Personally, my thoughts have turned to the environment. I don't want to build websites as much as I want to build consensus around things like the air we breath or what happens to the products we buy that we just throw away. It's a common enough problem that we kind of just live with it these days and hope that the weak light of good news on the cleanup front gets steadier regardless of the choices we make personally. If you think that's a dim view, I can understand that. You've probably made some sacrifices yourself.
My aim is to jump ahead on the timeline on the adoption of the hydrogen economy and to avoid pitfalls where it is now threatened.
Hydrogen evaporates faster than the memory of the Exxon Valdez.
Recent bad news about this possible transition to a Hydrogen Economy has struck a foul blow to those who thought the promise of this maturing technology 20 years ago would bear fruit in just a few short years from now.
I spoke with the PR Director of Ballard Power Systems a few years ago while working on a story. She told me commercial rollout of PEM Fuel Cells would be accomplished in 2005. Unfortunately, this is NOT a given. Governments are protecting jobs, infrastructure investments, petrochemical R&D and geological resources, among other things.
One of the major factors "appears" to be that pure Hydrogen can neither be supplied in the quantities needed nor transported nearly as efficiently as petrol, methanol, ethanol or natural gas. Even electrolysis (a way of using electricity to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water) as an on-site method of fuel distribution is considered difficult. Car companies expect that in order to meet the demand properly 30 per cent of the 170,000 plus gas stations in the US alone would have to make Hydrogen or a reformable fuel mixture available.
The fall back position is OIL. OIL! OIL! OIL! Oil before methanol. Oil before ethanol. And all of these before Hydrogen. Fossil fuel and nuclear and natural gas electricity production before hydrogen or hydrogen storage. No soft path. No earth, wind or sun fire.
And certainly no Regenerative PEM Fuel Cells or futuristic electrical generation built into the car's motion (yes, some hybrid models do recharge 'traditional' batteries under braking, but how many use each wheel as a generator).
Please notice your local gas station under construction or renovation... Is it supplying natural gas? Propane? Hydrogen? Where is all the profit going?
Government will is one thing. An interest in change is fine. But who wants to phase themselves out? What individual has the time to invest in building their own car or heating/air conditioning system in an effort to fight off corporate interests in maintaining dependencies?
And just where do we draw the line politically about what is in the public's interest anyway? Public policy may acknowledge dependence but it fights just as hard for corporate independence even during an era when the corporation has been seen to become government. By way of extending this it must be asked whether corporate self interest is the public policy of the future. Perhaps the French were not wrong when they declared "A market economy, but not a market society."
So, what is this favor I am going to ask you, right?
Well, it's simple really...
1.) Help make utility companies buy power from individuals to the effect of seeding the soft path to distributed energy stored as hydrogen for electricity production, transmission and distribution.
2.) Help break the 'egg' by campaigning against new car purchases until all car companies (or the most powerful among them) use their equity to bring regenerative fuel cell vehicles to market.
3.) Help build an open source knowledge base of industry needing to be phased out, training requirements, transitional requirement and other identifiable assistive information for employees, managers, executives and owners under each region in which these stakeholders live and operate.
4.) Build an open source organization to gather information for and to research and promote:
a.) Smart roads vs. smart cars (commuter clog and smog cleanup)
b.) Public patents for donated technologies
c.) Grassroots hydrogen focused planning, technology and implementation
d.) Debatable public scenarios for future adoption
c.) Features and benefits, reassurance of individual choice, safety and advancement in personal and business transportation future
d.) Knowledge base for house, apartment, business and industry as well as collecting ideas for legislative change in locality, activist resources
Anyway, I could go on, but I don't want to completely turn you off. These plans are big, of course, and it would be impossible to do anything without help and consensus, or being pointed in the right direction.
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