[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 86 (Tuesday, May 23, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7263-S7267]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


               HYDROGEN--AN ENERGY SOURCE FOR THE FUTURE

 Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I have long advocated greater 
investment in the development of sustainable hydrogen energy. Hydrogen 
has a tremendous potential to be the energy carrier of the future. It 
is an ideal energy source as it is plentiful, efficient and clean 
burning. An excellent article describing the many advantages of 
hydrogen as an energy source appeared in the March 19, 1995 edition of 
the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I urge all of my colleagues to read 
this article and I ask that the text of the article be printed in the 
Record.
  The article follows:

          [From the Los Angeles Times Magazine, March 3, 1995]

                          Harnessing the Big H


Hydrogen Seems the Ideal Energy Source--Plentiful, Efficient and Clean. 
       Can Something This Perfect Be Real? Just Ask the Japanese

                           (By Alan Weisman)

       West of Denver, Interstate 70 enters Golden, Colo., and 
     begins to curl through the foothills of the Rockies. There is 
     bisects an unassuming clump of brick buildings--the National 
     Renewable Energy Laboratory. [[Page S7264]] Among the 
     government's national laboratories, NREL is modest, operating 
     on a fraction of the billions commanded by atomic research 
     giants like Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. 
     Inside, there are no monstrous particle accelerators; 
     experiments here are more likely to proceed in test-tube 
     racks, bell jars and small glass beakers, like the one John 
     Turner is filling with a clear solution of water and 
     household lye.
       Turner, a chemist with a graying blond beard and gold-
     rimmed glasses, sticks a narrow glass slide, coated on one 
     end with a black, mica-like substance, into the lye solution. 
     The humming lab ventilators mask the sound of the vehicles 
     whizzing by on the nearby interstate, but Turner has spent 
     most of his career here, and during those years he's always 
     had the cars in mind. As he aims a pencil-thin beam from a 
     high-intensity lamp at the flask, he puts it this way: 
     ``Suppose someone announced he intended to ship millions of 
     gallons of a carcinogenic, explosive fluid that emits toxic 
     fumes through our downtown and then store it underground in 
     our neighborhoods. People would rise up in anger, right?''
       Wrong. Just outside on I-70, cars are spraying residues of 
     that very poison all over the mountains. After 11 decades of 
     tinkering, their internal combustion engines are miracles of 
     technology with hundreds of moving parts. Yet various laws of 
     physics still limit their ability to extract energy from 
     petroleum. Nearly three-fourths of its potential simply 
     radiates away or pours, partly combusted, out the tailpipe, 
     rising in geologic layers of brown murk until the Rockies 
     themselves dwindle to ghostly smudges.
       John Turner is among a cadre of scientists trying to 
     suppress what he regards as humanity's most pervasive, and 
     self-inflicted, epidemic. In a little more than a century, 
     since Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb and Henry 
     Ford began to mass-produce automobiles, man-made energy has 
     become the most addictive drug in history. Everybody today 
     was born into the this dependency: No one any longer can 
     imagine life without electricity or motorized vehicles. To 
     slake our craving, we must dose ourselves and our 
     surroundings daily with deadly filth. This ritual is now 
     doomed to spread, as China, India and other developing 
     nations bestow family cars and refrigerators upon 2 billion 
     new recruits to the industrial age.
       Getting an entire world to kick a habit is futile, so 
     Turner is trying to at least find us a clean needle. As the 
     beam strikes the shiny black square centimeter of 
     semiconductor glued to the submerged portion of his slide, 
     the surrounding liquid begins to fizz. Electrons stimulated 
     by light, he explains, are rushing to the semiconductor's 
     surface, hitting water molecules and splitting them into 
     their component parts: oxygen and hydrogen.
       He watches the tiny bubbles rise. ``For years,'' he says, 
     ``this has been the Holy Grail of photoelectric chemists. 
     We're witnessing the direct conversion of solar energy into 
     hydrogen.''
       Cape Canaveral, June, 1994: A group of visiting scientists 
     and engineers is touring the John F. Kennedy Space Center in 
     blue-and-white air-conditioned buses. They're here for the 
     World Hydrogen Energy Conference, a biennial event born of 
     the energy crisis 20 years earlier. Although the price of 
     petroleum has since calmed considerably (adjusted for 
     inflation, it's actually cheaper than pre-1973), a 
     groundswell of concern, coupled with numerous breakthroughs, 
     has ballooned this gathering to nearly 600 researchers from 
     34 countries. They've come to Canaveral this year for 
     inspiration: The huge tank on the pad, where the shuttle 
     Columbia will presently lift spaceward, is filled with pure 
     hydrogen.
       Since even before the moon shots, all U.S. astronauts' 
     heat, electricity and drinking water have been derived from 
     hydrogen. The U.S. space program is the first step toward 
     realizing these scientists' dream: to switch the planet from 
     an economy fueled with dirty coal and petroleum to one run on 
     clean hydrogen.
       The idea of something so ubiquitous--hydrogen is the most 
     abundant element composing three-fourths of the mass of the 
     universe--replacing diminishing fossil fuels seems the stuff 
     of fiction. Once, in fact, it was: In 1870, Jules Verne's 
     ``Mysterious Island'' described a world that would one day 
     derive ``an inexhaustible source of heat and light'' from 
     water's component parts.
       Back then, Verne didn't realize that this source was also 
     virtually pollution-free. The cycle is so elegant it seems 
     nearly miraculous: Separate water into its two constituent 
     gases, hydrogen and oxygen. Burn the hydrogen for fuel, and 
     it re-couples with oxygen to form water again. No nasty 
     particulates, no insidious carbon monoxide, no eye-stinging 
     ozone or sulfur dioxide (at high temperatures, however, 
     small, controllable amounts of nitrous oxides can form when 
     hydrogen is burned in the presence of air). Mainly, though, 
     hydrogen's exhaust is plain water vapor--which can then be 
     recaptured and neatly converted again to hydrogen.
       According to Bill Hoagland, founder of NREL's hydrogen 
     program, it would take less than a gallon of water to get the 
     same range from hydrogen that cars currently get from a 
     gallon of gasoline. Because hydrogen can be made anywhere. 
     I'm told repeatedly, there would be no more dependency on 
     imported oil. No more OPEC. Maybe no more global warming, 
     either, because it emits no greenhouse gases. As for 
     hydrogen's unfortunate association with bombs and blimps, 
     like the ill-fated Hindenburg, Hoagland reminds me that 
     fossil fuels also readily explode, and studies rate hydrogen 
     safer because it's nontoxic and dissipates quickly.
       It seems like the perfect fuel. Yet, these scientists 
     insist, it's been under-researched, under-funded and 
     virtually ignored in Detroit, which perseveres in its 
     allegiance to petroleum, and in Washington, which persists in 
     keeping troops ready to defend the Persian Gulf.
       So why aren't we leaping at this chance to end pollution, 
     energy wars and economic bondage to a few privileged 
     locations that float atop the earth's ebbing supplies of oil? 
     Much of it comes down to money and the seemingly 
     incontestable reign of the petroleum industry. Unlike natural 
     gas, to which hydrogen is often compared, you can't dig a 
     hole and find it. To tap hydrogen's energy, you have to 
     expend energy because it's always combined with something 
     else. Having to un-combine it makes it more expensive, at 
     least in the near term, than crude petroleum products, 
     including natural gas. And no alternative-energy constituency 
     has the clout to buck powerful fossil-fuel lobbies and find a 
     way to pay for retrofitting the world for a brand-new 
     technology.
       Currently, the U.S. Department of Energy allots hydrogen 
     about one-ninetieth of what it spends on continuing petroleum 
     research. (And two-thirds of the DOE's budget doesn't go for 
     energy at all, but for nuclear weapons research and cleanup.) 
     Nor has the public thus far demonstrated much interest in 
     trading the ease of dirty energy, available at the turn of an 
     ignition key or click of a light switch, for a major 
     commitment to something cleaner and renewable.
       Yet the learned crowd gathered at the World Hydrogen 
     Conference is convinced that hydrogen's time must come. 
     Fossil fuels will become expensive again; even today, their 
     true price isn't revealed at the gas pump, where the numbers 
     don't include the cost of pollution and the expense of 
     protecting our interests in the Persian Gulf.
       Other countries are less reluctant about hydrogen than the 
     United States. Two years ago, Japan, an island nation 
     frightened by the prospect of rising seas if the icecaps 
     start to melt, unveiled a multibillion-dollar, 28-year 
     program to form a global hydrogen system. The Japanese are 
     talking power plants, cars, buses, planes, ships and rockets, 
     all over the world, all fueled with renewable hydrogen.
       And there's a recent surprise announcement by Daimler-Benz, 
     the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, that has excited many 
     people here: The German auto maker claims it has cleared the 
     major obstacles to producing the first commercially viable 
     hydrogen-powered automobile. Unless Mercedes is just trying 
     to spook the competition, hydrogen's prospects have suddenly 
     improved faster than anyone dared hope. The Mercedes in 
     question runs on a fuel cell, a refillable device that, like 
     a battery, chemically converts fuel directly to electricity 
     without having to burn it. Fuel cells can function on 
     methanol or natural gas, but with hydrogen, they're up to 
     three times more efficient than conventional engines.
       The most advanced models, including the one Daimler-Benz 
     uses, come from the Vancouver-based Ballard Power Systems 
     Inc., which designed fuel cells for the Canadian defense 
     department, using technology NASA developed for the Gemini 
     mission and then shelved. Originally large, boxy affairs of 
     stackable metal plates separated by membranes resembling 
     plastic wrap, Ballard's fuel cells are now small enough to 
     fit inside a minivan chassis. ``when we start producing them 
     in volume,'' says Ballard co-founder Keith Prater, a former 
     University of Texas chemist, ``the price will shrink, too.''
       Surrounded by conference booths promoting the latest in 
     photovoltaics, fuel cells and electrolyzers--devices that 
     separate water into oxygen and hydrogen--I asked Princeton 
     physicist Joan M. Ogden if the United States is letting the 
     future slip away to foreign competitors. She tells me of a 
     recent, unreleased General Motors study admitting that non-
     polluting fuel cells could be
      mass-produced for the same cost as a conventional engine. 
     ``Actually, they should cost less, because they have no 
     moving parts,'' she says. ``They'll also last longer and 
     be cheaper to maintain.'' But while Mercedes, BMW and 
     Mazda race to bring a hydrogen car to market, U.S. auto 
     makers, by comparison, don't seem very interested.
       A few years ago, Ogden quit Princeton's glamorous fusion 
     energy program to engage in relatively impoverished research 
     in renewable hydrogen. ``Fusion will take decades,'' she told 
     aghast colleagues. ``I want results in my lifetime.'' Soon 
     after, she co-authored a book that proposed making hydrogen 
     by splitting water with electricity from solar photovoltaic 
     (PV) cells. (In this process, as electricity made from 
     sunlight passes through a pair of electrodes immersed in 
     water, hydrogen bubbles collect around one pole and oxygen 
     around another.) Although PV is still expensive, Ogden argued 
     that mass production and technological improvements would 
     lower costs until they intersect with rising oil prices.
       The book has been alternately praised and scorned, the 
     latter because of a map showing how much of the United States 
     would have to be covered by photovoltaic cells to produce 
     sufficient hydrogen to meet the total U.S. annual energy 
     needs. The area is [[Page S7265]] denoted by a circle that 
     reaches from Albuquerque nearly to the Mexican border. 
     Critics who derisively try to guess the value of all that 
     real estate miss the point, she insists. No one ever 
     suggested putting all the PV in the same place.
       ``Obviously, deserts are ideal, because they get the most 
     sun, and minimal rainfall is enough to make plenty of 
     hydrogen. But I did a little calculation once. Let's say 
     2,000 people who work at Princeton drive there every day. If 
     I wanted to run their cars on hydrogen, how much roof space 
     would I need to cover with PV to make enough hydrogen fuel 
     for them? I figured that by putting panels on fewer than half 
     the university rooftops, even with New Jersey's humble 
     sunshine levels, we could convert all those cars to hydrogen. 
     Think if we did that all over the country.''
       That same afternoon, Peter Lehman, an environmental 
     engineer from Humboldt State University in Northern 
     California, tells me what it would take to do the same for 
     the 9 million cars in the Los Angeles Basin: ``An area about 
     340 square miles. About two-thirds the size, say, of Edwards 
     Air Force Base.''
       Cover Edwards Air Force Base with shiny photovoltaic 
     panels?
       ``Sure. It would mean a fairly dramatic reorientation of 
     priorities, and a huge expenditure, probably like building 
     the interstate highway system. That took $100 billion and 34 
     years. But we did it because as a society we decided it was 
     important. Wouldn't you think that eliminating all smog might 
     be important?''
       All week, people here have been repeating a mantra of 
     massive American investments in the future that paid off, 
     like the Marshall Plan, the interstate highway system and--
     especially during a pilgrimage to the old Apollo launching 
     pad--President Kennedy's decision to put men on the moon. 
     Although these ventures involved enormous expense, they were 
     embraced by the public because of visionary, daring 
     leadership, but they also coincided, rather than conflicted, 
     with powerful interests. A commitment to transform America's 
     energy infrastructure to accommodate clean hydrogen would, I 
     suspect, evoke awesome resistance from the petroleum and auto 
     industries. And decisions these days seem dictated more by 
     the global marketplace than by the foresight of leaders.
       Yet the one vision these scientists from Argentina, Egypt, 
     Russia, Germany and Japan tell me may save civilization from 
     choking on its own exhaust emanates from California. They 
     refer specifically, and reverently, to mandates by the 
     California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air 
     Quality Management District, which require that zero-emission 
     vehicles (ZEVs) constitute 2% of all cars sold in the state 
     by 1998 and 10% by 2003.
       The allure of these requirements is the fact that, with one 
     out of 18 Americans living in the L.A. Basin alone, whoever 
     can first manufacture a viable car that meets this standard 
     will get rich. Everybody assures me that batteries aren't 
     going to do it; the acceleration is rotten, the range is too 
     short, and they must be recharged by plugging into dirty 
     power plants that only shift the pollution elsewhere. The 
     assumption here is that the only way to build a real ZEV is 
     by using a hydrogen fuel cell, and California's regulations 
     will help force that technology into existence. The air 
     quality district's chief scientist, Alan Lloyd, who's 
     speaking at the conference, agrees.
       Lloyd's problem though, is that he is not exactly 
     considered a prophet in his own land. Rather than instilling 
     native pride, California's world champion air-quality laws, 
     which some believe have wrecked the state's economy, have 
     barely survived legislative plots to scuttle them.
       And despite the vaunted environmental pedigree of Vice 
     President Al Gore, the Clinton Administration hasn't been 
     much help either. While a few projects like experimental wind 
     farms have been encouraged, federal efforts have focused more 
     on improving energy efficiency than on developing clean new 
     sources. Most frustrating to Alan Lloyd is a multimillion-
     dollar Administration program called PNGV: The Partnership 
     for a New Generation of Vehicles, whose goal is to deliver a 
     prototype car that gets triple today's expected gas mileage--
     about 80 miles per gallon--by the year 2004. ``Which means 
     that after 10 years, they'll develop a vehicle that will be 
     illegal in California because it's too dirty,'' he says, 
     gazing heavenward. ``That's unacceptable. A new-generation 
     vehicle should be fuel-efficient and clean. Leadership should 
     come from the White House, but their agenda is being driven 
     more from Detroit.''
       Other energy advocates claim the technology for an 80-
     m.g.g. vehicle already exists, but the Administration has 
     simply caved in to the Big Three auto makers and the oil 
     industry. But since I haven't seen filling stations 
     dispensing hydrogen on American street corners, I ask Lloyd 
     if a fuel-cell vehicle designed to run on the stuff is really 
     practical.
       In the interim, there are lots of ways to make hydrogen 
     besides solar energy, Lloyd explains. Using steam, it can be 
     derived from natural gas or even mixed with it--known as town 
     gas, that was what America once burned for light and cooking. 
     Hydrogen improves the potency and lowers the emissions of 
     natural gas, and with some modification it might even be 
     shipped through natural gas pipelines. As for a dearth of 
     service stations: a similar alarm was once sounded by buggy-
     whip manufacturers.
       The real obstacle, Lloyd says, is America's current lust to 
     pawn the future for the sake of profits today. ``While 
     Detroit hires 100 attorneys to defeat every new emissions 
     standard we establish, Japan assigns 1,000 engineers to meet 
     the challenge.''
       Maintaining energy's status quo might make some sense, or 
     at least some money, for purveyors of petroleum and internal-
     combustion engines. But the conference's keynote speaker 
     assures us that the decision won't really be theirs. 
     University of Colorado physicist emeritus Albert A. Bartlett 
     says he knows little about hydrogen but something about basic 
     arithmetic. He's particularly drawn to calculating the time 
     it takes for things to double. This is pertinent, he says, to 
     consumption of fossil fuels, because it allows the petroleum 
     and coal industries to deceive the world about how long those 
     resources will actually last.
       To illustrate what he means, he proposes that we imagine a 
     species of bacteria that reproduces by dividing in two. Those 
     two become four, the four become eight, and so forth. ``Let's 
     say we place one bacterium in a bottle at 11 a.m., and at 
     noon we observe the bottle to be full. At what point was it 
     half full?'' The answer, it turns out, is 11:59 a.m.
       ``Now, if you were a bacterium in that bottle, at what 
     point would you realize you were running out of space? At 
     11:55 a.m., when the bottle is only one-thirty-seconds full, 
     and 97% is open space, yearning for development?''
       Everyone giggles. ``Now suppose, with a minute to spare, 
     the bacteria discover three new bottles to inhabit. They sigh 
     with relief: They have three times more bottles than had ever 
     been known, quadrupling their space resources. Surely this 
     makes them self-sufficient in space. Right?''
       Except, of course, it doesn't. Bartlett's point is that in 
     exactly two more minutes, all four bottles will be full. 
     Likewise, when President Jimmy Carter noted that in each of 
     three previous decades the world had burned more fuel than 
     had been consumed previously in all of history, it meant that 
     fuel consumption was doubling every decade. That rate slowed 
     temporarily with the energy crisis, but now, with world 
     population rising and today's breakneck industrialization in 
     the Third World, the exponential gobbling of limited 
     resources is again accelerating.
       ``It's seriously misleading when we hear, for example, that 
     at current levels of output and recovery coal reserves can be 
     expected to last 500 years. We get the mistaken impression 
     that there's 500 years' worth of coal left, forgetting that 
     the sentence began with `at current levels.' That's 500 
     years, only if there's no growth of production.''
       And petroleum? ``In 1993, they announced the largest 
     discovery of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 20 years: 
     700 million barrels. It sounds like an enormous number, until 
     you realize that we Americans go through roughly 17.7 million 
     barrels a day. Divide 700 by 17.7. It'll last about 40 
     days.''
       The auditorium is now silent. ``That indicates,'' he tells 
     us, ``that we've already made the big petroleum discoveries. 
     Now we're picking around the edges, getting the last ones.''
       In 1975, during the depths of the energy crisis, Tom Harkin 
     arrived in Washington as an Iowa congressman. In his first 
     year on the House Science and Technology Committee, he 
     decided that the threat to the future of energy was genuine. 
     Then Carter was elected President, and, to Harkin's relief, 
     the Administration began dispensing billions and creating 
     incentives for solar, photovoltaic, wind and ocean thermal 
     energy.
       Then the next President, Ronald Regan, dismantled Carter's 
     solar-heating apparatus on the White House roof and all the 
     tax breaks and funding for alternative-energy research along 
     with it. During those lean years, Harkin, now a senator, 
     joined forces with longtime hydrogen zealot Sen. Spark M. 
     Matsunaga of Hawaii to convince whomever they could that 
     hydrogen wasn't some dumb fantasy. After Matsunaga's death in 
     1990, Harkin and the only other hydrogen devotees around, 
     Reps. George E. Brown, Jr. (D-Colton) and Robert S. Walker 
     (R-Pa.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), pushed through a five-
     year research bill in his memory.
       The appropriation was minimal, but after Clinton and Gore 
     were elected, Harkin was sure that would change. Shortly 
     after their inauguration, he presented the new Administration 
     with a 40-page proposal for a sustainable energy future based 
     on hydrogen. It showed how, by using solar photovoltaic 
     electricity to split water, hydrogen actually becomes a way 
     to store the power of the sun, because it can be burned at 
     night or shipped to cold climates where solar energy is 
     scare. It explained that the cheapest way to produce hydrogen 
     could be through ``electro-farming'': using marginal land to 
     grow energy crops like switch grass, which could be reduced 
     to hydrogen in a simple device called a biomass gasifier. The 
     gasifier, in turn, would run on excess heat from a hydrogen 
     fuel cell, providing power for the farm.
       Harkin also rebutted the myth that hydrogen is more 
     dangerous than traditional fuels, a belief dating to the 1937 
     explosion that destroyed the German airship Hindenburg. The 
     36 who died, he explained, were killed in the falll, not from 
     burning hydrogen, which simply floated away (as it would have 
     had the Exxon Valdez transported hydrogen instead of oil). In 
     fact, the 61 Hindenberg survivors [[Page S7266]] would not 
     have lived had the blimp carried natural gas.
       But, Harkin concluded, in order to make fuel cells or 
     hydrogen cars affordable, they have to be mass-produced, and 
     before manufacturers will mass-produce them, delivery 
     systems-hydrogen pumps at the corner gas station-have to be 
     in place. That won't happen until there's mass demand for 
     them, and so on. This classic chicken-and-egg dilemma, he 
     argued, could be resolved by a federal commitment to a 
     comfortable transition from fossil fuels.
       He didn't get very far. ``I told the President he should 
     grab the public's imagination the way Kennedy did with the 
     moon shot, by announcing in his first State of the Union 
     speech that the U.S. was going all out for hydrogen and fuel 
     cells. He looked at me like I was slightly nuts.''
       Later Harkin ran into Al Gore in the Executive Office 
     Building. If the government purchased large quantities of 
     photovoltaics, he told the vice president, it would lower the 
     cost immensely. The same for fuel cells. No luck there, 
     either. Instead, the tiny hydrogen coalition in Congress 
     actually has had to fight the Administration's proposed cuts 
     in funding provided by the Matsunaga Act.
       In Washington, Harkin's hydrogen consultant, Sandy Thomas, 
     shows me a chart of the Department of Energy's budget. Out of 
     $18.6 billion, $10 billion goes for nuclear-weapons research 
     and cleanup. ``That's even though we aren't building nuclear 
     weapons anymore. It's an upper-middle-class welfare program 
     for nuclear scientists. Then there's nearly $1 billion for 
     fossil-fuel research and conservation, even though they're 
     running out; $300 million for atomic fission, though we've 
     stopped building nuclear reactors, and nearly half of a 
     billion for fusion, the practical application of which even 
     its most optimistic proponents admit it at least 40 year 
     away.''
       ``And for hydrogen research?'' I ask.
       ``Ten million.
       I gape. ``I know,'' he says. ``We've argued for shifting 
     even $100 million out of DOE's nuclear-weapons fund. But 
     those decisions are made at the top. It's hard to get Hazel 
     O'Leary's ear on this one.''
       At a White House conference on environmental technology in 
     December, chaired by Gore, Energy Secretary O'Leary admits to 
     me that in the wake of a new Republican Congress that 
     threatens to cut not just budgets but the entire DOE, she 
     questions the wisdom of bank rolling fission. On hydrogen, 
     however, she doesn't yield. ``I'm not an apologist for 
     traditional energy. We've backed some exciting research into 
     wind power. But my strong opinion is that hydrogen isn't 
     there yet. We have to be willing to deliver more mature 
     technologies to market first. Excepting fusion, I think our 
     investments fairly represent the energy marketplace for the 
     near and midterm.''
       At the conference, Gore, five Cabinet officers and 
     President Clinton's science adviser meet with 1,400 
     industrialists, entrepreneurs and environmental 
     representatives to discuss how the U.S. can prosper in the 
     growing international market for clean, green technology. 
     There are seminars on environmental export financing and 
     transitions to industrial ecology--yet barely any mention of 
     energy, except for a small workshop on fuel cells and another 
     on transportation technologies.
       In the latter, I join a study group chaired by Ford's 
     representative for the Partnership for a New Generation of 
     Vehicles. Among the points we've asked to consider are the 
     prospects for introducing alternative fuels like hydrogen for 
     motor vehicles in the near future. The first to speak up is 
     General Motors' federal research coordinator. ``Very dim. As 
     long as gas and diesel stay around $1.20, consumers have no 
     incentive to use anything else.'' Alternative fuels, he says, 
     all lack the energy density of petroleum, so it will always 
     cost more to get the same amount of power.
       No one contradicts him, so Ford moves on to the next 
     question. I interrupt. ``Wait, Isn't the whole reason for 
     this conference the idea that consumer demand today involves 
     things other than price, such as products that don't pollute 
     us to death?''
       ``I'll believe that,'' GM replies, ``when Californians 
     start buying the 50 miles-per-gallon vehicles that are 
     already available. The fact is, they don't want cars that are 
     more efficient or cleaner.''
       ``So how would you get people to buy this thing?'' I yell 
     to Thomas Klaiber, but he doesn't hear me, because a low-
     slung, Class C racing series model and a black, V-12 600SL 
     roar past us at that instant, one on either side. We're on 
     the Mercedes-Benz test track in Stuttgart, Germany. Klaiber, 
     a mechanical engineer, is head of the Daimler-Benz hydrogen 
     fuel cell group, the van he's driving is the hydrogen-powered 
     vehicle that prompted Mercedes' grand announcement.
       If this is really the future we're driving into, at a top 
     cruising speed of 50 miles per hour, it's a little like 
     riding the tortoise while being passed by a flock of jeering 
     hares. Even Mercedes buses are passing us as we negotiate 
     banked curves and climb steep little hills that suddenly 
     appear in the middle of the straightways. Yet the van itself 
     feels surpringly normal. Amid the surrounding internal 
     combustion thunder, the most noticeable difference is how 
     quietly it runs. The fuel cell itself make no sound. There's 
     only the hum of an air compressor.
       Some significant technology challenges remain unmet, 
     however. Much of the cargo area is filled with fiberglass 
     pressure tanks. Although hydrogen has up to three times the 
     efficiency of gasoline, its lightness gives it such low 
     density that even when compressed. its storage requires at 
     least four times the space of a conventional gas tank. This 
     is fine for the fuel-cell buses that Ballard Power Systems is 
     operating successfully in Vancouver, because there's plenty 
     of room on their roofs to store hydrogen. To partly alleviate 
     this problem for passenger cars, Daimler-Benz plans to shrink 
     the fuel cell to one-fourth it current size, even as it 
     increases horsepower.
       ``The alternative is we store the hydrogen in metal 
     hydrides,'' Klaiber says, referring to a process in which 
     certain metals absorb hydrogen like a sponge, then release it 
     when heated. ``They're fine for commuter cars; citizens 
     tested a fleet for us in Berlin for four years. But for a 
     range of 250 miles, you'd need a ton of hydrides. Too much.''
       I have just come from Munich, where I rode in a silver 7-
     Series BMW that uses a third storage option, liquid hydrogen, 
     exactly like the space shuttle. Its ride, acceleration, speed 
     and internal combustion engine made it virtually 
     indistinguished from a regular car. Underneath the chassis, 
     however, was a doubled-walled tank to keep the fuel at -423 
     degrees F. But even with that much insulation, too much 
     hydrogen boils off after three days, making it impractical, 
     say, to leave a liquid hydrogen car in an airport parking lot 
     during summer.
       Plus, it takes one-third the energy of hydrogen to cool it 
     to a liquid state. So the simplicity and high efficiency of 
     fuel cells, which runs at normal temperatures, seem to be 
     winning the race to the future-whenever that is.
       Riding with Klaiber, it doesn't feel distant. His face is 
     glowing, almost cherubic. He confesses that he loves driving 
     this thing just because he knows it's so clean.
       We pull over. He doesn't turn off the engine but finds a 
     paper cup and holds it over the exhaust pipe. ``Drink?'' he 
     offers.
       It's pure, distilled water.
       Consumers, I'm told by hydrogen skeptics, won't buy a 
     vehicle whose power and performance fall short of what we've 
     grown to expect from our automobiles. In the Daimler-Benz 
     headquarters,
      Mercedes' vice president of marketing for passenger cars, 
     Jochen Placking, shows me a typical ad they use for the 
     United States: a convertible speeding across a New Mexico 
     desert. ``We're selling freedom. The limitless power to go 
     explore.''
       In the halls here, decades of Mercedes advertising posters 
     show women with long, shapely legs protruding from fur coats, 
     leaning against gorgeous roadsters. How can you make an 
     environmentally correct car into a sexy status symbol, like a 
     sports coupe?
       Placking strokes his mustache. ``We'll have to find a way 
     to make clean cars fascinating,'' he says. ``Like selling 
     people on safe sex.''
       It's not an altogether encouraging analogy, especially in 
     the context. Germany, world leader in hydrogen research 
     investment--about $12 million a year since the late 1970s 
     until it was blindsided by the expense of reunification--is 
     hardly the renewable-energy economy I imagined. An official 
     from the state of Bavaria's electric utility, which has the 
     world's biggest hydrogen pilot facility, admits there are no 
     plans to scale up to a full-sized working plant. So what will 
     they do in 30 years, when Bavaria's aging nuclear plants mut 
     be phased out and fossil fuels are expected to be scarce?
       ``I can't answer that question. Nobody can. Nobody gives a 
     damn about the future.''
       Back in my own country, I share this story with Michael 
     Heben, a lanky young materials scientist at the National 
     Renewable Energy Laboratory. Even at BMW and Daimler-Benz, I 
     tell him, hydrogen only gets a small chunk of the research 
     budget compared to conventional engines. I suppose it's not 
     in a company's interest to invent something that renders its 
     most successful product obsolete.
       Heben shrugs. He reminds me we've seen computers grow 
     smaller, faster and cheaper at a breathless pace, all because 
     a couple of kids in a garage dared to try to build something 
     better. When Edison was inventing light bulbs and 
     phonographs, electricity cost 300 times what it does now. As 
     soon as people saw what it could do, they started using it en 
     masse, and the price became practical. Maybe, he suggests, 
     one key discovery will do the same for hydrogen--like the 
     semiconductor work of John Turner, who's splitting water 
     without the intermediate step of first making photovoltaic 
     electricity.
       Other researchers here are cultivating strains of algae 
     that exhale hydrogen. Heben himself is after a revolutionary 
     way to store it. He's trying to prove that submicroscopic 
     tubes made of activated carbon, developed at IBM, suck up 
     hydrogen atoms via capillary action, like a straw. A fuel 
     tank full of the tough, light tubules, each about a billionth 
     of a meter in diameter, could actually hold far more diffuse 
     hydrogen gas than a tank that was empty.
       ``Our goal should be a vehicle that performs like today's 
     cars: same size, weight, acceleration, frequency of 
     refueling. With good, compact, energy-efficient storage, 
     there's no reason we can't do that with clean hydrogen.''
       On NREL's lean hydrogen budget, he's currently able to 
     create enough of a soot-like substance, which contains carbon 
     nanotubules, to coat the inside of a countertop bell jar. To 
     scale up to working size will cost a lot more. At this point, 
     he has no idea where funds will come from, but something 
     makes him believe they will. [[Page S7267]] 
       ``We're so close. so much has been accomplished with just a 
     little. If we really decided that we wanted a clean hydrogen 
     economy, we could have it by 2010. No more oil spills. Fresh 
     air in Denver and L.A. Think of it.''
       Maybe he's right. Curiously, amid panic over Republican 
     threats to dismember research budgets, hydrogen may prove to 
     be not just a survivor but also a winner. The new chairman of 
     the House Committee on Science is Bob Walker, longtime 
     science mentor to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and hydrogen 
     ally of Tom Harkin.
       In his office, decorated with pictures of the space 
     shuttle, Walker reminds me that one of the most powerful 
     forces in the marketplace is ``the love Americans have for 
     roaming the planet freely in their own cars. Hydrogen will 
     make that possible when the present technology gets too dirty 
     to extend into the future.'' He has introduced legislation 
     calling for a quadrupling or research funds for hydrogen over 
     the next three years. Part of the money will be matched by 
     non-federal sources and part expropriated from technologies. 
     Walker believes are either futile or outmoded.
       He has little pity for industries that resist change, 
     including auto makers. ``If Edison were to invent the light 
     bulb today, the headlines would read, `200,000 candle makers 
     lose their jobs.' We've been through this before, like when 
     cars put blacksmiths out of business. It's wrenching, but 
     overall our national competitiveness gets stronger. The same 
     thing will happen in energy. The people themselves will 
     demand it.''
       He pauses to gaze at a plaque naming him the latest 
     recipient of the National Hydrogen Assn.'s Spark M. Matsunaga 
     Award. ``Driving on the interstate, I watch them stringing 
     fiber-optic cable up the median strip for the Internet. The 
     government talks about the Internet but can't come up with a 
     structure. Meantime, it's happening because people want it. 
     When they realize they need clean hydrogen, somebody will 
     find a way to supply that, too.''
     

                          ____________________