Commentary:

We haven't properly defined the problem...

Matt (aka Blackfive) recently posted some figures on the origins of the oil consumed by the United States and placed those sources of oil in context with the war in Iraq, the relations with Saudi Arabia, and the recent increase in gasoline prices in the United States. His post prompted some thoughts and stirred some memories from the 1970s, where there was a true shortage of gasoline, not just a rapid rise in prices. Many solutions have been proposed to make the United States more "energy independent", and unfortunately most of those solutions evince the same kind of wishful thinking and disregard for consequences that characterize the vast majority of policy making by BOTH major political parties in the United States.

The vast majority of the discussion has been on how to produce more oil domestically to reduce imports. These ideas are merely band-aids at best and are not truly long term solutions. Some propose tax breaks and/or subsidies for oil companies to produce more oil from fields in the United States. There's not really that much oil that is recoverable in the United States that isn't already being pumped. Any oil still in the ground in fields not being exploited would be so expensive to get out of the ground that it would make the cost of the Iraq war look like peanuts. Some advocate opening up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That "solution" isn't even worthy of the appellation of "band-aid" because the total amount of oil recoverable from that area is much less than the amount consumed by the United States in one year.

The problem of oil consumption versus oil sources is a box that we've been stuck in for decades, and these ideas are firmly lodged in the center of that box. The vast majority of proposals that receive serious consideration focus on "oil" rather than on the fundamental issue, which is energy: the storage of energy, the transportation of energy, and the conversion of energy. Oil is merely an extremely convenient way to store, transport, and ultimately convert energy into a form we desire. Burning gasoline is converting chemical energy to motion or heat, chemical energy that was stored long ago in the decay of the dinosaurs and prehistoric plants into oil, nuclear power arises from converting the energy stored in a large atom into heat with the byproduct smaller atoms (sadly, these smaller atoms tend to be radioactive), and solar power is merely converting the photons from the sun into electricity. This is what I mean by getting "out of the box". Our problem is not oil, it is energy; it is how to store energy, how to move it, and how to convert that energy into a form that is useful (heat, motion, and so forth).

If our goal is truly to be independent of foreign sources for our energy, it is time to think outside of that box. It is only from outside that the ever shrinking, constraining box can be broken. A hydrogen based economy (as opposed to our current hydrocarbon based economy) is very appealing from several standpoints. Although burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine still creates nitrous and nitric oxides (which are NOT good chemicals) the main byproduct of that reaction is water, which is much more benign than the carbon compounds that arise from burning hydrocarbons. In addition, hydrogen is one of the primary reactants in fuel cells, which can act as very efficient generators of electricity with the primary byproduct again being water. Hydrogen can be obtained from water, and when it burns it returns back to water, making it a nice closed cycle.

So, why don't we already have a hydrogen based economy if it is so wonderful?

Well, to start, hydrogen isn't nearly as easy to handle as petroleum products and other liquid hydrocarbons. Under standard temperature and pressure (that is, the temperature and pressure that we live in), hydrogen is a gas why the vast majority of petroleum products and hydrocarbons we use are liquids. This makes both the cost and the expertise required to handle hydrogen higher than for the hydrocarbon family. The distribution system for hydrogen gas or compressed liquid hydrogen does not exist, nor is there a convenient way to have a moderately sized vehicle (such as a car) go for a "self-serve fill up" of the tank. A conventional gasoline engine can be run using hydrogen (if you inject a small amount of water to prevent premature combustion, aka engine knock), but that combustion produces the nitric and nitrous oxides that I mentioned earlier, which are both not entirely healthy to breathe in large quantities and can also act as greenhouse gases. On the plus side for hydrogen, the quantities of these nitrogen containing gases are no more than are produced by gasoline engines in use now. Also, it requires energy (in the form of electricity in the easiest to implement method) to get hydrogen from water. That energy must come from somewhere, whether natural gas or oil fired power plants, nuclear energy, solar energy, or whatever source. This moves our problem of energy from the fuel pump further upstream to where we generate electricity, but that problem is also solvable in the short term with increased use of nuclear power (despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear power is still more environmentally benign than burning coal or oil or even natural gas, and safer reactors have been designed) and in the longer term with solar power and other "renewable" forms of energy conversion.

I am leading up to an important point here, which is although in general it is best to let the "invisible hand", aka "the market", determine the path our economy takes in terms of technology, in this particular case I think a conscious choice of policy and preferred direction is better. Otherwise, we will continue down our path of increased dependence on foreign sources for the energy we use to drive our economy. What I am advocating is not just research money for hydrogen based engines, fuel cells, and the like. I am calling for a large scale effort (larger than the program to land a man on the moon) to convert our entire energy economy from hydrocarbon to hydrogen. The distribution problems could be solved with subsidies similar to those proposed for domestic oil exploration and exploitation, and the other issues are not insurmountable. This is a true issue of national security which does require government intervention based upon a rational analysis, not political concerns. Am I being idealistic? Yes, I am, but our nation itself was founded on idealism, so there are occasions where it is not out of place, and we have proven that idealism does not always lead to disaster by our existence as the oldest continually functioning democracy in the world.