Andart

The Hydrogen Boon

A good futurist conference should surprise, and I got a major surprise tonight by actually finding myself agreeing with Jeremy Rifkin.

Wait a minute, isn't he the guy with entropy and the anti-biotech crusade? Yep. And I think we would seriously disagree if we had a longer conversation (we certainly didn't agree in the few words we exchanged after the talk). But his talk was about the hydrogen economy, and here I think he might be largely right.

His basic argument is that we are approaching a hydrogen rather than oil based economy and that this will be a Good Thing in many ways. First, he blames the fossil fuel economy of being the cause of the Mid-East crisis, excessive greenhouse warming and global inequality. I would buy maybe one or two of those, but let's not quibble. Second, fossil fuel reserves are running out... someday. Again, the exact decade is debatable, but the overall argument holds: eventually it will become really expensive to use fossil fuels, whether due to depletion, indirect costs through greenhouse effects or political costs by supporting governments like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Norway. At the same time renewable energy sources are low-density and variable, and nuclear power is made expensive through cultural means (my view, he didn't go into it). The solution: a distributed hydrogen economy.

The core here is that fuel cells are becoming cheap and efficient, and once they become more widely adopted we can expect further price decreases and efficiency increases - I have no doubt that Ray Kurzweil could show a nice exponential graph of present improvements. Storing energy as hydrogen turns the renewable energy sources into all-day, all-year sources. Hydrogen based cars would not just be clean, but could double as generators for the house or sell power onto the grid if the prize grew favourable. Overall, hydrogen power would fit with the new distributed paradigms of the Internet age, give the world a non-hegemonic energy source, fix the greenhouse effect and maybe even the Mid-East.

I found the core argument fairly convincing.

As I see it, the main stumbling blocks might be:

• Good hydrogen storage. Hydrogen gas is dangerous, tricky to store and still low density, we need a good storage medium be it inside metal hydrides, borohydride or as methanol.

• 
  Bootstrapping problems. Nobody wants a hydrogen car today because there isn't a gas station. Presumably this could change as the petrol giants get involved (from their perspective a hydrogen economy isn't necessarily a bad thing; they could still make huge profits from selling oil to the chemical industry as well as using their sales infrastructure to sell hydrogen - if they chose to keep it, as it is not earning that much in itself). One possibility is that the hydrogen economy starts out with fuel cell refills for laptops and electronics, then moves on to refills for portable or stationary home fuel cells and then finally to cars.

• 
  Centralisation due to legislation, economies of scale or intellectual property. Selling power back to the grid is technically feasible but would require quite a bit of engineering and political support, which is not always forthcoming. Economies of scale might promote huge centralised hydrogen production systems rather than the distributed ones envisioned by Rifkin, supporting the hegemonic powers of the oil economy as they move over to become hydrogen powers. Intellectual property rules might both make fuel cells and hydrogen storage too costly for the third world, or worse, make it tethered to certain producers. Imagine that GM cars only run on GM hydrogen cartridges (and woe to anybody trying to reverse engineer them!).

• 
  Hydrogen makes a wonderful terrorist toy. This is another possibility that might strangle the hydrogen economy: if it is seen as too enabling for dangerous people, authorities might impose costly security restrictions on hydrogen, centralising it or making it too expensive.
  

But these problems are not insurmountable, just as the apparent threat from Big Oil and the car industry has not proven insurmountable. In many cases the apparent enemies of hydrogen power are not the true enemies, since they also stand the best chance of being major players (thanks to their infrastructure, experience, engineers etc) of a hydrogen economy. I did think Rifkin was a bit too convinced about the inevitability of hydrogen, but in the long run I can't see any other energy transport economy than hydrogen (unless we count more remote nanotech approaches like ultra-high energy molecules, diamond springs or nanoflywheels). It might not be the political panacea he makes it sound like (no technology comes with a built-in ideology or society), but it appears to make some good distributed systems possible. I also think it might be a good early application area for mesoscale and nanoscale structures, there may be some very neat synergies between the industries here.

One of the problems of making hydrogen from renewables is that you convert ambient energy into electricity and then hydrogen and then back to electricity, losing quite a bit on the way. One approach I guess Rifkin isn't so keen on is to circumvent this altogether by using photosynthetic hydrogen producing bacteria in solar ponds. This idea, developed by Robert Bradbury, is simply to use engineered bacteria (or bacterial mixtures) to convert solar power into methane or hydrogen directly. It has many advantages over electrolysis in that it avoids electric re-conversion, it can replicate making the bacterial soup very cheap, the ponds work well in the tropics and can likely be maintained in the third world more easily than hardtech. It is indeed a very green solution.

Apropos Robert. At the end of the Extro 3 conference Robert held a wonderful lecture. The schedule was by then seriously shot, the room had to be evacuated soon and in the neighbouring meeting room a wedding was taking place complete with insane jingles from what sounded like a hockey organ. Robert started out slow with various trends, then moving onwards to deal with energy (I don't think hydrogen was on his mind then), then to nanotechnology, then to uploading and then to Dyson spheres and what he later dubbed Matrioshka brains. It was wild. The tempo and scope just rose and rose as time got shorter and shorter. In the end the assembled transhumanist rose to a future shocked applause.

The fun thing is that most of the things Robert discussed were mentioned by Ray Kurzweil at his keynote speech tonight (or will be tomorrow; as always there are more slides than minutes to lecture). Taken together Rifkin and Kurzweil show that the wild ideas of transhumanists in 1997 are acceptable for keynote speeches at a futurist conference 2004. I look forward to see at Transvision what will become futurist mainstream by 2011.

Posted by Anders at August 1, 2004 07:36 AM