Rotary speaker touts hydrogen-powered vehicles

Aug. 30—The race against time is on in relation to fossil fuel availability, Fort Worth scientist and business owner Steve Hench said, and the consequences are serious.

"We know [oil] is finite and only so much left," Hench said on Thursday at the Cleburne Rotary Club's weekly luncheon. "We don't know exactly how finite it is but, according to a 2016 [U.S. Energy Information Administration] report, there are about 1.3 to 1.6 trillion barrels of oil left in the world that are accessible.

"That sounds like a lot until you consider that we use about 100 million barrels a day, which gives us about 16,000 days. So, by those projections, it's game over for oil by 2052."

The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere at Stanford University reported similar findings in a 2019 publication, which predicts the world will run out of oil reserves by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090.

In a more optimistic prediction, the U.S. Energy Information Association that same year reported that the U.S. has enough natural gas to last 84 years.

They noted, however, that those projections could change "depending on how much is actually produced and changes in estimated amounts of technically recoverable resources."

Such is true of oil as well, Hench said, labeling the 2052 expiration date overly optimistic.

This because of the exponential decay problem.

"A second thing that correlates with that projected game over date is the energy return on energy investment," Hench said. "It's like a wolf hunting to track down it's prey and consume it. It gets so many calories back for that effort. But once it takes more energy to get your food than you get from the food, you're running an energy deficit."

Which, Hench said, is where the oil industry is today.

"The energy required to get a barrel of oil out of the ground 100 years ago was about 2 percent of that barrel," Hench said. "Because the first wells in Pennsylvania, Spindletop and all, the oil was basically right there. But today, that energy required is about 80 percent.

"So, when we take and apply that, it's not 2052, it's actually 2045 and game over. We really don't have a lot of time left and we're going to start seeing the consequences of declining global petroleum output by the mid '20s."

For those and other reasons, the need for renewable energy development is vital.

Wind and solar while helpful are problematic, Hench said. Both are intermittent and the additional energy output required to make them constant also renders them largely non feasible.

Nor, Hench contended, are electric vehicles the answer.

"The overall message is that battery-powered electric vehicles consume about the same quantity of fossil fuel as their petrol-fueled counterparts," Hench said.

Hench employed basic math — albeit a lot of basic math — to illustrate his claim.

"When we look at powering anything for human endeavor, we look at the energy we need," Hench said. "We look at the energy content of the fuel and then the efficiency of which the fuel is utilized to meet our end objective."

Other factors to consider are that internal combustion engines — about one fifth of each gallon going into the tank ends up in the drive shaft — are only 20 percent to 25 percent efficient, Hench said.

Likewise, Hench said, much of the energy put out by power plants gets lost in transmission between the plant and its ultimate destination. Important,he said, when factoring in transmission of electricity to charging stations for cars.

"We have to have three times the energy coming out of the power plant in fuel content to produce one unit of energy," Hench said.

Hench labeled claims that electric vehicles will be able to be charged in five minutes a pipe dream.

"The amount of electrical energy flow required to do that would be 1.2 megawatts of energy flowing into that car," Hench said. "Now, the average home consumes about 1.5 kilowatts of energy. So, in other words, that car would use the current flow of 100 homes if you were to charge it that fast. And how fast do you think that battery would heat up?"

The more realistic charge time is about an hour, Hench said, which makes electric vehicles impractical.

Hench cited a QT gas station with 20 fuel pumps near his home.

"If you wanted to charge electric vehicles with the same amount of business run through and those vehicles taking an hour to charge, you'd have to have a station that's 20 times as large," Hench said. "Almost three blocks of real estate and infrastructure."

Hydrogen, Hench said, is more efficient than fossil fuel or electric.

Hench owns H2 Ranch, a Fort Worth company that has developed technology for economical production of green hydrogen.

Hydrogen powered vehicles, Hench said, are 60 percent efficient versus 20 percent to 25 percent for fossil fueled engines.

"We are in the process of raising money to commercialize it now," Hench said. "The prototypes have all worked and everything has been good on the small pilot scale."

Following a 2003 State of the Union speech by then President George W. Bush, which has come to be known as the hydrogen speech, the U.S. Department of Energy reached similar conclusions and tackled the challenge in 2010, Hench said.

"At the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado," Hench said. "Using solar or wind turbines to split water. It has to be one of those. Doesn't make sense to use power plants because then you have more energy losses in the end. They determined that wind was more cost effective than solar."

All the same, production costs remained prohibitive.

Hench said that his company, through innovations, have substantially cut those production costs. Another plus, he said, is that the window between initial introduction and mass use totals about 40 years. Good because that allows coal and other fossil fuel industries to function for the foreseeable future without major upheaval and allows for the gradual implementation of the infrastructure required for hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

A tank of hydrogen versus a tank of gas works out roughly the same, Hench said, about 300 miles per fill up.

"But say I want to drive to Fredericksburg," Hench said. "How am I going to get back? You can't."

Commercial vehicles running area routes are the logical starting point," Hench said.

"We can deliver to their fuel pumps every week," Hench said. "So, a business with a fleet of 100 trucks buys three or four hydrogen-powered trucks to start, gets used to them. Buys another truck and, as their fleets ramp up, our business is growing too.

"Eventually that spills into 7-11 adding a hydrogen pump, then another. Over time that trickles down to the consumer market and the addition of hydrogen pumps at more and more stations."

Such fuel is sustainable forever, Hench said.

"We don't have to drill holes in the ground," Hench said. "All we do is take water, a few specially designed windmill turbines and this product comes out and we ship it to market. And it ends up making water as its exhaust."

Such could also make Texas an energy capital.

"The number of hydrogen ranches that would have to be built would be immense," Hench said. "But Texas is big with a lot of open, dry land that you can't even run cattle on and we could produce more energy output than the oil output of Texas and Saudi Arabia combined."