Hydrogen's Dirty Details - Village Voice [View All]

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"The day after George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, the president of the National Mining Association, Jack Gerard, wrote him a letter applauding Bush's plan for a pollution-free future powered by fuel cells, the battery-like devices that use hydrogen to release energy. "Coal—reliable, abundant, affordable and domestic," wrote Gerard, "will be the source for much of this hydrogen-powered fuel."

Gerard is right: The so-called hydrogen economy will be a boon for the mining industry. The clean-energy future that many environmentalists have dreamed of has been turned over to the coal industry and a notoriously dirty Siberian mining company run by Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin. A deal personally smoothed over by Bush has given Norilsk Nickel, one of the world's worst polluters, a toehold on American soil—and a major stake in the hydrogen economy. The new mining frenzy is emerging as yet another piece of Bush's "black hydrogen agenda," according to the Green Hydrogen Coalition, whose members include the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and Jeremy Rifkin, a leading proponent of hydrogen fuel cells.

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Hard-rock mineral miners will also have a big role in Bush's version of the hydrogen economy. The most promising hydrogen fuel cell designs depend on expensive platinum group metals, or PGMs, which catalyze hydrogen with oxygen to release energy while resisting corrosion. Most PGMs, particularly platinum and palladium, are produced as by-products of nickel and copper hard-rock mining and smelting, practices that scar landscapes and spew sulfur dioxide and heavy metals into the air and surrounding waterways. Only two mines in the world produce PGMs as their primary product. One is the Stillwater Mining Co. in Nye, Montana, where miners are digging deeper each year to extract palladium and platinum. The Stillwater mine actually enjoys a good reputation among environmentalists. It's underground, and its waste rock and tailings contain little of the toxins associated with the hard-rock mining of other minerals. "Stillwater operates so cleanly you can damn near eat off the floor," says Jim Kuipers, a mining engineer and consultant who has worked with the Mineral Policy Center, an environmental group that was not part of the agreement.

But earlier this year, Stillwater, the only U.S. producer of palladium and platinum, was taken over by Norilsk Nickel, the world's biggest producer of PGMs. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin discussed the deal in a meeting in 2002, and Norilsk hired Baker Botts, a law firm run by former secretary of state and Bush family friend James Baker, to ensure regulatory approval. As part of the deal, Norilsk got to name five new directors to Stillwater's board. But they're not Russians; they're heavy-hitting Americans, including a Bush pal or two: Craig Fuller, who served as assistant for cabinet affairs to President Ronald Reagan and chief of staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush; Steve Lucas, a GOP strategist who works as a lobbyist and attorney with one of California's most powerful law firms; former Michigan senator Don Riegle; veteran mining executive Jack Thompson; and Todd Schafer, a Moscow-based attorney for Hogan & Hartson, one of the biggest lobbying firms in D.C. (Schafer was a key lawyer in protecting Potanin's control of Uneximbank, the cornerstone of the oligarch's holdings.)"

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Much, much more at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0401/mbaard.php