Europe industry: The hydrogen economy

Europe industry: The hydrogen economy

Publication Date:01-April-2006
09:30 AM US Eastern Timezone
Source:European Voice



Energy has quickly moved to the top of the political agenda in
countries across the European Union. Chancellor Angela Merkel has
announced an energy summit bringing together German businesses and
policymakers, while Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee announced a
Â?500 million-investment plan to develop hydrogen-powered vehicles.
The EU is in the ideal position to lead an "exit strategy" from the oil
era, introducing a new energy independence vision based on hydrogen and
renewable energies abundantly available on its own territory, and not
on far and uncontrollable fossil or nuclear sources.

In 2003 I provided the initial strategic memorandum that led Romano
Prodi to establish the European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology
Platform, for a transition into a fully integrated hydrogen economy.
Prodi said then that the transformation of Europe's energy regime would
be the next great development in European integration after the
introduction of the euro.

I currently advise the European Parliament's leadership group for a
renewable energy hydrogen economy, composed of members of all six major
political groups, and led by Vittorio Prodi, an expert on hydrogen.
This group is supported by the Parliament's President Josep Borrell and
by Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas.

Hydrogen and fuel cell technologies are now entering the commercial
market for industrial, office and home use. Consumers will be able to
power up their cell phones, lap-top computers, digital cameras, MP3
players, and PDAs up to 35 hours with a single cartridge. The major
automakers have spent billions of dollars developing hydrogen-powered
cars, buses, and trucks that are expected to be in the showrooms before
2012.

But hydrogen needs to be produced in a sustainable way, by simply
generating a surplus electricity from renewable energies and then
electrolysing the water, or extracting it directly from biomass (which
could also generate a partial shift in subsidies away from agricultural
crops and toward energy crops providing a long-term solution to the
question of the EU's agricultural subsidies).

While the costs of extracting hydrogen from renewable energy are
increasingly reduced by new technological breakthroughs and economies
of scale, the direct and indirect costs of oil and gas on world markets
are continuing to rise. Goldman Sachs is already warning of oil spikes
of up to $105 a barrel.

The EU has already agreed to generating 22% of its electricity and 12%
of its energy from renewable sources by 2010, with even higher
benchmarks by 2020. Because renewable energy is intermittent using
hydrogen as a "storage carrier" will be essential if the EU is to
ensure a reliable supply of energy.

Hydrogen will also dramatically cut down on CO2 emissions and mitigate
the effects of "real-time global warming" of which the hurricanes in
the US gulf coast, the record flooding in Europe and the spreading
drought in the southern hemisphere are clear signals. The hydrogen
economy will also defuse the dangerous geopolitical game being played
out in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Because hydrogen is so plentiful,
every human being could be "empowered," in the first truly democratic
energy regime in history, making obsolete today's centralised, top-down
flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies. In the new
"distributed generation" era, businesses, municipalities and homeowners
could become producers and consumers of their own energy. But this will
require reconfiguring the power grid with the same architecture and
smart technologies of the internet, so that billions of people on Earth
can share energy peer-to-peer, just like they now share information at
the speed of light. This is the third industrial revolution.

All the major automobile, chemical and electronic companies are in a
race to the hydrogen era. Energy companies such as BP and Shell sport
hydrogen divisions. Japan is making hydrogen technology a critical
national priority, while the state of California - the world's fourth
largest economy - is ooperationalising a broad programme to become a
fully integrated renewable energy-based economy over the next two
decades. Also local regions across Europe are introducing hydrogen R&D
projects. Sixteen of the 20 Italian regions have endorsed the eNergency
Manifesto for a renewable energy hydrogen economy. In Germany, the
Speicherstadt development area just outside the city of Potsdam is
pioneering an ambitious biomass and hydrogen project.

The hydrogen economy makes possible a broad redistribution of power on
Earth: how soon the world will get there depends on how fast Europe
moves today.

* Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The hydrogen economy: the
creation of the world wide energy web and the redistribution of power
on earth.


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