It may be premature to report that the death of the hydrogen economy has been greatly exaggerated.
Does that mean the hydrogen economy has been finally laid to rest?
Before I close, I would like to say a few words about the idea that "the hydrogen economy" can magically solve our energy problems.
Several studies conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the past few years have suggested using natural gas to jump-start the hydrogen economy.
It will take visionaries like Taniguchi to bring the hydrogen economy closer, say realists like Masasuke Takata, a professor at Nagoaka University of Technology in Niigata, and to keep the public's expectations a few notches below the utterly impossible.
"Economics dictates that 95% of current U.S. hydrogen is produced by steam-methane re-forming of non-renewable natural gas, " Michael K. Heiman, professor of environmental studies at Dickinson College, wrote in a study of the proposed hydrogen economy last year.
This gets around the great problem of a hydrogen economy, the transport of it (it leaks through steel pipes for example).
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Proponents of a hydrogen economy want to produce the hydrogen with excess electricity from renewables such as wind power and solar energy.
And, despite Honda's launch, the idea of a hydrogen economy is also fading fast.
ECONOMIST: A fundamental change is coming sooner than you might think
Also, since the necessarily erratic nature of wind power necessitates the development of energy-storage technologies to guarantee continuous supply, wind power can also act as a spur to the development of a hydrogen economy in which cars no longer require petroleum fuel.
The hydrogen for these fuel cells (and for the rest of Iceland's new hydrogen economy, should it come to pass) will be made initially in a fertiliser plant that has been turning the stuff out since the 1950s.
The newspapers were full of articles on solar power, fusion and converting the economy to run on fuel cells and hydrogen.
ECONOMIST: A fundamental change is coming sooner than you might think
Increasingly, experts see natural gas as the only economically feasible way to build a new, less-polluting, hydrogen-based economy--a vast market allowing the oil industry a second act at the center of a transportation revolution.
He says it's the best private-sector plan he has seen for a hydrogen economy.
His mission: to create the world's first zero-emission, hydrogen-based economy--and to pull it off through no-nonsense business principles, not tree-hugging wishful thinking.
IR I find it puzzling that your otherwise prescient article on hydrogen power (October 25th) focuses solely on technology and the environment, while ignoring the profound geopolitical and social implications of a transition to a hydrogen economy.
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