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Example research essay topic: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Millions Of Dollars - 2,556 words

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Cars that go 5, 000 miles between fill-ups, electric power plants you buy like appliances, a world with radically reduced pollution, and a better standard of living... Sounds like a sci-fi pipe dream - if it weren't for all these automobile and power companies spending billions to make it real. by Jacques Leslie I'm at the headquarters of Ballard Power Systems in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, and my big fuel cell moment is about to occur. Following the example of the premier of British Columbia, the mayor of Chicago, and the chair of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, I am going to drink the exhaust from Ballard's prototype fuel cell municipal bus. This is less foolhardy than it sounds, since the only emission from the fuel cell engine is water.

For this reason, many people think that fuel cells can change the world. At Ballard, the exhaust-drinking routine has grown so tiresome that when I ask for a sip, Paul Lancaster, Ballard's treasurer, doesn't even offer me a glass: he suggests I cup my hands under the bus's exhaust pipe. The pipe points straight down, presumably because its effluence is not a noxious gas that must be spewed into the atmosphere in hopes that it will dissipate. I bend over, and, within a few seconds, I collect several teaspoons of warm, clear liquid. As I begin to drink, I try to imagine a mountain stream, but the water is disappointingly bland. "Like distilled water, " Lancaster explains, and I realize that what I'm drinking is, in a sense, exactly that - the pure product of the union of hydrogen, the element that powers fuel cells, and oxygen in the engine. In some engine designs, even the exhaust water becomes an asset, recirculated to aid in internal processes.

One tenet of the coming hydrogen age, according to businessman-cum-fuel cell visionary Joe Maceda, is that "pollution is a measure of inefficiency, and inefficiency is lost profit. " After decades of unfulfilled promise, fuel cell momentum is now so great that its emergence as a predominant technology appears just short of inevitable. During the early 1990 s, nearly every major car manufacturer in the world launched a program to build a fuel cell automobile. Then, in April, a stunning announcement by Daimler-Benz AG suddenly gave the fuel cell age a timetable. Mercedes-Benz's parent company said it was investing US$ 145 million to buy a one-quarter interest in Ballard, the world's leader in fuel cell technology, and $ 150 million toward a joint venture with Ballard to create a new vehicle fuel cell engine company. Daimler-Benz also announced that beginning in 2005, the new company would produce 100, 000 fuel cell engines annually. This is a remarkable figure, considering that the company, the world's 15 th-largest auto manufacturer, makes only 700, 000 cars a year now. "Daimler-Benz has a history of being one of the more conservative companies in the auto business, and arguably the auto business is one of the more conservative industries in the world, " says Bill Reinert, a Toyota mechanical engineer. "So when somebody like Daimler pours millions of dollars into a technology and comes up making a statement like that, you have to say this might be pretty serious. " Though Daimler's fuel cell car will be powered by methanol, a hydrogen-rich derivative of natural gas, it is widely assumed that the use of fossil fuels to power fuel cells will be transitional, leading to an era in which hydrogen is extracted from sustainable energy sources.

It is hard to overstate the implications of such a development: A drastic decline in air pollution, oil spills, acid rain, and greenhouse-gas emissions. An epochal geopolitical shift as global reliance on Middle East oil comes to an end and international trade balances are realigned. The emergence of quiet, decentralized electric plants sized according to need - small enough to power your car (and perhaps, at night, your house); big enough to power a town of 15, 000 people, or, in tandem, a city. The disappearance of the electric grid is a possibility; a makeover of the electric-utility industry is nearly certain. It is likely to take 50 to 100 years to achieve a mature "hydrogen economy, " but the impact of fuel cells should be felt long before that. Over the next decade, products are likely to emerge on the market that are both more efficient and more environmentally benign than their predecessors.

The century-long reign of internal-combustion engines will almost certainly be challenged by fuel cell-powered cars and buses that are quiet and clean, and use energy far more efficiently than today's vehicles. Naval forces in several countries are looking into fuel cells to run submarines and provide auxiliary power on oceangoing vessels; the US Army is building a backpack-sized fuel cell generator that can power a soldier's electronics gear, from night-vision goggles to infrared heat detectors. Fuel cell-driven desalination plants may offer clean water cheaply, defusing a potentially critical 21 st-century resource shortage. Within a few years, fuel cells will probably power professional video cameras and many other products that now use batteries. Your laptop may eventually run on a fuel cell whose range is measured in days, not hours. To be sure, all this is heady stuff considering that no commercial products now use the technology. (The one quasi-exception is a 200 -kilowatt power generator manufactured by International Fuel Cells of South Windsor, Connecticut.

IFC has installed more than 90 units to power buildings ranging from hospitals to casinos to jails, but the US Defense Department subsidized a third of the $ 600, 000 price tag for 70 of the units. ) Nevertheless, fuel cells are poised to ride some powerful historical trends. For one thing, the trend in energy use over the last one and a half centuries has been toward reduced carbon consumption and increased use of hydrogen. Each predominant feedstock - from wood, through coal, then oil, natural gas, and, ultimately perhaps, renewables - has contained more hydrogen and less carbon than its predecessor, and each successive fuel has been cleaner and more powerful. In addition, just as computer telecommunications has promoted information decentralization and de materialization, fuel cells promise to untie energy consumers from centralized power generators - you might say that energy wants to be free. "The information revolution and the coming energy revolution are similar in that we are using human ingenuity to replace energy and raw materials, " says Joseph J. Room, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the US Department of Energy. "We can use information technology to avoid travel and transportation, and we can use energy technology to reduce energy consumption, pollution, and our use of natural resources.

Both revolutions represent a fundamental transition to a world in which we are not resource constrained, yet we have a higher standard of living. " The irony is that for all of this technology's potential benefits, the one thing it notably lacks is strong public support. As William Hoagland, president of the fledgling advocacy group Hydrogen 2000, points out, "There are a lot of political and other forces supporting the conventional fuel structure, and we don't have a hydrogen industry or a public constituency asking for change. " The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel cell research and development over several decades, but in recent years, as that investment has finally borne fruit, the public perception - well represented in Congress - is that fuel cells are a stagnant technology. "The last few years have created a lag between what fuel cells can do, what funding ought to be, and what everybody's understanding of them is, " Room says. As the US Environmental Protection Agency's newly toughened clean-air standards and the upcoming international meeting on global warming in Kyoto focus attention on combating pollution, the technology's stature in the US is likely to rise. Indeed, Room says it is understood at the DOE's "highest levels" that fuel cells will be part of President Clinton's evolving strategy to counter climate change. Nevertheless, more than one-quarter of the department's current $ 16 billion budget is spent on nuclear-weapons management, while all fuel cell programs together amount to about $ 90 million. Sandy Thomas, a researcher at Directed Technologies Inc.

who consults for Ford Motor Company's fuel cell vehicle program, says, "If I could take 1 percent of the nuclear-weapons budget from the Department of Energy and put it into hydrogen fuel cells, that would probably take 10 years off hydrogen development. But the weapons budget is sacrosanct - you can't attack it, even though we don't build, test, or explode nuclear weapons any longer. " Compared with the internal-combustion engine (ICE), the fuel cell engine is a simple, if elegantly engineered, device. Its lineage dates to 1839, but it wasn't until the early 1960 s, when NASA began using the technology to power spaceships, that fuel cells found their first application. Unlike an ICE, which runs on high-temperature explosions, most fuel cells rely on relatively cool electrochemical reactions.

The fuel cell has no moving parts: as hydrogen feeds into the cell, the catalyst, a thin layer of platinum, induces the gas to separate into electrons and protons (hydrogen ions). In the case of the proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell, the technology favored to power cars, the protons pass through a membrane to combine with oxygen on the other side, producing water. The electrons, which cannot pass through the membrane, are channeled along an external route through an electric motor, which the electrons drive. The process is two to three times more efficient than that of an ICE, and its only by-products are electricity, water, and a moderate amount of heat. "Fuel cells are much more natural, " says Joe Maceda, the visionary who this year formed Power Technologies Corporation, which, among other things, markets fuel cell-driven desalination plants. "Human beings, for instance, are basically electrochemically driven membrane processes. We take in oxidant and fuel, we change the form of it, things move through membranes, and we oxygenate our blood - that's how nature works. Most industry is built on brute force: you start a process by increasing pressure or temperature.

Nature changes free energy states much more gently, and, as a result, much more efficiently. So the next century is going to see a shift toward electrochemical processes and away from temperature and pressure systems. " Redesigning cars At the core of fuel cell activity is Ballard, a 325 -employee company that has contracts with eight of the world's nine largest car manufacturers. (The lone exception, Toyota, is thought to be spending more than $ 700 million a year to develop alternative-fuel cars in-house. ) Ballard is positioning itself as the Intel of the fuel cell industry: just as the Silicon Valley giant tapped a vast market by providing microprocessors for many computer brands, the Canadianfirm hopes to build fuel cells for a virtually unlimited array of electrical products. Financial markets like Ballard's prospects: though the company still has no significant earnings, its stock is worth about six times what it was when the company went public three years ago. Founded in 1979 as a contract research and development firm focusing on lithium rechargeable batteries, Ballard switched to fuel cells when funding for battery projects dwindled in the early 1980 s. General Electric developed PEM fuel cells for the Gemini space program in the early 1960 s, but when NASA found a related technology with superior characteristics for space applications, it shelved work on PEM fuel cells, and GE's patents in the field eventually lapsed. At the prompting of Canada's Department of Defense, which was searching for an unobtrusive field generator, Ballard took up where GE left off and made rapid advancements in intensifying PEM fuel cells' power potential.

Along the way to leadership in the technology, Ballard got a couple of big breaks. One was a series of discoveries in the early 1990 s by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Until then, PEM fuel cells had been considered too expensive for mass production because their catalysts required a substantial amount of costly platinum, but the Los Alamos scientists found a way to reduce the necessary platinum by a factor of 40. Suddenly, it was conceivable that fuel cells could compete with ICEs. Paul Lancaster, my Ballard tour guide, denies that the Los Alamos discoveries aided the Canadianfirm, but Shimshon Gottesfeld, the laboratory's project leader, says Ballard officials visited Los Alamos regularly and showed deep interest in the lab " standings. Equally important, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) decided in 1990 to stimulate development of nonpolluting cars by requiring that zero-emission vehicles comprise 2 percent of annual statewide car sales by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003.

Though CARB had battery-powered electric cars in mind, the batteries' weight, uncertain durability, and short range have stymied the cars' development. Fuel cell developers, however, were galvanized. Consultant Sandy Thomas says bluntly, "Without the zero-emissions program in California, I wouldn't have a job. " When CARB dropped its 1998 requirement last year because battery-powered car development had stalled, Thomas and most other fuel cell advocates were relieved, since fuel cell cars now had five more years to prove themselves. The most vexing issue developers face is the selection of fuel to deliver hydrogen to fuel cell engines. It's a choice with huge environmental implications.

Automobile emissions cause more than 60 percent of air pollution in urban areas. The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that in the US alone, one kind of car emissions - fine particulates - causes 50, 000 to 60, 000 deaths a year; several other types of vehicle emissions are also thought lethal, but no mortality estimates exist for them. In addition, automotive use of fossil fuels accounts for 20 percent of the nation's carbon-dioxide emissions, the most significant greenhouse gas. If the US vehicle fleet switches from ICEs burning fossil fuel to fuel cell engines using hydrogen derived from renewable sources - which may be possible within several decades - levels of both kinds of car emissions would drop to zero. Even if the hydrogen is produced from natural gas, as is common now, vehicular air pollution would end and greenhouse-gas emissions would drop by more than 60 percent. The global consequences are even more extreme.

The DOE estimates that in a mere 20 years - from 1995 to 2015 - the demand for energy will grow by 54 percent worldwide and by 129 percent in developing Asia. China and India, the world's two most populous nations, are expected to satisfy an exploding demand for energy by tapping vast reserves of coal, among the dirtiest of fossil fuels; it is widely assumed that the pollution and climactic impact of such developments will be grave. The advent of hydrogen not only poses a dramatically cleaner alternative, but also offers developing countries a chance to bypass at least part of the expense of building a fossil fuel infrastructure just as industrialized countries are poised to turn to more advanced technologies. Yet shifting to hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars will not be easy. True enough, hydrogen is already used in all sorts of processing, from the hardening of fats and oils - hydrogenation - to, ...


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