Hydrogen Power for Home? Not.

[This blog entry was turned into my USA Today column of Feb. 20, 2004.]

According to a CNN article, “Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.”

The article goes on to get people excited — here, at least in prototype form, is a small, inexpensive device that can produce hydrogen from ethanol so people can power their homes with hydrogen. Neat!

But wait.

First, ethanol doesn’t grow on trees. Well, not exactly. It’s commonly made from plants like corn. Lots of corn. LOTS of corn.

Specifically, it takes a little more than 26 pounds of corn to make 1 gallon of ethanol, according to a study at Cornell.

An acre of land can yield about 7,100 pounds of corn — that’s about 328 gallons of ethanol per year. So you would need a lot of acres of corn to make the ethanol. (According to the folks at HowStuffWorks, you would need half an acre of corn just to power a single cross-country drive in a Toyota Camry.) That’s acreage that requires water, pesticides, herbicides… you get the idea. (It’s also acreage that’s not growing food.) And yes, making the ethanol from the corn takes energy, too.

So when you think about it, although hydrogen power sounds great, the reality is very different. We’d need millions of acres devoted to growing the plants which we’d have to convert to ethanol before converting them to hydrogen to burn. That’s a lot of wasted energy and a lot of wasted land.

(Oh, and the CNN article says at the end, “The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home.” Um, wrong. Most homes need in the range of 4-5 kilowatts of power — more if they’ve got central air or electric heat.)