Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, a board member of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, says high gas
prices might be a good thing: A way to get Americans over their addiction to oil. Pulido (shown standing outside a hydrogen-powered BMW he’s been test driving) talked to John Gittelsohn about his experiences behind the wheel and on the political stage. Some excerpts:
Q. You have been driving a BMW Hydrogen 7, on loan from the German automaker. What do you think?
A. This car goes on hydrogen and gasoline and you can only tell the difference by a light on the dashboard. The important thing this car shows is that an internal combustion engine can run on both hydrogen and gasoline. It’s a good interim step. As you look at the puzzle in the future, at what point we will be using hydrogen economically, we don’t know. But this puts one piece of the puzzle in place.
Q. What does hydrogen cost?
A. It’s measured in kilograms but they say it comes out to paying about $7 for a gallon of gas. That used to seem incredibly expensive, but now that we’re approaching $5 a gallon, it doesn’t seem that crazy. It only makes sense if you have a green source of hydrogen.
Q. Where do you get the hydrogen now?
A. That’s the kooky thing. Unfortunately, BMW’s headquarters are in Oxnard and so they have to take the car there to fill it up with hydrogen. And they drive it back here on gasoline. There’s a hydrogen station in Irvine, but it’s a different platform. We have hydrogen at the AQMD in Diamond Bar that we’d like to use too.
Q. Where does hydrogen come from?
A. That’s the problem. You make it from oil. And if you use oil to make hydrogen, you aren’t helping things. We’ve got to get off oil.
Q. So what’s a better solution?
A. Electricity. The car I’m driving right now is a plug-in Prius hybrid. I took out the spare tire and put in lithium batteries — a 7.2 kilowatt-hour battery — to store electricity. It has a computer that tells it when to use electricity or gas. At night, I go home and charge it for a couple of hours. I’ve gone 600 miles with eight gallons of gas. That’s 75 miles per gallon. Eventually, we’ll have electric cars that will go 200 to 300 miles on a charge. And they won’t be as expensive over their lifetime. They’ll be cheaper.
Q. For them to be “cheaper,” won’t the price of gasoline have to go up? Is that good?
A. I think it’s absolutely good, just a painful way to do it. I think ultimately it’s the only way to do it. Wall Street won’t finance a product unless it gets a good rate of return. High energy prices, I think, create an environment where courageous politicians can survive and create better policy.
Q. Can you give me an example?
A. The battles I’m having now are to convince people that we need to be leaders. The (Orange County Transit Authority) has 100 Priuses and I’ve been trying to get 10 converted to plug-in hybrids and I’m getting resistance. People say we gotta change our infrastructure to do it. They say “We gotta drop a 110-volt line.”
Q. You mean like you have to get an extension cord?
A. Yes. Something like an extension cord. I’m going to win this battle. I’ve learned that if I stick to it, I’ll win, because the math is on our side. We’ve got to do it very, very quickly, because we’re much more vulnerable than we realize.
To learn more about the BMW Hydrogen 7, CLICK HERE.
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In the big article “Hydrogen Highway Beckons” on page 3 of the July 5 Register there isn’t any reference to oil being required to make hydrogen - as today’s article on page 11 says. Please verify this is correct, and how significant is the amount required. Also, who is the manufacturer of the Li-ion battery in Mayor Pulido’s converted Prius?
Here’s a comment from another well-informed reader, Lloyd Wentworth:
Read your Q&A with Mayor Pulido this morning. I’m on a campaign to stop the spread of nonsense.
Hydrogen: Burning hydrogen is relatively clean, with some nitrogen oxide emission. Getting energy from hydrogen with a fuel cell is very clean but not very efficient. Hydrogen is typically not made from oil. It is typically made from methane or natural gas, which produces carbon monoxide which is then converted to carbon dioxide. Sound familiar? It can be made from water. All of these processes require high energy input. The energy must be produced. If that energy is not produced by nuclear or solar power, you just shifted the hydrocarbon burning to another location and increased the amount of it because of the very low efficiency of the conversion/reconversion process.
Electricity: Electricity is neither free nor clean. The 75 MPG figure quoted for the Prius doesn’t take into account the cost of the electricity used to charge the batteries or the mess that’s made producing it. 50% of U.S. electricity comes from coal and another 20% from oil or natural gas. Again, clean at the source, not at the producing end and low efficiency because of multiple conversions. Also not terribly likely that electricity will stay the same price while gasoline is getting more expensive because of high oil prices.
Tell the Mayor that I’m sorry but he has found a typical politician’s solution. It looks good but really only pushes the problem to where it’s not as easily seen.
Lloyd