele’s bad fortune that his publisher put off publication of his major work, Chemical Treatise on Air and Fire, until 1777. His chief com- petitors, Priestley and Lavoisier, published their discoveries in 1774. In that year, Priestley discovered oxygen—he called it “dephlogisticated air”— when he heated mercury oxide without the presence of air. The resultant gas produced sparks and a bright flame in a glowing piece of wood kin- dling. When Priestley inhaled the gas, he “felt so light and well that he regarded it as curative and recommended it as a means of improving the quality of air in a room and as beneficial for lung diseases.” Priestley’s and Scheele’s experiments came to the attention of France’s fore- most chemist of the day, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Lavoisier, who had been studying gases for years, had noted that during burning both phosphorus and sulfur absorbed part of the surrounding air and gained weight in that process. During a visit to Paris in October 1774, Priestley told Lavoisier about his experiments with mercury oxide. Lavoisier had recently received a letter from Scheele about his discovery of this gas, which makes flames burn “lively” and which “animals can breathe.” Lavoisier repeated Priestley’s experiments. In 1772, Lavoisier had been among the first to make precise weight measurements to quantify how much “air” disappeared dur- ing combustion of phosphorus and sulfur. In an elaborate 12-day experi- ment, he had heated mercury and air in an airtight retort, producing that same gas that was so conducive to combustion and breathing. Lavoisier labeled this gas “oxygen.” He concluded one of his papers by as follows: “We shall call the change of phosphorus into an acid and in general the com- bination of any burnable body with oxygen as oxidation.” In 1789, Lavoisier, not content to refute Stahl’s phlogiston theory with experimental evidence, staged a play in Paris to destroy the theory com- pletely. A German visitor wrote: “I saw the famous M. Lavoisier hold an almost formal auto-da-fé in the Arsenal in which his wife appeared as a high priestess, Stahl as advocatus diaboli to defend phlogiston, and in which poor phlogiston was burned in the end following the accusations by oxy- gen. Do not consider this a joking invention of mine; everything is true to the letter.”6
- 35. 22 Chapter 2 Thediscovery of hydrogen as an element also proceeded by fits and starts. The Chinese reportedly doubted early on that water was an indivisible ele- ment. In the Middle Ages, the famous physician Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541) was apparently the first to produce hydrogen when he dis- solved iron in spirit of vitriol. “Air arises and breaks forth like a wind,” he is reputed to have said of his discovery, but he failed to note that hydrogen was burnable. Turquet de Mayeme (1573–1655) noted hydrogen’s burn- ability after he mixed sulfuric acid with iron—a phenomenon that was rediscovered by the French chemist and apothecary Nicolas Lemery (1645–1715), who described the burning of the gas as “fulmination vio- lente et éclatente.” Still, there was no thought that this gas was an element; rather, it was believed to be some sort of burnable sulfur. The final isolation and identification of hydrogen was roughly concur- rent with the unraveling of the secrets of oxygen in the second half of the eighteenth century, largely because the same scientists were investigating both air and water. Boyle, for instance, was researching artificial gases— “factitious air,” as he called them—and was producing hydrogen from diluted sulfuric acid and iron. Boyle did not regard these gases as signifi- cantly different from common air; he saw them as a type of air with differ- ent characteristics, a view shared by many chemists of those days.7 Henry Cavendish (1731–1810), an English nobleman, was the first to discover and describe some of hydrogen’s qualities. However, Cavendish did not name the element hydrogen; caught up in the prevailing belief in phlogiston, he thought he had discovered phlogiston in a pure state—a belief he clung to until his death. Taking off from investigations of “facti- tious air” by other scientists, Cavendish found that there were two differ- ent types: “fixed air” (CO2) and “inflammable air” (hydrogen). Describing these findings in his first scientific paper, which he presented to the Royal Society of London in 1766, Cavendish gave precise readings of specific weight and specific density for both gases. He proved that hydrogen was the same material as “inflammable air,” even though it was derived from dif- ferent metals and different acids, and that it was exceedingly light—about 1 ⁄14 as heavy as air. Hydrogen’s buoyancy was quickly put to aeronautical use. “Our colleague has put this knowledge to practical advantage in making navigation in the air safe and easy,” said a eulogizing contemporary the year after Cavendish’s
- 36. Hydrogen’s Discovery 23 death.8 Hewas referring to Jacques Alexandre César Charles (1746–1823), a French physicist who confirmed Benjamin Franklin’s electrical experiments and who became interested in aeronautics. In 1783 Charles flew a hydrogen- filled balloon to an altitude of almost 2 miles. “In fact,” said the aforemen- tioned orator, “one can say that without Cavendish’s discovery and Charles’s application of it, the Montgolfiers’ achievement would scarcely have been feasible, so dangerous and cumbersome for the aeronaut was the fire neces- sary for keeping ordinary air expanded in the montgolfières. . . .”9 Cavendish also demonstrated that mixing inflammable air (hydrogen) with air and igniting the mixture with an electric spark produced water and usually a remnant of air. In other experiments, he ignited hydrogen with pure oxygen; when the ratio was right, this yielded only water, thus defi- nitely establishing the makeup of that first “element.” Cavendish’s experi- ments involving electric sparks and hydrogen and oxygen, begun in the late 1770s, were not published until the mid 1780s, in his famous treatise Experiments on Air. Lavoisier had been trying for some time to find out the nature of “inflam- mable air,” which he also had obtained by dissolving metals in acid. On combustion of this gas he expected to obtain an acid, but that was not the result. In 1783, Lavoisier heard of Cavendish’s work through an interme- diary (Charles Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society). Lavoisier immedi- ately repeated the experiment, but his first attempt failed to impress fellow scientists with its significance. In other efforts, he took the reverse route: splitting water molecules in a heated copper tube. Iron filings in the tube turned black and brittle from the escaping oxygen, and “inflammable air”—a gas that could have come only from the water—emerged from the tube. In a landmark experiment, Lavoisier combined hydrogen and oxygen and produced 45 grams of water. (The water is still preserved in the French Academy of Science.) His classic, definitive experiments proving that hydro- gen and oxygen constitute the basic elements of water were done before a large body of scientists in February 1785. In collaboration with other exper- imenters, he published his major work, The Method of Chemical Nomen- clature, in which he labeled the “life-sustaining air” oxygen and the “inflammable air” hydrogen. In 1793, four years after the storming of the Bastille, large-scale econom- ical hydrogen production was invented under the shadow of the uprising
- 37. 24 Chapter 2 andoccasioned by the warfare of the competing factions, according to a fascinating historical account presented at the 1986 World Hydrogen Conference in Vienna.10 Jean Pottier and C. Bailleux (of France’s national utilities Gaz de France and Electricité de France, respectively) noted that Guyton de Norveau, a well-known chemist and “representative of the peo- ple” of the Comité de Salut Public (Committee for Public Salvation), sug- gested using hydrogen-filled captive balloons by the army as observation platforms. Norveau, together with Lavoisier, repeated Lavoisier’s famous 1783 experiment on a larger scale, prompting the Comité to approve the large-scale manufacture of hydrogen gas. The task was entrusted to another chemist/physicist, Jean Pierre Coutelle. Coutelle built a furnace equipped with a cast iron tube, which he filled with some 50 kilograms of iron fil- ings. Steam was piped in at one end, and hydrogen came out at the other— 170 cubic meters of the gas in the first round-the-clock trial run, which lasted 3 days. Coutelle subsequently set up shop at an army camp at Meudon, close to Paris, where he built a forerunner of what today would be called a hydrogen generator. The first action-ready generator was con- structed in early 1794 at Maubeuge. Meanwhile, a collaborator named Conté refined the design into what Pottier and Bailleux called “the army’s standard generator.” Contemporary drawings mentioned by Pottier and Bailleux depicted a furnace with seven 3-meter-long iron tubes, each 30 cen- timeters in diameter, containing 200 kilograms of iron cuttings. Water was injected via a seven-way distributor, and the generated hydrogen was washed and cooled with a rotating washer behind which the inventors had installed a dryer-scrubber. The device also included a temperature-control system—75 years before similar systems with similarly sophisticated com- ponents were devised for coal gas generators, according to Pottier and Bailleux. In the early nineteenth century, so-called hydrogen gas was used to light and heat houses, hotels, and apartments, and to supply street lighting. Usually this was not hydrogen at all but essentially carbon-containing gases derived from wood or coal. The confusion was due to the fact that all were lighter than air and were associated with the intrepid balloonists. (Pottier and Bailleux reported that in 1817 there was a “Café du Gaz Hydrogène” across from the Paris town hall, which in fact was lighted by coal gas.)
- 38. Hydrogen’s Discovery 25 Lavoisierhad been a member of the Ferme-Générale, a financial corporation that leased from the French government the right to collect certain taxes. The system was open to abuse, and some of its members were widely hated by the public. Lavoisier, who was also one of the com- missioners in charge of gunpowder production for the government, got caught up in the swirl of charges and countercharges of the French Revolution, and he became one of its victims. In 1794 all the members of the Ferme-Générale were convicted on trumped-up accusations, and Lavoisier went to the guillotine.
- 39. 3 A History ofHydrogen Energy: The Reverend Cecil, Jules Verne, and the Redoubtable Mr. Erren On November 27, 1820, the dons of Cambridge University assembled to hear a clergyman’s proposal. It is recorded in the transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society that Rev. W. Cecil, M.A., Fellow of Magdalen College and of the society, read a lengthy treatise, titled On the Application of Hydrogen Gas to Produce Moving Power in Machinery, describing an engine operated by the “Pressure of the Atmosphere upon a Vacuum Caused by Explosions of Hydrogen Gas and Atmospheric Air.” Cecil first dwelt on the disadvantages of water-driven engines (which could be used only “where water is abundant”) and steam engines (which were slow in getting underway). The utility of a steam engine was “much dimin- ished by the tedious and laborious preparation which is necessary to bring it into action.” Furthermore, “a small steam engine not exceeding the power of one man cannot be brought into action in less than half an hour: and a four-horse steam engine cannot be used [without] two hours preparation.” A hydrogen-powered engine would solve these problems, Cecil averred: “The engine in which hydrogen gas is employed to produce moving force was intended to unite two principal advantages of water and steam so as to be capable of acting in any place without the delay and labour of prepara- tion.” Rather prophetically, Cecil added: “It may be inferior, in some respects, to many engines at present employed; yet it will not be wholly use- less, if, together with its own defects, it should be found to possess advan- tages also peculiar to itself.” According to Cecil’s explanations, the general principle was that hydro- gen, when mixed with air and ignited, would produce a large partial vac- uum. The air rushing back into the vacuum after the explosion could be harnessed as a moving force “nearly in the same manner as in the common
- 40. 28 Chapter 3 steamengine: the difference consists chiefly in the manner of forming the vacuum. . . . If two and a half measures by bulk of atmospheric air be mixed with one measure of hydrogen, and a flame be applied, the mixed gas will expand into a space rather greater than three times its original bulk.”1 Cecil went on to discuss the workings of his engine in considerable detail. The Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society did not record whether Cecil actually ever built such an engine. In any event, Cecil’s pro- posal was the first known instance of an early technologist’s attempting to put the special qualities of hydrogen to work. Cecil’s suggestion came only 20 years after another fundamental discov- ery: electrolysis (breaking water down into hydrogen and oxygen by pass- ing an electrical current through it). That discovery had been made by two English scientists, William Nicholson and Sir Anthony Carlisle, 6 years after Lavoisier’s execution and just a few weeks after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta built his first electric cell. In the next 150 years or so, hydrogen’s unique properties were discussed with increasing frequency by scientists and by writers of early science fic- tion. Probably the most famous example, well known in the world’s hydro- gen community, is Jules Verne’s uncannily prescient description in one of his last books of how hydrogen would become the world’s chief fuel. The Mysterious Island was written in 1874, just about 100 years before research into hydrogen began in earnest. In one remarkable passage, Verne describes the discussions of five Americans during the Civil War—Northerners marooned on a mysterious island 7000 miles from their starting point of Richmond, Virginia, after a storm-tossed escape by balloon from a Confederate camp.2 The five are the “learned, clear-headed and practical” engineer Cyrus Harding, his servant Neb, the “indomitable, intrepid” reporter Gideon Spillett, a sailor named Pencroft, and young Herbert Brown (an orphan and Pencroft’s protégé). The five are discussing the future of the Union, and Spillett raises the specter of what would happen to com- merce and industry if the coal supply were to run out: “Without coal there would be no machinery, and without machinery there would be no railways, no steamers, no manufactories, nothing of that which is indis- pensable to modern civilization!” “But what will they find?” asked Pencroft. “Can you guess, captain?” “Nearly, my friend.” “And what will they burn instead of coal?”
- 41. A History ofHydrogen Energy 29 “Water,” replied Harding. “Water!” cried Pencroft, “water as fuel for steamers and engines! Water to heat water!” “Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements,” replied Cyrus Harding, “and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a power- ful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some inexplicable laws, appear to agree and become complete at the same time. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which con- stitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steam- ers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.” “I should like to see that,” observed the sailor. “You were born too soon, Pencroft,” returned Neb, who only took part in the discussion with these words. Of course Verne did not explain what the primary energy source would be to make the electricity needed to decompose water. But in the overall context of nineteenth-century scientific knowledge, Verne’s foresight is remarkable. Hydrogen also figures in a juvenile adventure novel that seems to have been published shortly after 1900 in England. A British scientist interested in hydrogen, W. Hastings Campbell, referred to the book briefly when introducing a hydrogen paper read in March 1933 at Britain’s Institute of Fuel. Campbell told his distinguished audience that The Iron Pirate by Max Pemberton had made a great impression on him when he was a boy. Pemberton’s potboiler described the adventures of a gang of international crooks who owned a battleship that attained terrific speeds due to the use of hydrogen engines—“another instance of the very annoying persistence with which art always seemed to anticipate discoveries,” said the account of that meeting in the Journal of the Institute of Fuel. The 1920s and the 1930s witnessed a flowering of interest, especially in Germany and England but also in Canada, in hydrogen as fuel. The evolu- tion of Canada’s Electrolyser Corporation Ltd.—today one of the world’s leading makers of electrolytic hydrogen plants (it has delivered some 900 systems to 91 countries)—began early in the twentieth century. Around
- 42. 30 Chapter 3 1905,Alexander T. Stuart, the father of the current chairman, Alexander K. “Sandy” Stuart, began to take an interest in hydrogen energy while studying chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Toronto. Young Stuart and one of his professors, Lash Miller (a former student of the fuel cell’s inventor, William Grove), had noted that most of Canada was import- ing almost all its fuel except for wood. “At the same time, Niagara Falls’ hydroelectric generating capacity was being utilized at a capacity factor of only 30–40 percent,” Sandy Stuart related in 1996 in the first of a series of lectures bearing his name at the University of Sherbrooke. “The question was, how could such surplus capacity be converted to fuel energy? The obvious answer was electrolysis of water. This led to our first experimen- tal electrolysers.” As it turned out, Stuart electrolysers came into commercial use not to make hydrogen fuel but to make hydrogen and oxygen for the purpose of cutting steel. The first electrolysers were shipped in 1920 to what was then the Stuart Oxygen Company in San Francisco. Four years later, the Canadian government began supporting the use of Stuart electrolysis cells to make fertilizer in British Columbia. From the mid 1920s on, the elder Stuart also developed concepts for the Ontario Hydro utility to integrate hydroelectric energy with coal, coke, or other carbon sources to make “town gas” (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) for domestic heating, to produce a range of synthetic chemicals (including methanol), and to directly reduce iron ore to iron. In 1934 Ontario Hydro built a 400-kilowatt electrolysis plant, and there were plans to heat buildings with hydrogen and even to run test vehicles on it, but that project was terminated after 2 years. All these efforts ended with changes in Ontario’s governments, but mostly with Canada’s entry into World War II and with the arrival of natural gas on Canada’s energy scene after the war. On the conceptual level, one of the most important figures in those early years was John Burden Sanderson Haldane, a physiologist turned geneticist, longtime editorial board director of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker, and in the 1960s an émigré to India and a guru to that country’s growing science establishment. In 1923, when he was only in his late twen- ties, Haldane gave a famous lecture at Cambridge University in which he said that hydrogen—derived from wind power via electrolysis, liquefied, and stored—would be the fuel of the future.3 In a paper read to the univer-
- 43. A History ofHydrogen Energy 31 sity’s “Heretics” society, Haldane said: “Liquid hydrogen is weight for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. On the other hand, it is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one-third the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use in aeroplanes where weight is more important than bulk.” In the same paper, Haldane prophesied that 400 years in the future Britain’s energy needs would be met by “rows of metal- lic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains.” “At suitable distances,” he con- tinued, “there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gases will be liquefied and stored in vast vac- uum jacketed reservoirs probably sunk into the ground. . . . In times of calm the gases will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more, or more probably in oxidation cells.”4 “These huge reservoirs of liquefied gases,” Haldane continued, “will enable wind energy to be stored so that it can be expended for industry, trans- portation, heating, and lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable but the running expenses less than those of our present sys- tem. Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced.” Also in Britain, Harry Ricardo (one of the pioneers in the development of the internal-combustion engine) and A. F. Burstall were among the first to investigate the burn characteristics of hydrogen, and W. Hastings Campbell, the German Rudolf Erren (who spent most of the 1930s in England), and R. O. King (then with the British Air Ministry Laboratory) worked on hydrogen as a fuel. In Germany, Franz Lawaczeck, Rudolf Erren, Kurt Weil, J. E. Noeggerath, Hermann Honnef, and other engineers and inventors were researching hydrogen and advocating its use as a fuel. Some of these men admitted to being influenced by Jules Verne. Lawaczeck, a turbine designer, became interested in hydrogen as early as 1907. By 1919 he was sketching concepts for hydrogen-powered cars, trains, and engines. Some his inspiration came from contact with his cousin J. E. Noeggerath, an American of German birth who worked in Schenectady, New York, and later in Berlin. Lawaczeck
- 44. 32 Chapter 3 andNoeggerath collaborated in developing an efficient pressurized elec- trolyzer. In the 1930s, Lawaczeck was apparently the first to suggest that energy could be transported via hydrogen-carrying pipelines. Honnef dreamed of huge steel towers, up to 750 feet in height, each with as many as five 480-foot windmills producing up to 100 megawatts each, which would be stored in the form of hydrogen; however, his concepts were never developed beyond the construction of a 50-meter prototype tower. In Italy, a 1937 article in the journal Rivista Aeronautica mentioned in passing the experimental efforts of the engineer A. Beldimano to adapt liq- uid hydrogen for use in aircraft engines. In the United States, Igor Sikorski mentioned hydrogen’s potential as an aviation fuel in a 1938 lecture before the American Institution of Electrical Engineers in Schenectady. After predicting the development of a new type of aircraft engine that would permit planes to fly at speeds of 500–600 miles per hour and altitudes of 30,000–50,000 feet, Sikorski said: “If a method of safe and economical production and handling of liquid hydrogen were developed for use as a fuel, this would result in a great change, particularly with respect to long-range aircraft. This would make possible the circum- navigation of the earth along the equator in a non-stop flight without refueling. It would also enable an increase in the performance of nearly every type of aircraft.” One of the earliest and most fascinating efforts involving hydrogen was its use as not only as a buoyancy medium but also a booster fuel for the Zeppelins, the huge German dirigibles that provided leisurely and elegant transatlantic air travel in the 1920s and the 1930s. Normally, these big sky- ships carried large amounts of liquid fuel (usually a benzol-gasoline mix- ture) that was used to drive 12- or 16-cylinder engines, which typically propelled a Zeppelin at an altitude of 2400 feet and a speed of not quite 75 miles per hour—provided there was no headwind. Fuel economy was one problem for the Zeppelin; another was how to reduce buoyancy as fuel con- sumption reduced a ship’s weight. According to a 1929 report by the Zeppelin Company, the rule of thumb was that a Zeppelin’s captain had to blow off about a cubic meter of hydrogen for every kilogram of fuel burned up during a nonstop cruise, which typically lasted 3–5 days. Better fuel economy could be achieved by certain engine modifications, such as increas- ing the compression ratios, but the buoyancy problem persisted. The solu-
- 45. A History ofHydrogen Energy 33 tion was as simple as it was ingenious: Why not burn the blow-off hydro- gen as extra fuel together with the main fuel supply? Zeppelin’s engineers found that this was feasible. The addition of between 5 percent and 30 per- cent hydrogen to the main fuel at compression ratios as high as 10:1 pro- duced substantially higher power output—as much as 325 brake horsepower, in comparison with the normal 269 bhp. It also achieved sub- stantial energy savings. The test-bed findings were confirmed by an 82-hour, 6000-mile cruise over the Mediterranean Sea in 1928, during which a fuel reduction of about 14 percent was achieved. Experimenting along the same lines with diesel engines, the Royal Airship Works in Great Britain found that “it was possible to replace almost the whole of the fuel oil by hydro- gen without loss of power.” On a typical England-to-Egypt trip, an airship would have saved almost 5 tons of fuel oil, according to these experiments. However, neither the British nor the Germans appear to have applied these findings to routine flights to a significant extent. One of the best-known hydrogen advocates of the 1930s and the 1940s was Rudolf Erren, a brilliant, visionary German engineer who had trucks, buses, submarines, and internal-combustion engines of all kinds running on hydrogen and other fuels, conventional and unconventional. Erren engines were powering vehicles in sizable numbers in Germany and in England. A flinty engineer from Upper Silesia (now part of Poland) with a pronounced disdain for academics and theoreticians, Erren formed his first company, Erren Motoren GmbH Spezialversuchsanstalt, in a grimy indus- trial section of northern Berlin in 1928. Two years earlier, he had begun to investigate hydrogen and its properties, pursuing an interest that went back to his childhood. When I visited him in Hannover in 1976, he told me that he, like W. Hastings Campbell, had read Pemberton’s Iron Pirate as a child. As he recalled the book, it “described a pirate group that had kidnapped a German professor who had developed a hydrogen engine which made the pirates’ ship much faster than other ships.” Erren had experimented with hydrogen while attending high school in Katowice. His interest in hydrogen carried over as a hobby through his uni- versity years in Berlin, in Göttingen, and in England. “During summer vaca- tions when other students went on vacation,” he recalled, “I worked in engine workshops to learn something because I wanted to know these things in practice. Theory alone doesn’t work.” In 1928 he won his first
- 46. 34 Chapter 3 patents,one of them for a hydrogen engine. Erren presented his data at the 1930 World Power Conference in Berlin. According to him, the terms “Erren Engine,” “Erren Process,” and “Erren System,” now largely for- gotten, were then officially recognized to differentiate his combustion process from any other. In 1930, at the invitation of several British firms, Erren went to London to found the Erren Engineering Company. There he continued his work on developing advanced combustion processes that would permit hydrogen to be used alone as a fuel or as a “clean-up” additive to normal fuels. The tech- nique of “Errenizing” any type of internal-combustion process was appar- ently relatively well known in the 1930s, at least among automotive engineers. Essentially it meant injecting slightly pressurized hydrogen into air or oxygen inside the combustion chamber, rather than feeding the air- fuel mixture via a carburetor into the engine, a method that commonly resulted in violent backfiring. Erren’s patented system required special fuel injection and control mechanisms but left the other engine components intact. With hydrogen used as a booster, the Erren system eliminated back- firing and achieved much better combustion of hydrocarbons with higher output and lower specific fuel consumption. Kurt Weil, a German-born engineer who was Erren’s technical director in the 1930s and who in the 1970s was a professor emeritus at the Stevens Institute of Technology, said that the idea of not permitting hydrogen to come into contact with the oxygen of the air before entering the combus- tion chamber was representative of Erren’s “genius.” Weil, who had been in the forefront of promoting hydrogen in the 1970s, explained: “When the valves were closed we injected hydrogen, which had a supercharging effect.” This engineering approach was revived in the early 1970s. In the mid 1930s, Erren and Weil proposed to the Nazi government— which by then was concerned with economic self-sufficiency and with reducing Germany’s dependence on imported liquid fuels—that most inter- nal-combustion engines be converted to the Erren multi-fuel system. In addition to using carbon-based fuels produced from Germany’s plentiful coal by the Fischer-Tropsch and Bergius systems,5 it would be possible to use hydrogen produced with off-peak power from Germany’s closely knit grid of electric power stations, which normally ran at only about 50 percent of capacity. By 1938, when Weil fled Germany and went to the United States,
- 47. A History ofHydrogen Energy 35 about 100 trucks were running between Berlin and the industrial Ruhr area in the west—a distance of some 350 miles—switching from one fuel to another along the way (“with the truck fully loaded, on a steep incline with a switch in the cockpit,” Weil recalled). In an late-1970s interview, Weil recalled that the engine adaptation was not especially difficult, but it was easier for some engine types than for others: “For a six-in-line it was much easier than for a V-type engine.” In regard to the conversion costs, he esti- mated that “under [late 1970s] conditions the cost would have been a few hundred dollars per engine.” Erren believed that more than 1000 cars and trucks were converted to his multi-fuel system; however, one British report put the total at between 3000 and 4000. The German railway system tested a hydrogen-powered self-propelled rail car in suburban operations out of Dresden. The train was powered by a 75-horsepower six-cylinder gasoline engine. It was “much worn” and running harshly, according to a 1932 report by a Reichsbahn maintenance depot; however, when primed with hydrogen the engine developed up to 83 bhp—an increase of 9.7 percent. Powered by pure hydrogen, the engine produced 77 bhp. Errenization was catching on in England, too. Erren converted Carter- Paterson delivery vans and buses with Beardmore diesel engines to run on hydrogen for better fuel consumption and less pollution. Erren told of an incident involving an Australian commission that spent 2 or 3 weeks in his shops checking his claims and his engines. Eventually, the commission wanted to conduct an open-road speed test with a bus. The site chosen was a hill outside London. According to Erren: The police there were always on the lookout because the gentlemen from a nearby club drove faster than the thirty miles per hour speed limit. Well, we wanted an official confirmation. . . . The police were pretty well hidden, but we saw them anyway, switched to hydrogen and instead of driving at 30 miles we did 50 or 52 miles up the hill. The police stopped us, told us that they had timed us with a stop watch and we had exceeded the speed limit, which we had to admit. We paid our fine but thanked them profusely, which in turn astonished them until we explained that we now had official proof of our claims. In 1935, Erren made headlines in the popular British press with news that warmed the hearts of Jules Verne fans. “Secret Fuel to Smash Air Record” headlined the Sunday Despatch of March 24, 1935, subheading the one-column story “Non-Stop Round the World with Liquid Hydrogen.”
- 48. 36 Chapter 3 Thestory reported that engines were being perfected “in secret” in London that would “enable aeroplanes to smash the distance record; make long flights in the stratosphere; and fly non-stop around the world without refuelling.” The project never went beyond the concept stage, however. Four decades later, Erren recalled that the prototype plane, a Rolls-Royce- powered De Havilland, was “ready to go,” but that the idea fell by the wayside because of disputes as to whether the attempt would be made from Britain or from Germany. Two other Erren inventions, the “oxy-hydrogen” submarine and the trackless torpedo, attracted some attention in Britain in 1942. The track- less torpedo, fueled by oxygen and hydrogen, was beguilingly simple in con- cept. Erren started from the realization that torpedoes leave “tracks” of exhaust-gas bubbles. Because hydrogen and oxygen recombined into water vapor, condensing back into the seawater, no bubbles were formed, and thus there was no giveaway trail. And the oxygen-hydrogen-burning sub- marine eliminated almost entirely the need for big batteries and electric motors for underwater running. Instead, during diesel-powered surface runs the sub’s engine also drove an electrolyzer, generating oxygen and hydrogen, which were then stored under pressure. When diving and run- ning submerged, the same diesel engine burned the oxygen and hydrogen without any exhaust bubbles. Weight savings from the elimination of bat- teries and electric motors translated into the ability to carry more fuel and extended the sub’s range—by one report, to as much as 15,000 miles. The generated oxygen was a valuable reserve for the crew in an emergency, and the pressurized hydrogen could be used to blow out tanks for surfacing if other air supplies were exhausted. Erren was repatriated to Germany in 1945 after the end of World War II. All his personal and business possessions in England had been confiscated during the war. The papers of his company, Deutsche Erren Studien GmbH, in Berlin, had been lost in Allied bombing. After moving to Hannover, where he helped set up a trade association of German plastics manufactur- ers, he worked for several years as an independent consulting engineer spe- cializing in pollution control, industrial combustion processes, and related areas. None of his engines seem to have survived the war years.6 During World War II, interest in hydrogen as a fuel picked up in some parts of the world where fuel supplies were threatened or cut off because of
- 49. A History ofHydrogen Energy 37 hostilities. In Australia, industrial use of hydrogen was considered early in the war because of wartime demands for fuel oil and because the oil fields in Borneo had been lost to the Japanese. Queensland’s government became attracted to hydrogen after the coordinator for public works, J. F. Kemp, learned about hydrogen progress in England and Germany on a 1938 visit to Britain. After Kemp returned, he ordered some studies of his own. However, it was not until the last year of the war that another Australian engineer, J. S. Just, completed a report dealing with hydrogen production via off-peak electricity in Brisbane. The hydrogen was to be used mostly for trucks. The Queensland government authorized construction of an exper- imental high-pressure plant in Brisbane, but not much was heard about it. The Allied victory in 1945 and the return of cheap oil and gasoline brought hydrogen progress to a halt.7 Interest in hydrogen picked up again around 1950 in the context of fuel cells. Francis T. Bacon, a British scientist, developed the first practical hydrogen-air fuel cell (a development that was to be of great significance later in the American space program). Also in the 1950s, a German physicist was becoming interested in hydro- gen as an energy-storage medium. Eduard Justi, a distinguished German electrochemist at the University of Braunschweig, had been working for years on the development of new, more efficient fuel cells. In a 1962 mono- graph titled Cold Combustion—Fuel Cells (Franz Steiner), Eduard Justi and a co-worker, August Winsel, discussed the prospects of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, storing these gases separately, and recombining them in fuel cells. Justi later amplified his ideas in the 1965 book Energie- umwandlung in Festkörpern (Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht), in which he pro- posed using solar energy to produce hydrogen along the Mediterranean and piping it to Germany and other countries. In 1962, John Bockris, an Australian electrochemist, proposed a plan to supply US cities with solar-derived energy via hydrogen. Bockris (who in 1975 published Energy: The Solar-Hydrogen Alternative (Halstead), the first detailed overview of a future solar-hydrogen economy), says that the term “hydrogen economy”—which has multiple economic and environ- mental meanings—was coined in 1970 during a discussion at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Bockris, at the time a con- sultant to GM, was discussing prospects for other fuels to replace gasoline
- 50. 38 Chapter 3 andthereby help to eliminate pollution, a subject that was then beginning to creep into the public consciousness. The group concluded that “hydro- gen would be the fuel for all types of transports,” Bockris related in his book. GM did some early experimental work on hydrogen but apparently did not give it the attention—at least, not the degree of publicity—that Daimler-Benz gave it 6 years later. In 1970 an Italian scientist, Cesare Marchetti, delivered a lecture at Cornell University in which he outlined the case for hydrogen in lay terms. Marchetti, at the time head of the Materials Division of the European Atomic Energy Community’s Research Center at Ispra in northern Italy and one of Europe’s most persuasive hydrogen advocates, had been calling for the use of hydrogen in Europe and the United States since the late 1960s.8 Hydrogen, produced from water and heat from a nuclear reactor, could free humanity from dependence on dwindling fossil fuels, Marchetti said at Cornell. “The potential for hydrogen is very great, and a smell of revolu- tion lingers in the air,” he told the audience. Marchetti, who has the gift of putting complex relationships into simple terms, stated the hydrogen propo- sition as follows: The reason why the studies of industrial utilization of nuclear energy have con- centrated on the production of electricity is that a substantial 20 to 25 percent of the energetic input in a developed society is used in the form of electricity and that its production is lumped in large blocks where reactors can show their economies. But almost nothing has been done to penetrate the remaining three quarters of the energy input: food, fuel, ore processing and miscellaneous uses where society is geared to using a wide variety of chemicals. The problem is to find a flexible intermediate, produced in large blocks in which nuclear heat can be stored as chemical energy and distributed through the usual channels. . . . In my opinion, the best candidate to perform such a task is hydrogen: on one side hydrogen can be obtained from water, a cheap and plentiful raw material. On the other side, hydrogen can be used directly and very efficiently for: 1. ore reduction, as an alternative to coal, 2. home and industrial heat as an alternative to oil, 3. in chemical synthesis, in particular (for making) ammonia and methanol, 4. producing liquid fuels, such as methanol, for transport; ammonia and hydro- gen themselves have potential in the future, 5. producing food, particularly proteins, via yeasts such as hydrogenomonas. Points one to four cover most of the 80 percent of the energy input, excluding electricity.
- 51. A History ofHydrogen Energy 39 Point five can solve once and for all the problem of feeding a growing world population. A similar message was spread in lectures, papers, and articles in the United States by a few scientists and engineers who had come to the same general conclusion in their respective disciplines. Derek Gregory, a British scientist working at the Chicago-based Institute of Gas Technology, had become interested in hydrogen as a clean substitute for natural gas. Gregory wrote a seminal article on the hydrogen economy for the January 1973 issue of Scientific American. He was strongly supported in his work by Henry Linden, founding president of the IGT and éminence grise behind many of the early hydrogen-related R&D efforts in the United States.9 Bob Witcofski, a young researcher working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had become aware of the exciting prospects of liq- uid hydrogen as a fuel for aircraft, including nonpolluting supersonic and hypersonic airplanes. Lawrence Jones, a particle physicist at the University of Michigan, had become interested in hydrogen both as an offshoot of his scientific work and because of the rising concern over automotive pollu- tion. Larry Williams, a cryogenic specialist at the Martin-Marietta Corpora- tion, had recognized the usefulness of liquid hydrogen as a fuel. Bill Escher, a former rocket engineer, had come to appreciate hydrogen’s potential as a fuel through his involvement with the US space program. In the early 1970s, while General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler by and large ignored hydrogen’s potential as a nonpolluting car fuel (publicly, at least), it captured the attention and the enthusiasm of many American aca- demics, engineers, and automotive enthusiasts. Beginning roughly with the work of the Perris Smogless Automobile Association in California, and with a hydrogen-powered car built by the University of California at Los Angeles that placed second in the 1972 Urban Vehicle Design Competition spon- sored by General Motors and other companies, efforts to utilize hydrogen in cars and trucks sprang up in the United States, in Germany, in Japan, in France, and even in the Soviet Union. The US military was also looking into hydrogen as a fuel. An Air Force program begun in 1943 at Ohio State University eventually culminated in the use of combined liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as rocket fuel in the US space program. In 1956, Lockheed began secret work on a long-distance high-altitude reconnaissance plane, a forerunner of the U-2. In a parallel
- 52. 40 Chapter 3 program,the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA, was gathering actual engine flight data in a B-57 twin-jet bomber operating partially on liquid hydrogen. The Navy had been investigating hydrogen as a fuel for a variety of ships, and hydrogen plus oxygen as a fuel for a deep-diving rescue vessel that would be powered by fuel cells. One rev- olutionary idea tossed around in the mid 1950s was to use energy from nuclear reactors powering aircraft carriers to make liquid-hydrogen fuel for carrier-based airplanes. One significant military effort of the 1960s was the Army’s Nuclear- Powered Energy Depot, “an early experiment in the hydrogen economy,” according to a paper presented in 1974 at a Miami conference dubbed The Hydrogen Economy Miami Energy (THEME). The idea was to develop a portable nuclear reactor that could split water into hydrogen and oxygen in the field, making hydrogen available as a chemical fuel for battle tanks and trucks. It was an outgrowth of the “recognition that the dominant problem in the combat theater is the transportation of petroleum,” said John O’Sullivan, then an Army chemical engineer and in the 1990s the man- ager of a fuel cell program at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. The idea was dropped because of efficiency problems and because such a portable nuclear hydrogen plant was a “very vulnerable item” that “needed a lot of people” and lost its main advantage—mobility—if it had to be buried or otherwise protected from attack. The enthusiasm for hydrogen in the early 1970s was a by-product of growing environmental awareness (especially concern over automotive pollution and the mounting conviction that alternative nonpolluting trans- portation systems and energy forms were needed) and of the awareness that, with the main sources of petroleum thousands of miles away in the politically volatile Middle East, energy sources closer to home should be looked at. The oil shock of 1973 announced that the age of cheap, convenient liquid fuel would be coming to an end at some point and that substitutes would have to be found. At first blush, hydrogen seemed to provide an easy, fairly fast answer. Produced via electrolysis “cheaply” from “safe, clean” nuclear reactors (so went the conventional wisdom then), hydrogen could be sub- stituted readily for fossil fuels. Thus, environmental concern and the desire for energy security combined to speed up the investigation of hydrogen.
- 53. A History ofHydrogen Energy 41 The reasons for the renewed interest in hydrogen were, of course, differ- ent for different people, but the idea of a “totally benign energy metabo- lism,” as Lawrence Jones of the University of Michigan once put it, was certainly a large factor. Hydrogen, Jones observed, had “a kind of gut appeal to people.” Jones, a particle physicist, put it more formally in a 1971 article in Science magazine, writing that the possibility of using liquid hydrogen as an ultimate replacement for fossil fuels had occurred to him in a casual conversation “related to the logistics and use of large quantities of liquid hydrogen in a cosmic-ray experiment.” “In remarking on the drop in price of liquid hydrogen in recent years,” Jones recalled, “I noted that the cost per liter was about the same as that of gasoline.” As he began reading up on hydrogen in the available literature, he reports, “I recognized that . . . it had an inherent self-consistency and appeal which warranted broader discussion. The conclusion I have reached is that the use of liquid hydrogen as a fuel not only is feasible technically and economically, but also is desir- able and may even be inevitable.” In another article, published 2 years later in the Journal of Environ- mental Planning and Pollution Control, Jones said: “It soon became appar- ent that a surprising number of widely separated individuals and groups had very similar thoughts.” That phenomenon broke into the open in 1972 at a spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, where Cesare Marchetti and a co-worker, Gianfranco De Beni, presented their first thermochemical water-splitting process, and again at the Seventh Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference in San Diego that autumn. In its September 22, 1972 issue, Business Week ran a multi-page article on international hydrogen developments.10 (Its effect on the scientists assem- bled in San Diego was apparently quite riveting. Marchetti later wrote, in a personal note, that “out of 650 participants about 500 were concentrated in the [session] on H2.”) Fortune carried a longer story 2 months later, and that was followed by articles in Readers Digest, Time, Popular Science, and other periodicals. Hydrogen researchers’ recognition that they were not alone reached a climax of sorts on May 6, 1972—the 35th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster—with the creation of the informal H2indenburg Society, a group dedicated “to the safe utilization of hydrogen as a fuel.” Bill Escher, whose
- 54. 42 Chapter 3 nameappeared on many of the hydrogen papers published in the United States in the 1970s, was the H2indenburg Society’s secretary.11 In March 1973, THEME—the first major international hydrogen con- ference—was held in Miami Beach. At that conference, the groundwork was laid for setting up the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, which has been sponsoring biannual World Hydrogen Energy Conferences ever since. T. Nejat Veziroglu, president of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, recounted the following in 1994 in his opening remarks at the conference in Cocoa Beach: “In the afternoon of the second day a small group, later to be named ‘Hydrogen Romantics,’ got together: Cesare Marchetti, John Bockris, Tokio Ohta, Bill Van Vorst, Anibal Martinez, Walter Seifritz, Hussein Abdel-Aal, Bill Escher, the late Kurt Weil, myself and a few other enthusiasts. . . .”12 After a “passionate, yet deliberate debate,” it was agreed “that the Hydrogen Energy System was an idea whose time had arrived.” “It was a permanent solution to the depletion of con- ventional fuels, it was the permanent solution to the global environmental problem,” Veziroglu said. “It was Anibal Martinez of Venezuela—inciden- tally, one who took part in setting up the petroleum cartel OPEC—who urged the founding of a society dedicated to crusade for the establishment of the inevitable and the universal energy system,” Veziroglu added. “The rest is history.” Officially chartered in the autumn of 1974, the association had about 2000 members by 1979. In 1976 it began publishing a quarterly, which soon turned into a bimonthly and which is now a monthly peer- reviewed scholarly journal, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. Governments and international organizations were beginning to take notice. In the United States, where hydrogen research funding did not pass the million-dollar-per-year mark until the mid 1970s, $24 million was bud- geted for hydrogen research in fiscal 1978—far too little, in the opinion of hydrogen advocates, who compared it to the $200 million the recently cre- ated Department of Energy13 had allocated that same year for research on how to convert coal into natural gas. Both the disparity and the sentiment have changed little: after declining to slightly more than $1 million in the early 1990s, the DoE’s hydrogen program budget had laboriously climbed back up to $24 million level by 1999. West Germany also began funding hydrogen programs on a small scale, earmarking $2 million between 1978 and 1980. Beginning in 1976, the
- 55. Random documents withunrelated content Scribd suggests to you:
- 56. something in thatquarter. He then landed, on the 31st of July, a body of troops near the mouth of the Montmorency, which there falls three hundred feet into the St. Lawrence. He had discovered a ford at some distance up the river, and dispatched Brigadier Townshend to cross there and attack Montcalm in flank, whilst he himself, by means of the ships and their boats, gained the beach and attacked in front. The Centurion man-of-war was placed to engage a battery which swept the place of landing, and then the troops were conveyed in boats, which drew little water, towards the shore. Some of these, however, got entangled amongst rocks, and created a delay in getting them off. By this time the French were hurrying down towards the landing-place with their artillery, and began to fire murderously from the banks above upon them. Wolfe, seeing that Townshend would cross the ford before they were ready to co- operate, sent an officer to recall him. At this time, the Grenadiers having reached the beach, rushed forward upon the entrenchments before the rest of the troops could be got out of the boats to support them. They were met by such a destructive fire that they were compelled to fall back with much slaughter. By this time night was setting in, attended by a storm, the roaring of which, mingling with the roar of the mighty St. Lawrence as the tide fell, seemed to warn them to recover their camp. The word was given to re-cross the river, and they made good their retreat without the French attempting to pursue them, though the Indians lurked in the rear to scalp such of the dead and such of the wounded as could not be brought off. Wolfe then held a council with his two next in command, the Brigadiers Monckton and Townshend, and they resolved, as a desperate attempt, to move up the river, and thus endeavour to draw Montcalm from his unassailable position. Accordingly, leaving detachments to defend the Isle of Orleans and Point Levi, the rest of the army ascended the St. Lawrence for some miles, and pitched their camp on the right bank. To attract still more attention, Admiral Holmes was ordered to put his vessels in active motion for some days, as if seeking a landing-place higher up the river. This
- 57. stratagem, however, producedno other result than that of Montcalm sending a detachment of one thousand five hundred men to watch their proceedings. He himself maintained his old ground. Completely disheartened by this result, Wolfe for a moment felt despair of his object, and in that despairing mood, on the 9th of September, he wrote to Pitt. He said that, "to the uncommon strength of the country, the enemy had added, for the defence of the river, a great number of floating batteries and boats; that the vigilance of the Indians had prevented their effecting anything by surprise; that he had had a choice of difficulties, and felt at a loss how to proceed; and he concluded with the remark, that his constitution was entirely ruined, without the consolation of having done any considerable service to the State, or without any prospect of it." But the despondency of Wolfe was but for a moment. Suddenly a new idea—an inspiration, it seemed—burst upon him: he would scale the Heights of Abraham—the point where no mortal ascent was dreamed of, and which therefore was less defended, except by nature, than the rest of the vicinity of the city. The ships were immediately ordered to make a feint, under Admiral Saunders, opposite Montcalm's camp at Beauport, and those under Holmes, at a point higher up the river. Attention being thus drawn from himself, on the night of the 12th of September, when it was pitch dark and the tide flowing, he put across the river to a small inlet about two miles above Quebec, which ever since bears the name of Wolfe's Cove. They succeeded in landing unobserved by any of the sentinels posted along the shore, where they had to wait for the boats fetching over the second detachment, there not being boats enough. Before this arrived, they began to climb the rocks by a narrow track, so steep and rugged that they could only ascend by clinging to the bushes and projecting crags. Directly above their heads was a watch-post of a captain and a hundred and fifty men. There, as they drew near the summit, Colonel Howe—a brother of Lord Howe, who
- 58. fell at Ticonderoga—leadingthe van, the watch became aware of a noise, and fired down the rocks, directed by the sound. The English soldiers imprudently returned the volley upwards, instead of reserving it until they had gained the ascent. They continued their scramble up, however, with redoubled ardour, and the French, on their sudden appearance, panic-struck, fled. The second detachment soon followed them, and the whole little army stood on the heights above the town before the break of day. When Montcalm was informed of this wonderful feat, he thought it merely some new feint to draw him from his lines; but when he had ascertained with his own eyes the truth, he said, "I see them, indeed, where they ought not to be; but, as we must fight, I shall crush them." He immediately led his troops over the bridge of the St. Charles, and up to the eminence above the town. There he found the English already advanced in order of battle to within cannon-shot of Quebec. Wolfe had drawn them up with much judgment. His left wing was formed in what military men call en potence—that is, facing two ways, so as to guard against being outflanked. In this wing, too, he had placed a regiment of Highlanders, one of those which Pitt had formed, and which had already shown its bravery. His right, extending towards the St. Lawrence, had in the van the Grenadiers who had distinguished themselves at the taking of Louisburg, supported by a regiment of the line. Wolfe had taken his post on this wing. The sailors had managed to drag up one cannon, and they had seized four other small guns at the battery they had passed; that was all their artillery. But in this respect Montcalm was no better off, for in his haste he had only brought along with him two guns. He had ordered a cloud of Indians to hover on the left of the English, and had lined the thickets and copses with one thousand five hundred of his best marksmen. These concealed skirmishers fired on the advancing pickets of the English with such effect, that they fell back in confusion; but Wolfe hastened forward, encouraged them to dash on, and ordered the first line to reserve their fire till within forty yards of the enemy. The men well obeyed the order, and marched briskly on without firing a shot, whilst the
- 59. French came hurryingforward, firing as they came. They killed many of the English, but, as soon as these came within the forty yards' distance, they poured a steady and well-directed a volley into the enemy that did dreadful execution. Wolfe, with characteristic enthusiasm, was in the front line, encouraging them by voice and action, and in less than half an hour the French ranks broke, and many began to fly. Meanwhile Wolfe, exposing himself to the very hottest fire, had been wounded in the wrist by nearly the first discharge; and he had scarcely wrapped his handkerchief around it, when another bullet hit him in the groin. Still appearing to pay no attention to these serious wounds, he was in the act of inciting his men to fresh efforts, when a ball pierced his chest, and he fell. He was carried to the rear, and, whilst he seemed to be in the very agony of death, one of those around him cried, "See how they run!" "Who run?" exclaimed Wolfe, raising himself, with sudden energy, on his elbow. "The enemy," replied the officer; "they give way in all directions." "God be praised!" ejaculated Wolfe; "I die happy!" and, falling back, he expired. Nearly at the same moment Brigadier Monckton was severely wounded, and Brigadier Townshend took the command, and completed the victory. Montcalm, also, had fallen. He was struck by a musket-ball whilst endeavouring to rally his men, and was carried into the city, where he died the next day. When told that he could not live—"So much the better," replied this brave and able man; "I shall not then live to see the surrender of Quebec." His second in command was also mortally wounded, and being taken on board the English ships, also died the next day. Of the French, one thousand five hundred had fallen, and six hundred and forty of the English. On the 18th September, five days after the battle, the city capitulated, the garrison marching out with the honours of war, and under engagement to be conveyed to the nearest French port. Other fragments of the defeated army retired to Montreal. Whilst this glorious news came from the West, from the East arrived tidings equally stirring. In India Colonel Coote, afterwards famous as Sir Eyre Coote, defeated the French under Lally, and made himself master of all Arcot. General Ford defeated the Marquis de Conflans,
- 60. and took Masulipatam,and afterwards defeated a detachment of Dutch, which had landed from Java to aid our enemies in Bengal. Ford completely routed them, and took the seven ships which had brought them over, and which lay in the Hooghly. At sea, Sir Edward Hawke attacked the French fleet under Admiral Conflans at the mouth of the Vilaine in Quibéron Bay. The situation, amid rocks and shoals, and with a sea running high, so late in the year as the 20th of November, was most perilous, but Hawke scorned all danger, attacked the French fleet close under their own shores, took two men-of-war, sank four more, including the admiral's ship, the Soleil Royal, and caused the rest, more or less damaged, to take refuge up the river. Two of our own vessels were stranded in the night, but their crews and stores were saved. For this brilliant action, which crippled the French navy for the remainder of the war, Hawke was thanked by Parliament, received from the king a pension of one thousand five hundred pounds a-year for his own and his son's life, and, in the next reign, was raised to the peerage. Thurot, meanwhile, had escaped out of Dunkirk, but with only five ships, which kept out of the way by seeking shelter in the ports of Sweden and Norway. In Germany, Frederick of Prussia was hard put to it. A fresh army of Russians, under General Soltikow, advanced to the Oder, and another army of Austrians, under Laudohn, advanced to form a junction with them. To prevent this, Frederick sent General Wedel to encounter the Russians, but he was defeated by them on the 23rd of July, with heavy loss. Frederick himself then hastened against them, but, before his arrival, the Austrians had joined Soltikow, making a united force of sixty thousand, which Frederick attacked, on the 12th of August, with forty-eight thousand, at the village of Kunersdorf, close to Frankfort-on-the-Oder. At first he was successful; but, attempting to push his advantages, he was completely beaten, the whole of his army being killed or scattered to three thousand men. So completely did his ruin now seem accomplished, that, expecting the Russians, Austrians, Poles, Swedes, and Saxons to come down on him on all sides, he once more contemplated taking the poison
- 61. that he stillcarried about him; wrote a letter to that effect to his Prime Minister, and directed the oath of allegiance to be taken to his nephew, and that his brother, Prince Henry, should be regent; but finding that the Russians, who had lost twenty thousand men, were actually drawing off, he again took courage, was soon at the head of thirty thousand men, and with these was hastening to the relief of Dresden, when he was paralysed by the news that General Finck, with twelve thousand men, had suffered himself to be surrounded at Maxen, and compelled to surrender. Despairing of relieving Dresden during this campaign, Frederick eventually took up his winter quarters at Freiberg, in Saxony, and employed himself in raising and drilling fresh soldiers; compelled, however, to pay his way by debasing both the Prussian coin, and the English gold which he received in subsidy, by a very large alloy. DEATH OF WOLFE. (After the Painting by Benjamin West, P.R.A.) [See larger version] Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick was more successful. He was at the head of an army of fifty-five thousand men, including ten or twelve
- 62. thousand English, underLord George Sackville. As the French had taken Frankfort-on-the-Main, he left the British and Hanoverian troops, amounting to twenty-eight thousand men, to watch the French, under Marshal de Contades, upon the Lippe, and set out to drive back the other divisions of the French, under De Broglie. He found these amounted to thirty-five thousand strong, but he did not hesitate to engage them at Bergen, on the Nidda, near Frankfort. After a hard-fought battle, he was defeated with a loss of two thousand men and five pieces of cannon. De Broglie pushed rapidly after him, formed a junction with Contades, and speedily reduced Cassel, Münster, and Minden. There appeared every prospect of the whole Electorate of Hanover being again overrun by them. The archives were once more sent off to Stade, ready for embarkation. But Ferdinand now displayed the superiority of his generalship. He left five thousand of his troops, with an air of carelessness, in the way of the French, who, unsuspicious of any stratagem, hastened forward to surprise them, when, to their astonishment, they found the whole of Ferdinand's army had been brought up in the night, and were drawn up behind a ridge near Minden. To approach Ferdinand's forces, the French were obliged to pass a narrow ground between a river and a marsh, and were so cramped that they committed the very error which cost them the battle of Blenheim. They placed the cavalry in the centre, and made wings of their infantry. The cavalry made a succession of furious charges on Ferdinand's centre, but this stood compact and immovable, till the French horse, being discouraged, the Allies charged in their turn, and the centre of the army, the cavalry, being thus driven back, the whole line gave way. At this moment Ferdinand sent orders to Lord George Sackville to charge with the cavalry, which had been kept in reserve, and thus complete the destruction of the flying French. But Lord George, who had been constantly quarrelling with Ferdinand, as well as his own second in command, the Marquis of Granby, now did not appear to comprehend a succession of orders, and sat still. But Ferdinand, having lost patience, sent word to the Marquis of Granby to advance, and he promptly obeyed, but it was now too late; the
- 63. French had gothalf an hour's start. Thus the English cavalry was deprived of all share in the victory; but the English foot had borne the chief brunt of the attack, being in the centre. Six British regiments, in fact, for a time maintained the whole shock of the French. Sackville was tried by court martial, and dismissed from all his military appointments. The battle of Minden was fought on the 1st of August, 1759. The Parliament of England met on the 13th of October. Pitt, not without cause, assumed much merit from the successes of the year; and, in truth, so far as military matters went, rarely had this country reaped such fame. We had triumphed in every quarter of the world. In January came the news of the capture of Goree; in June, of Guadeloupe; in August, that of the victory of Minden; in September, of the victory off Lagos; in October, of the conquest of Quebec; in November, of Hawke's victory off Quiberon. Horace Walpole said, "victories came so thick, that every morning we were obliged to ask what victory there was, for fear of missing one." At the same time, the condition of our trade warranted the inscription afterwards placed on Chatham's monument in the Guildhall, that he caused commerce to flourish with war. The earliest martial event of the year 1760 was the landing of Thurot, the French admiral, at Carrickfergus, on the 28th of February. He had been beating about between Scandinavia and Ireland till he had only three ships left, and but six hundred soldiers. But Carrickfergus being negligently garrisoned, Thurot made his way into the town and plundered it, but was soon obliged to abandon it. He was overtaken by Captain Elliot and three frigates before he had got out to sea, his ships were taken, he himself was killed, and his men were carried prisoners to Ramsey, in the Isle of Man. In April the French made an attempt to recover Quebec. Brigadier- General Murray had been left in command of the troops, six thousand in number, and the fleet had returned to England. The Marquis de Vaudreuil, now the French governor at Montreal, formed a plan of dropping down the St. Lawrence the moment the ice broke
- 64. up, and beforethe mouth of the river was clear for ships to ascend from England. He therefore held in readiness five thousand regular troops, and as many militia, and the moment the ice broke in April, though the ground was still covered with snow, he embarked them in ships and boats under the command of Chevalier de Levis, an officer of reputation. On the 28th of that month they were within sight of Quebec. They had landed higher up than where Wolfe did, and were now at the village of Sillery, not far from Wolfe's place of ascent. Murray, who had only about three thousand men available for such a purpose, the rest having been reduced by sickness, or being needed to man the fortifications, yet ventured to march out against them. He was emulous of the fame of Wolfe, and attacked this overwhelming force with great impetuosity, but was soon compelled to retire into Quebec with the loss of one thousand men killed and wounded. This was a serious matter with their scanty garrison, considering the numbers of the enemy, and the uncertainty of the arrival of succour. Levis, who knew that his success depended on forestalling any English arrivals, lost no time in throwing up trenches and preparing batteries. Had the river continued closed, Quebec must soon have reverted to the French; but, on the 11th of May, the English were rejoiced to see a frigate approaching, and this, only four days after, was followed by another frigate and a ship of the line. These, commanded by Lord Colville, immediately attacked and destroyed or drove on shore the French flotilla, and at that sight Levis struck his tents and decamped as rapidly as he came, leaving behind him his baggage and artillery. Nor was the Marquis de Vaudreuil left long undisturbed at Montreal. The three expeditions, which had failed to meet the preceding summer, were now ordered to converge on Montreal—Amherst from Lake Ontario, Haviland from Crown Point, and Murray from Quebec. Amherst had been detained at Oswego by an outbreak of the Cherokees against us. This native tribe had been friendly to us, and we had built a fort in their country, and called it Fort Loudon, after Lord Loudon; but in the autumn of 1759 they had been bought over by the French, and made a terrible raid on our
- 65. back settlements, murderingand scalping the defenceless inhabitants. Mr. Lyttelton, the Governor of South Carolina, marched against them with a thousand men, and compelled them to submission; but no sooner had he retired than they recommenced their hostilities, and Amherst sent against them Colonel Montgomery, with one thousand two hundred men, who made a merciless retaliation, plundering and burning their villages, so as to impress a sufficient terror upon them. Amherst had now ten thousand men; and though he had to carry all his baggage and artillery over the Ontario in open boats, and to pass the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, he made a most able and prosperous march, reducing the fort of Île Royale on the way, and reached the isle of Montreal on the very same day as Murray, and a day before Haviland. Vaudreuil saw that resistance was hopeless, and capitulated on the 8th of September. The French were, according to contract, sent home, under engagement not to come against us during the remainder of the war. Besides this, Lord Byron chased a squadron of three frigates, convoying twenty store-ships to Quebec, into the Bay of Chaleur, and there destroyed them. Thus all the French possessions in North America, excepting the recent and feeble settlement of New Orleans, remained in our hands. The war in Germany grew more and more bloody. Russia and Austria came down upon Frederick this year with great forces. Daun entered Saxony; Laudohn and Soltikow, Silesia. Laudohn defeated Fouqué at Landshut, and took the fortress of Glatz, and compelled Frederick, though hard pressed by Daun, to march for Silesia. The month was July, the weather so hot that upwards of a hundred of his soldiers fell dead on the march. Daun followed him, watching his opportunity to fall upon him when engaged with other troops, but on the way Frederick heard of the defeat of Fouqué and the fall of Glatz, and suddenly turned back to reach Dresden before Daun, and take the city by storm; but as Daun was too expeditious for him, and Maguire, the governor, an Irishman, paid no heed to his demands for surrender, Frederick, who had lately been so beautifully philosophising on the inhumanities of men, commenced a most
- 66. ferocious bombardment, notof the fortress but of the town. He burnt and laid waste the suburbs, fired red-hot balls into the city to burn it all down, demolished the finest churches and houses, and crushed the innocent inhabitants in their flaming and falling dwellings, till crowds rushed from the place in desperation, rather facing his ruthless soldiers than the horrors of his bombardment. Prevented by the arrival of Daun from utterly destroying Dresden, though he had done enough to require thirty years of peace to restore it, Frederick marched for Silesia. Laudohn, who was besieging Breslau, quitted it at his approach; but the Prussian king, who found himself surrounded by three armies, cut his way, on the 15th of August, at Liegnitz, through Laudohn's division, which he denominated merely "a scratch." He was instantly, however, called away to defend his own capital from a combined army of Russians under Todleben, and of Austrians under Lacy, another Irishman; but before he could reach them they had forced an entrance, on the 9th of October. The Russians, departing from their usual custom of plunder, touched nothing, but levied a contribution of one million seven hundred thousand dollars on the city. At Frederick's approach they withdrew. But there was no rest for Frederick. Daun was overrunning Saxony; had reduced Leipsic, Wittenberg, and Torgau. Frederick marched against him, retook Leipsic, and came up with Daun at Torgau on the 3rd of November. There a most sanguinary battle took place, which lasted all day and late into the night. Within half an hour five thousand of Frederick's grenadiers, the pride of his army, were killed by Daun's batteries of four hundred cannon. Frederick was himself disabled and carried into the rear, and altogether fourteen thousand Prussians were killed or wounded, and twenty thousand of the Austrians. This scene of savage slaughter closed the campaign. The Austrians evacuated Saxony, with the exception of Dresden; the Russians re-passed the Oder, and Frederick took up his winter quarters at Leipsic.
- 67. Prince Ferdinand thissummer had to contend with numerous armies of the French. De Broglie marched from Frankfort into Hesse with a hundred thousand men. On the 10th of July they met the hereditary Prince of Brunswick at Corbach, and defeated him, though he gained a decided advantage over them a few days after at Emsdorf, taking the commander of the division and five battalions prisoners. This was followed by Ferdinand himself, who was at Warburg, where he took ten pieces of artillery, killed one thousand five hundred of the French, and drove them into the Dimel, where many were drowned. The British cavalry had the greatest share in this victory. In fact, the Marquis of Granby led them on all occasions with such spirit and bravery, that Ferdinand placed them continually in the post of danger, where of course they suffered more severely than the other troops. Notwithstanding these checks at Emsdorf and Warburg, the French obtained possession of Göttingen and Cassel. Ferdinand attempted, but in vain, to dislodge them from Göttingen, and the hereditary Prince, attempting to surprise the Marquis de Castries at Wesel, was repulsed with a loss of one thousand two hundred men at Closter- Campen, near that town, and was compelled to retreat. This closed the campaign, and the French took up their winter quarters at Göttingen and Cassel. Whilst these things were happening, and but two days before the mail arrived bringing the news of the defeat at Closter-Campen, George II. died. He had, till within the last two years, enjoyed robust health. He had then a severe attack of gout, and from that time his eyes and hearing had failed. On the morning of the 25th of October he rose at his usual hour of six, drank his chocolate, inquired how the wind was, being anxious for the arrival of the mails, and then suddenly fell, uttered a groan, and expired. He was seventy-seven years of age.
- 68. MARTELLO TOWER ONTHE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM, QUEBEC. [See larger version] GEORGE WHITEFIELD PREACHING. (See p. 143.) [See larger version]
- 69. CHAPTER VI. PROGRESS OFTHE NATION FROM THE REVOLUTION TO 1760. The Church after the Revolution—The Non-Jurors—The Act of Toleration—Comprehension Bill—Laxity of Religion—The Wesleys and Whitefield—Foundation of Methodism—Extension of the Movement—Literature—Survivors of the Stuart Period—Prose Writers: Bishop Burnet—Philosophers: Locke—Bishop Berkeley, etc.—Novelists: Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne—Dr. Davenant—Bentley—Swift—Addison—Addison and Steele— Bolingbroke—Daniel Defoe—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu— Poets: Pope—His Prose Writings—Gay, Prior, Young, etc.—James Thomson, Allan Ramsay, Gray, and Minor Lights—Dramatists— Physical Science: Astronomers—Mathematicians—Electricians— Chemists—Medical Discoverers—Music: Purcell—Italian Music— Handel—Church Music—The Academy of Ancient Music and other Societies—Architecture—Wren and his Buildings—St. Paul's—His Churches and Palaces—Vanbrugh—Gibbs— Hawksmoor—Minor Architects—Painting and Sculpture: Lely and Kneller—Other Foreign Painters and Decorators—Thornhill— Other English Artists—Hogarth and his Works—Exhibition of British Artists—Sculptors—Shipping, Colonies, Commerce, and Manufactures—Increase of Canals—Woollen and Silk Trades— Irish Linens—Lace—Iron, Copper, and other Industries— Increase of the large Towns. The Revolution of 1688, which overthrew absolutism in the State, overthrew it also in the Church. The political principles of William of Orange, and the Whigs who brought him in, were not more opposed
- 70. to the absolutismof the Stuarts than the ecclesiastical principles of the new king and queen, and the prelates whom they introduced into the Church, were to the high-churchism of Laud, Sancroft, Atterbury, and their section of the Establishment. When Parliament, on the accession of William and Mary, presented the Oath of Allegiance to the Lords and Commons, eight of the bishops, including Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused it; and of these, five were of the number of the seven who had refused to sign James II.'s Declaration of Indulgence, and thus gave the immediate occasion to the outbreak ending in the Revolution. Thus a fresh faction was produced in the Establishment, that of the Non-jurors, who were, after much delay and patience, finally excluded from their livings. As the existing law could not touch the non-juring bishops so long as they absented themselves from Parliament, where the oath had to be put to them, a new Act was passed, providing that all who did not take the new oaths before the 1st of August, 1689, should be suspended six months, and at the end of that time, in case of non-compliance, should be ejected from their sees. Still the Act was not rigorously complied with; they were indulged for a year longer, when, continuing obstinate, they were, on the 1st of February, 1691, excluded from their sees. Two of the eight had escaped this sentence by dying in the interim—namely, the Bishops of Worcester and Chichester. The remaining six who were expelled were Sancroft, the Primate, Ken of Bath and Wells, Turner of Ely, Frampton of Gloucester, Lloyd of Norwich, and White of Peterborough. In the room of these were appointed prelates of Whig principles, the celebrated Dr. Tillotson being made Primate. Other vacancies had recently or did soon fall out; so that, within three years of his accession, William had put in sixteen new bishops, and the whole body was thus favourable to his succession, and, more or less, to the new views of Church administration. Having obtained a favourable episcopal bench, King William now endeavoured to introduce measures of the utmost wisdom and importance—measures of the truest liberality and the profoundest policy—namely, an Act of Toleration of dissent, and an Act of
- 71. Comprehension, by whichit was intended to allow Presbyterian ministers to occupy livings in the Church without denying the validity of their ordination, and also to do away with various things in the ritual of the Church which drove great numbers from its community. By the Act of Toleration—under the name of "An Act for exempting their Majesties' Protestant subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the penalties of certain laws"—dissenters were exempt from all penalties for not attending church and for attending their own chapels, provided that they took the new oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and subscribed to the declaration against Transubstantiation, and also that their chapels were registered, and their services conducted without the doors being locked or barred. As the Quakers would take no oaths, they were allowed to subscribe a declaration of fidelity to the Government, and a profession of their Christian belief. But the Comprehension Bill was not so fortunate. Ten bishops, with twenty dignified clergymen, were appointed as a commission to make such alterations in the liturgy and canons, and such plans for the reformation of the ecclesiastical courts as, in their opinion, best suited the exigencies of the times, and were necessary to remove the abuses, and render more efficient the services of the Church. The list of these commissioners comprised such men as Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Sharp, Kidder, Hall, Tenison, and Fowler. They met in the Jerusalem Chamber, and began their labours preparatory to this great comprehensive bill. In order to sanction these changes, Convocation was summoned, and then the storm broke loose. The Jacobites and the discontented cried out they were going to pull the Church down; the High Churchmen declared it was a scheme to hand over the Church to the Presbyterians; the Universities cried that all the men engaged in the plan were traitors to the true faith, and the king himself was not spared. The High Churchmen who were included in the commission fled out of it amain, and Convocation threw out the whole reform as an abomination. Convocation having given this blow to all hopes of ecclesiastical reform, was prorogued to the 24th of January, 1690, and on the 6th
- 72. of February wasdissolved with the Parliament, nor was it suffered to meet again for business till the last year of the reign of William. Burnet describes the state of religion and intelligence in the nation at the period of Anne's reign as most lamentable, the clergy as "dead and lifeless: the most remiss in their labours in private, and the least severe in their lives," of all that he had seen amongst all religions at home or abroad; the gentry "the worst instructed and the least knowing of any of their rank that he ever went amongst;" and the common people beyond all conception "ignorant in matters of religion." The words of Atterbury, a high Tory, were quite as strong. A description of the state of religion in the country, drawn up by him, was presented by Convocation to the queen, which stated that "the manifest growth of immorality and profaneness," "the relaxation and decay of the discipline of the Church," the "disregard to all religious places, persons, and things," had scarcely had a parallel in any age. Dr. Calamy, a great Nonconformist, equally complains that the "decay of real religion, both in and out of the Church," was most visible. Under the Georges much the same state of affairs prevailed. The episcopal bench was Whig, though very apathetic; while the clergy were Tory, and disinclined to listen to their superiors. It was at this era of religious apathy that John Wesley (b. 1703; d. 1791), and Charles, his brother (b. 1708; d. 1788), and George Whitefield (b. 1714), came forward to preach a revival, and laid the foundation of Methodism. These young men, students at Oxford, all of them originally of clerical families but Whitefield—who was the son of an innkeeper—with Hervey, afterwards the author of the well- known "Meditations amongst the Tombs," and some others of their fellow-collegians, struck by the dearth of religious life of the time, met in their rooms for prayer and spiritual improvement. They were soon assailed with the nicknames of "Sacramentarians," "Bible Moths," and finally, "Methodists," a term current against the Puritans in those days, and suggested by the appellative Methodistæ, given to a college of physicians in ancient Rome, in consequence of the strict regimen which they prescribed to their patients.
- 73. In 1734 theWesleys commenced their career as preachers to the people, and were soon followed by Whitefield. This may, therefore, be considered the date of the foundation of Methodism. None of them had any the remotest idea of separating from the Church, or founding new sects. The Wesleys made a voyage to Georgia, in America, and, on their return, found their little party not only flourishing in Oxford but in London, where they had a meeting- house in Fetter Lane. Whitefield, however, was the first to commence the practice of field-preaching, amongst the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol; but in this he was soon imitated by Wesley. As they began to attract attention by the ardour of their preaching and the wonderful effect on the people, this became necessary, for speedily all church doors were closed against them. John Wesley had a peculiar genius for the construction of a new religious community, and he was ready to collect hints for its organisation from any quarter. The most prolific source of his ordinances for his new society was the system of the Moravians, whose great settlement at Herrnhuth, in Germany, he visited, and had much consultation with its head, Count Zinzendorf. From it he drew his class-meetings, his love-feasts, and the like. In framing the constitution of his society, Wesley displayed a profound knowledge of human nature. He took care that every man and woman in his society counted for something more than a mere unit. The machinery of class-meetings and love-feasts brought members together in little groups, where every one was recognised and had a personal interest. Numbers of men, who had no higher ambition, could enjoy the distinction of class-leaders. It did not require a man to go to college and take orders to become a preacher. Thomas Maxwell with Wesley, and Howel Harris with Whitefield, led the way from the plane of the laity into the pulpits of Methodism, and have been followed by tens of thousands who have become able if not learned, and eloquent if not Greek-imbued, preachers. Wesley divided the whole country into districts, into which he sent one or more well-endowed preachers, who were called circuit preachers, or round preachers, from their going their rounds in particular circuits. Under the ministry of these men sprang up volunteer preachers, who first led prayer-meetings,
- 74. and then ascendedto the pulpit in the absence of the circuit preachers, and most of them soon discovered unexpected talents, and edifying their own local and often remote or obscure little auditories, became styled local preachers. Out of these local preachers ever and anon grew men of large minds and fertilising eloquence, who became the burning and shining lights of the whole firmament of Methodism. It was Wesley's object not to separate from the Church, and it was only after his death that the Wesleyans were reckoned as Nonconformists. Whitefield and Wesley soon separated into distinct fields of labour, as was inevitable, from Whitefield embracing Calvinism and Wesley Arminianism. Whitefield grew popular amongst the aristocracy, from the Countess of Huntingdon becoming one of his followers, and, at the same time, his great patron. Whitefield, like the Wesleys, made repeated tours in America, and visited all the British possessions there. When in England, he generally made an annual tour in it, extending his labours to Scotland and several times to Ireland. On one of his voyages to America he made some stay at Lisbon. Everywhere he astonished his hearers by his vivid eloquence; and Benjamin Franklin relates a singular triumph of Whitefield over his prejudices and his pocket. He died at Newbury Port, near Boston, United States, on the 30th of September, 1770. If Whitefield did not found so numerous a body as Wesley, he yet left a powerful impression on his age; and we still trace his steps, in little bodies of Calvinistic Methodists in various quarters of the United Kingdom, especially in Wales.
- 75. JOHN WESLEY. [See largerversion] The literature of this period is more distinguished for learning and cleverness than for genius. There are a few names that rise above the smartness and mere accomplishment of the time into the regions of pure genius; but, with very few exceptions, even they bear the stamp of the period. We have here no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Herbert, no Herrick even, to produce; but De Foe, Addison, Steele, Thomson, and Pope, if they do not lift us to the highest creative plane, give us glimpses and traits of what is found there. For the rest, however full of power, there hangs a tone of "town," of a vicious and sordid era, about them, of an artificial and by no means refined life, a flavour of the grovelling of the politics which distinguished the period, and of the low views and feelings which
- 76. occupied and surroundedthe throne during the greater portion of this term. Some of the writers of the last period were still existing in this. Dryden was living, and wrote some of his most perfect works, as his "Fables," and his "Alexander's Feast," as well as translated Virgil after the Revolution. He was still hampered by his miserable but far more successful dramatic rivals, Shadwell and Elkanah Settle. Nathaniel Lee produced in William's time his tragedies, "The Princess of Cleves," and his "Massacre of Paris." Etherege was yet alive; Wycherley still poured out his licentious poems; and Southern wrote the greater part of his plays. His "Oronooko" and his "Fatal Marriage" were produced now, and he received such prices as astonished Dryden. Whilst "Glorious John" never obtained more than a hundred pounds for a play, Southern obtained his six or seven hundred. From the Picture in the National Gallery of British Art.
- 77. Welcome to ourwebsite – the perfect destination for book lovers and knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world, offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth. That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to self-development guides and children's books. More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading. Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and personal growth every day! ebookbell.com