Hydrogen as the way toward sustainability - excerpted from Hydrogen Futures: Toward a Sustainable Energy System - Cover Story - Excerpt

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Seth Dunn

Hermina Morita has a grand vision for Hawaii's energy future. A state representative, Morita chairs a legislative committee to reduce Hawaii's dependence on oil, which accounts for 88 percent of its energy and is mainly imported on tankers from Asia and Alaska. In April 2001, the committee approved a $200,000 "jumpstart" grant to support a public/private partnership in hydrogen research and development, tapping the island state's plentiful geothermal, solar, and wind resources to split water and produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells to power buses and cars, homes and businesses, and military and fishing fleets.

The grant grew out of a consultant study suggesting that hydrogen could become widely cost-effective in Hawaii this decade. The University of Hawaii, meanwhile, has received $2 million from the U.S. Department of Defense for a fuel cell project. Possibilities include Hawaii becoming a mid-Pacific refueling point, shipping its own hydrogen to Oceania, other states, and Japan. Instead of importing energy, Morita told a San Francisco reporter, "Ultimately what we want ... is to be capable of producing more hydrogen than we need, so we can send the excess to California."

Leaders of the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu have similar aspirations. In September 2000, President John Bani appealed to international donors and energy experts to help prepare a feasibility study for developing a hydrogen-based renewable energy economy. The economically depressed and climactically vulnerable island, which spends nearly as much money on petroleum-based products as it receives from all of its exports, hopes to become 100 percent renewable-energy-based by 2020. Like Hawaii, it has abundant geothermal and solar energy, which can be used to make hydrogen. And like Hawaii, it hopes to become an exporter, providing energy to neighboring islands. "As part of the hydrogen power and renewable energy initiative we will strive to provide electricity to every village in Vanuatu," the government announced in its October 5, 2000, issue of Environment News Service.

Hawaii and Vanuatu are following the lead of yet another island, Iceland, which amazed the world in 1999 when it announced its intention to become the world's first hydrogen society. Iceland, which spent $185 million--a quarter of its trade deficit--on oil imports in 2000, has joined forces with Shell Hydrogen, DaimlerChrysler, and Norsk Hydro in a multimillion-dollar initiative to convert the island's buses, cars, and boats to hydrogen and fuel cells over the next thirty to forty years. The brainchild of a chemist named Bragi Arnason and nicknamed "Professor Hydrogen," the project will begin in the capital of Reykjavik, with the city's bus fleet drawing on hydrogen from a nearby fertilizer plant and later refilling from a station that produces hydrogen on site from abundant supplies of geothermal and hydroelectric energy--which furnish 99 percent of Iceland's power. If the project is successful, the island hopes to become a "Kuwait of the North," exporting hydrogen to Europe and other countries. "Iceland is already a world leader in using renewable energy," announced Thorsteinn Sigfusson, chair of the venture, in March 2001, adding that the bus project "is the first important step toward becoming the world's first hydrogen economy."

Jules Verne would be pleased--though not surprised--to see his vision of a planet powered by hydrogen unfolding in this way. After all, it was in an 1874 book entitled The Mysterious Island that Verne first sketched a world in which water--and the hydrogen that, along with oxygen, composed it--would be "the coal of the future." A century and a quarter later, the idea of using hydrogen--the simplest, lightest, and most abundant element in the universe--as a primary form of energy is beginning to move from the pages of science fiction and into speeches of industry executives. "Greenery, innovation, and market forces are shaping the future of our industry and propelling us inexorably toward hydrogen energy," Texaco executive Frank Ingriselli explained in April 2001 to members of the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. "Those who don't pursue it, will rue it."

Indeed, several converging forces explain this renewed interest in hydrogen. Technological advances and the advent of greater competition in the energy industry are part of the equation. But equally important motivations for exploring hydrogen are the energy-related problems of energy security, air pollution, and climate change--problems that are collectively calling into question the fundamental sustainability of the current energy system. These factors reveal why islands, stationed on the front lines of vulnerability to high oil prices and climate change, are in the vanguard of the hydrogen transition.

Yet Iceland and other nations represent just the bare beginning in terms of the changes that lie ahead in the energy world. The commercial implications of a transition to hydrogen as the world's major energy currency will be staggering, putting the $2 trillion energy industry through its greatest tumult since the early days of Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Over 100 companies are aiming to commercialize fuel cells for a broad range of applications--from cell phones, laptop computers, and soda machines to homes, offices, and factories to vehicles of all kinds. Hydrogen is also being researched for direct use in cars and planes. Fuel and auto companies are spending between $500 million and $1 billion annually on hydrogen. Leading energy suppliers are creating hydrogen divisions, while major carmakers are pouring billions of dollars into a race to put the first fuel cell vehicles on the market between 2003 and 2005. In California, twenty-three auto, fuel, and fuel cell companies and seven government agencies are partnering to fuel and test drive seventy cars and buses over the next few years. Hydrogen and fuel cell companies have captured the attention of venture capitalist firms and investment banks anxious to get into the hot new space known as ET, or energy technology.