The Second Law guarantees us that every energy source takes more energy to produce than it gives back when it’s used. So the electrical energy we get when we run water through the dam’s generators is less than the energy it took for the sun to evaporate the ocean water and for the wind to blow the cloud over the mountains, so that the rain could fall and pour into the lake behind the dam. The energy we get from gasoline is less than what the prehistoric plants absorbed from the sun while they lived, plus the geologic heat and pressure they were under as they got converted into oil over millions of years. It’s just convenient that they already took care of that before we showed up. That near-obligatory pearl of wisdom about taking more energy is a truism; it doesn’t matter. There’s a similar, but not equivalent point that does matter. It’s whether or not the source of energy costs more money to produce than you can sell it for. Especially since it costs the Saudis around 50 cents to suck a barrel of oil out of the ground which they can then sell for $50 or $60. Not only can they and their corporate partners make nice juicy profits, they can also easily afford to cut prices enough to undersell just about any alternative energy source and chase it out of the market.

There is another reason that getting less energy out of an energy source than was put into it doesn’t matter, and this is the main point I want to make: we aren’t short of energy, we’re short of means of energy storage. We’re awash in energy. There are gigajoules of energy pouring down onto our deserts (and everywhere else that doesn’t happen to be cloudy at the moment) every day, during daylight hours. Right, sunlight. We just don’t have a cost-effective way of scooping a bunch of it up and storing it in our cars until we need it to move us around. The issue is efficient and economical energy storage. Efficient in terms of amount of energy stored per volume and weight, that is – I don’t care how energy-efficient it is to produce, as long as I can afford it. Gasoline is a fuel. That means it stores energy in chemical form. It stores so much energy so compactly that you have to be careful with it, because it can explode (before you want it to, which would be a teensy bit at a time in the combustion chambers of your car’s engine). A battery is a form of electrochemical energy storage, one that is much less efficient than gasoline, in terms of amount of energy stored per volume or weight. A spinning flywheel stores energy in mechanical form, angular momentum, but is also much less compact than gasoline and leaks off energy through friction relatively rapidly. Hydrogen is similar to gasoline, in that it stores energy chemically, which we release by explosively oxidizing it. It requires a more expensive container, and isn’t as volume-efficient as gasoline, but gets reasonably close if it’s compressed.

Hydrogen  is the most frequent victim of pundit-inflicted dismissal by the takes-more-energy canard. The usual method for producing hydrogen is to separate it from natural gas. It takes energy to do that, and while the energy doesn’t have to be, the natural gas isn’t cheap. Another common method is to separate water into its hydrogen and oxygen components by applying electricity or heat to it. Water is a cheap raw material, but the hydrogen and oxygen atoms dearly love to cling to one another. “Splitting” water takes a tremendous amount of energy. Using heat requires raising its temperature to 2000 degrees Centigrade. I’m keeping my eye on SHEC Labs, a privately-held Canadian company that’s working on a catalytic method of splitting hydrogen from water. That essentially means that you bring in a “third party” chemical (the catalyst) that temporarily binds with the hydrogen to help separate it from the oxygen. They expect this process to bring the required heat from 2000 degrees C down to 850 degrees C. This means that the size of the solar furnace you would need to generate the heat would be  pickup-truck-size instead of baseball-field-size, much cheaper to build and operate. That, in turn, has political as well as economic implications. Cheap hydrogen conversion with a small, affordable solar furnace would democratize fuel production by de-monopolizing it. Communities could decide to go into the business for themselves, and for an initial investment of around $100K (my completely uninformed guess) start producing the fuel for their own vehicles. Stand by for a Bush Administration push to invade Canada, once the oil companies get wind of this.

So, fellow blogoids, give yourselves permission to be hydrogen fuel cell buffs. We’d become energy-independent, with a fuel whose combustion byproduct is water instead of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Scientists and engineers at SHEC Labs or some other lab not owned by Exxon-Mobil will have to figure out how to produce hydrogen cheaply, and an engaged, proactive government would have to give it a tax advantage to protect against OPEC underselling, and said government would have to invest in the filling station infrastructure, because it would take longer than we’d want for the market to catch on to the technology trend and make the investment. Sounds progressive to me.