BMW Series 7 car runs on Hydrogen

1. Fuel tank, holds approx 8kg of liquid hydrogen at -253C

2. Petrol tank, with 74 litre capacity

3. Pressure control valve

4. Internal combustion engine, uses petrol or liquid hydrogen

Source: BMW

BMW's hydrogen car: Beauty or beast? from BBC News (edited by Chris Street)

As one of the first journalists to drive the world's first series-produced car powered by zero-emission hydrogen, BBC News business reporter Jorn Madslien assesses whether it is a truly green initiative or merely a cynical marketing ploy.

Racing to save the world?

Heading north out of Berlin, towards miles and miles of German autobahn, the roaring six-litre engine belies the top-of-the-range BMW's true potential: to save the world.

Powered by liquid hydrogen that is stored in a vacuum-sealed tank, the engine delivers a whopping 300bhp, yet the emission escaping through the exhaust pipe is mainly pure water vapour.

Unlike rival hydrogen models in the making, which use fuel cells, the BMW Hydrogen 7 is kitted out with a conventional combustion engine that can also run on petrol.

This makes it possible to use it as an everyday car, which is why BMW has announced plans to put hydrogen powered cars into production, months or years ahead of its competitors.

Having stolen a march on its rivals, BMW is far from shy about milking it for all it is worth.

Finding a place to refuel remains a major problem

Wealthy endorsement

BMW has already received plenty of offers from politicians and executives, scientists and athletes, rock stars and TV personalities, all eager to help "create visibility for hydrogen".

Madonna, David Suzuki, Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger are said to be among a long line of celebrities queuing up to endorse the car, and perhaps further enhance their own green images in the process.

But they will have to pay for the privilege.

The H2 button switches between green and gas guzzler mode

The risk of explosion if the car is parked inside a garage and the lack of luggage space caused by the massive hydrogen tank taking up half the boot.

With no more than five hydrogen fuelling stations in the world supporting BMW's technology, early adopters will have to rely on mobile fuelling vehicles that are set to arrive, complete with support crews.

Or they can press a little button on the steering wheel that switches to petrol and extends the car's range by a further 500 gas-guzzling km.

BMW says it wants to lead the way to encourage governments and investors to provide a regulatory framework and an infrastructure that can make a hydrogen economy a reality.

Even more important than getting the fuelling stations up and running is the need to find ways to create enough cheap and clean hydrogen.

"Hydrogen is an energy carrier," points out Wolfgang Leder of Total Deutschland's new energy team.

"There are several ways to produce it. Wind power would be the best, or solar."

The problem is that currently most hydrogen is generated from fossil fuels, since the cost of generating it from, say, solar energy can be up to four times higher.

And when hydrogen is produced this way, well-to-tank and tank-to-wheel analysis shows the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel powered vehicles.

What is required is large scale investment in technology, BMW insists, and the carmaker - along with many of its rivals - is prepared to do its bit.

"One day, even petrol and diesel will have to compete with hydrogen," predicts BMW's marketing and brand manager, Torsten Muller-Otvos.

The company declines to divulge exactly how much money it has sunk into the project, though it says 300 of its 7,500 engineers work on it full time.

James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University

New Scientist 13 September 2006, James Martin, Magazine issue 2568

James Martin believes that by using logic, and by understanding history, technology and the behaviour of complex organisms we can explore the future properly and find solutions.

The complete article is 1492 words long. To continue reading this article, subscribe to New Scientist. Get 4 issues of New Scientist magazine and instant access to all online content for only £2.95

James Martin founded the 21st Century School at Oxford University which is concerned with the most urgent problems that humanity faces. It has 10 institutes covering science and civilisation, the future of the mind, ageing, information and communication technology, emergent infections in humans, migration, future of humanity, bioscience ethics, environmental change and world education.

Markets and capitalism are the solution to some very big problems requiring complex, expensive solutions and the only safe bet is to do this through corporations. You can set up corporations motivated by profit to deal with these big problems such as global warming. General Electric has set out to transform 12 product lines into the kind of ecologically inventive products they think customers will want five years from now.

I have this idea of a World Upper House, rather like the UK's House of Lords, which oversees the elected House of Commons. It would be populated by statesmen who have been through the political mill and know how to get action, as well as scientists who can talk to and trust the statesmen. This world upper house would make decisions about the new energy sources or forms of transport etc.

And they would choose anything other than carbon. Right now there seems to be a strong motivation not to have non-carbon solutions because of the subsidies. The total subsidy for the car and petroleum industries is around a trillion dollars. Huge profits are being made out of huge subsidies and these profits are going to destroy the planet.

I think James Lovelock's view of runaway global warming is going to be proved right. The ice in the Arctic - which is the size of the US - is melting, and if it disappears, the Earth will absorb massive amounts of extra heat. If we took action right now, we could slow it down, though it's not clear whether we could stop all the self-perpetuating processes that have already begun.

Mass Human Extinction

Writing in the British newspaper The Independent in January 2006, James Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the Twenty First century.

James Lovelock claims that by the end of the century, the average temperature in temperate regions will increase by as much as 8°C and by up to 5°C in the tropics, leaving much of the world's land uninhabitable and unsuitable for farming. He suggests that "we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can."

We may not have time to solve the real problems of humanity because there is a lot of apathy. If everyone was excited about solving the problems, it would work fine, but that's not the case. It will take a catastrophe to get most people interested - this is how things happen. For example, the US Food and Drug Administration tightened up its regulations after the thalidomide scandal, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights & Preamble with 30 Articles was drafted after the Holocaust.

We're almost certainly going to get some kind of catastrophe in the next 20 years or so, such as a bird flu pandemic.

Right now it isn't poor people who are damaging the planet, it's the rich. What if you could turn them to eco-affluence, with a high standard of living which doesn't harm the planet? This will involve a huge transition away from a consumer society. And a lot of ideas to solve global warming will be politically controversial. If you put shades up in space to shield our planet from the sun, for example, this would affect countries around the world differently, so would cause controversy.

James Martin Quotes

“It isn't the poor people who are damaging the planet, it's the rich”

"Now people are driven to develop specific skills to make money."

"There's a wisdom deficit in our world."

"I feel like I'm at the beginning of my life aged 73. When I was 18, I remember Bertrand Russell saying that the key to being 90 is to keep learning."

"A lot of apathetic people are as happy as pigs, watching reality TV shows and getting drunk on a Friday night."

"The biggest problem in solving the urgent problems that face humanity is apathy: the public is not putting pressure on the politicians."

From issue 2568 of New Scientist magazine, 13 September 2006, page 46-47 (with other links added by Chris Street)

Profile

After reading physics at the University of Oxford in the 1950s, James Martin worked as a rocket scientist before joining IBM. In 1981 he set up a management consultancy, Headstrong, which holds seminars for politicians and business leaders. His latest book is called The Meaning of the 21st Century.