The Hydrogen Economy

Imagine, for a moment, a world where fossil fuels are no longer burned to generate power, heat and light. A world no longer threatened by global warming or geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. A world where every person on earth has access to electricity. That world now looms on the horizon.

While the costs of harnessing renewable technologies and extracting hydrogen are still high, new technological breakthroughs and economies of scale are dramatically reducing these costs every year. Moreover, hydrogen powered fuel cells are two-and-one-half times more efficient than internal combustion engines. Meanwhile, the direct and indirect costs of oil and gas on world markets are going to continue to rise. As we approach the nexus between the falling price of renewables and hydrogen and the rising price of fossil fuels, the old energy regime will steadily give rise to the new energy era.
 

Like the ongoing struggle to control the internet, we are likely to see a fierce struggle for control over hydrogen energy webs. Even as users have argued that information should flow freely over the internet, Microsoft, AOL-Time Warner, and others have fought hard to control access to the portals of cyberspace. Expect some global energy companies and the world's leading power and utility companies to try to exercise similar control over the emerging hydrogen energy web. Only by organizing collectively to control their own energy can end users hope to gain a modicum of energy independence.
 

Incredibly, sixty-five percent of the human population has never made a telephone call, and a third of the human race has no access to electricity. Today, the per capita use of energy throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the consumption enjoyed in the United States. The disparity between the connected and the unconnected is deep and threatens to become even more pronounced as world population is expected to rise from the current 6.2 billion to nine billion people in the next half-century.

Stationary commercial fuel cells powered by hydrogen are just now being introduced for home, office and industrial use. Portable fuel cell cartridges will be on the market in the next couple of years. Consumers will be able to power up their cell phones, lap tops computers, and other appliances for forty days or more with a single cartridge. The major automakers already have spent over $2 billion developing hydrogen cars, buses and trucks, and the first mass-produced vehicles are expected to be on the road in 2010.

The harnessing of hydrogen will alter our way of life as fundamentally as the introduction of coal and steam power in the 19th century and the shift to oil and the internal combustion engine in the 20th century. In October 2002, the European Union became the world's first superpower to announce a long-term plan to make the transition out of fossil-fuel dependency and into a renewable based, hydrogen economy.