Our future in five atoms
Hydrogen’s potential for the region is to give new life to existing infrastructure.
In 1985, two Rice University scientists and a British collaborator discovered a new form of carbon in the shape of a soccer ball just one nanometer wide. That’s just a billionth of a meter, and smaller than the DNA in your cells. A few years later, a tubular form of these tiny carbon molecules was discovered and these carbon nanotubes can join together to form materials with extraordinary properties — greater strength than steel and the conductivity on par with aluminum wire.
Seventeen years ago this month, Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, one of the two Rice scientists, testified to Congress about the potential of nanotubes to power a clean energy revolution.
Battling cancer, his hair taken by chemotherapy, Smalley urged Congress to help American scientists “create a cornucopia of new technologies that will … solve the energy problem within this generation.”
“We can find ‘the new oil,’ the new technology that provides the massive clean, low-cost energy necessary for advanced civilization of the 10 billion souls we expect to be living on this planet before this century is out,” he said.
Those who heard him that day in the Capitol still talk about the soaring vision the dying scientist spelled out for the nation, and yet all these years later it’s clear that the full potential of his work was yet to be understood.
So focused on a super material, Smalley’s successors missed the “new oil” in their work — not the carbon they were after, but the hydrogen they all but ignored.
Hydrogen in the mix
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and its potential as a fuel has generated excitement since the 1800s.
For decades, governments and industry have poured money into the research and development of hydrogen — and for several good reasons.
When hydrogen gas burns, only energy and water are produced — so just as with wind and solar energy, there are no greenhouse gases emitted. Using more hydrogen as fuel will help the world limit climate change.
Hydrogen also packs a punch, and can deliver energy with more intensity than either solar and wind. In fact, it holds more energy per unit of weight than fossil fuels. It can be stockpiled against future need and, with adequate precautions, transported safely.
Hydrogen can also power internalcombustion engines. And while early enthusiasm for hydrogen-powered cars has stalled, hydrogen could also offer hope in addressing some of the hardest climate challenges, like greening the world’s trucking fleets.
An electric car can get you to Austin, but existing batteries cannot easily power long-haul trucks — or for that matter planes crossing oceans and cargo ships. Hydrogen, or fuels made from hydrogen, could do the job, as well as reduce emissions in steel production, a notoriously dirty process.
Investors, academic and energy giants have all taken notice.
Exxon Mobil predicted this year that the hydrogen market will be worth $1 trillion by 2040, and others insist its share of the world’s energy supply will only grow.
“Hydrogen over the next 30 years could grow up to 20 percent of the world’s total energy demand,” Mike Graff, the CEO of the Air Liquide’s American operations, told the Chronicle last month.
The payoff for Houston may go well beyond helping limit climate change. Investments in hydrogen will likely rely on many of the same skill sets already found in abundance along the Gulf Coast, and that could mean real alternatives for sustainable careers for oil and gas workers.
Rainbow of options
Each of these potential breakthroughs, however, faces challenges before hydrogen can deliver on its promise. They involve costs and technology that is not yet perfected, even as hydrogen is already in use in a wide variety of forms which experts have conveniently color coded.
European countries are investing in so-called “green hydrogen,” which is made by splitting water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen using an electrical current powered by renewable energy. It emits no carbon and yet for now requires more energy to split the atoms than the process produces.
Using coal to produce so-called “black hydrogen” avoids that problem, but the
process releases large amounts of carbon dioxide. That makes it no better in fighting climate change than burning coal in the first place.
Slightly more promising is “gray hydrogen,” made using natural gas instead of coal. Special pipelines carry hydrogen made here up and down the Gulf Coast, where it is used to make fertilizer and take the sulfur out of gasoline. Houston is already a global leader in this method, but it nevertheless produces large amount of CO2, and is no better for the environment than burning gasoline.
Houston may be ready to help there, too. By adding CO2-capture technology to the process, the production of socalled “blue hydrogen” eliminates the harmful emissions and relies on science and engineering already being developed in Texas and elsewhere. What’s more, the University of Houston and the Center for Houston’s Future have detailed how Texas is suited for such a scheme. The same porous rock that once gushed oil and gas can now be used to store emissions. It would make use of the massive infrastructure — and workforce — already in place along the Gulf Coast.
A future that is already happening
The potential for a true hydrogen breakthrough, however, brings us back to the story of Smalley and how other researchers took up his quest. Starting in the late 1990s, Smalley used carbon monoxide to make nanotubes. Other teams developed processes to create nanotubes using the four hydrogen atom and one carbon in each molecule of natural gas. Normally, burning the natural gas produces carbon dioxide. Nanotubes, however, are made without oxygen, yielding only solid carbon and hydrogen gas.
“When we switched from using carbon monoxide to natural gas, we didn’t think about the hydrogen,” Matteo Pasquali, a professor at Rice who collaborated with Smalley, told the editorial board. A decade after Smalley died, Pasquali realized the value of both products.
Making hydrogen at a large scale this way could potentially do more than give the world another source of bountiful, emission-free energy. It could also accelerate the production of the carbonbased innovations that were the focus of Smalley’s work all along.
Large-scale fibers made from carbon nanotubes could replace steel — a major step forward for a zero-carbon future, given that the nanotubes are lighter and more efficient.
Fiber-grade nanotubes are already made in the tens of tons per year and used in aerospace applications, but the costs are too high and the technology not yet advanced enough to produce the massive quantities that would be needed. But Pasquali is optimistic that Rice’s Carbon Hub can accelerate the curve. He points to the rapid drop in costs of solar energy, which over the course of a few decades went from an environmentalist fever dream to one of the cheapest forms of energy available.
Jobs for the workers we have
The still-untapped promise of hydrogen energy, and the carbon products made possible by its creation also offers real help for the tens of thousands of Texans whose oil and gas industry jobs will likely go away in coming decades.
It could address the thousand sighs, groans and dark guffaws that mix in Houston’s humid air every time President Joe Biden suggests that oil and gas workers can switch to well-paying jobs in renewable energy. Energy workers here know that beyond a few well-established exceptions, there is no easy, job-for-job transition for most oil and gas workers — the refinery machinists, the pipe fitters, the drill operators, the engineers, the geologists.
The hard truth is that solar panels and wind turbines require fewer workers to install and maintain than drilling, moving and refining oil. And the salaries are lower, too.
As this editorial board has argued before, the energy transition to address climate change offers opportunities that Houston should embrace. Hydrogen’s potential for the Houston region is to give new life to infrastructure we have, to take the emissions out of fossil fuel, to spur a revolution in materials and to sustain the jobs of well-paid oil and gas workers.
It won’t be easy to realize that promise. But few big things are.
“I am an American scientist brought up in the Midwest during the Sputnik era,” Smalley, with less than a year to live, told Congress in his 2004 speech, “and like so many of my colleagues in the U.S. and worldwide, I am a technological optimist. I think we can do it.”