MULTAN, Feb 18: The use of hydrogen as a fuel will bring in a new revolution after the telecommunications. This was the prediction of Engineer Khalid Saeed in a lecture on 'Hydrogen Economy' he delivered here at the auditorium of NFC Institute of Engineering and Technology on Wednesday.

Engineer Saeed said globalization could be understood from a number of perspectives but none was more important than the energy. Analysts sometimes forgot that globalization was impossible without Fossil Fuel Energy (FFE).

The discovery of FFE enabled commercial enterprises to drastically compress time and shorten distances to make possible a single world market for the exploitation of raw resources and human labour, he added.

He said however the FFE was one of the major causes of inequalities as those countries/enterprises that enjoyed control over the FFE had unparalleled wealth while the rest of the world was bound to further slip into poverty.

But, the matter of concern was that the global FFE infrastructure was aging and had started showing signs of crack to an extent that it was being feared that it might not hold together for a long.

Engineer Saeed said but in the form of hydrogen the world had a substance which could replace FFE and become the 'eternal fuel'. It would never run out and as it did not contain any carbon so it emitted nothing that could be hazardous to the environment. However, it rarely exists free-floating in nature and rather it has to be extracted from natural resources.

He said foundation to harness hydrogen energy had been laid in a number of developed and developing countries and production of hydrogen-powered fuel cells had been started commercially for installation in factories, offices and buildings to produce electricity and heat.

He said the time was not far away when the end user would become producer and consumer of the energy at the same time.

Thus, the phenomenon would give birth to the world wide Hydrogen Energy Web (HEW) comprising millions of small power plants connected into vast energy webs, using the same architectural design principles and smart technologies that had made possible the worldwide web (WWW).

He predicted that the HEW would be the next great technological, commercial and social revolution in the history of mankind on the heels of worldwide communication web. The HEW will decentralize and democratize the energy like the communication web has empowered billions of people to communicate and exchange information.

Mr Saeed said the global communication giants like AOL and Microsoft always pursued an agenda to gain an unbreakable hold over the portals of cyberspace to become gatekeepers of the information age and a similar threat was looming over the HEW horizon.

He said the question that whether hydrogen could become the people's energy would largely depend on the mode of its harnessing in the early stages of its development.

He said an appropriate partnership between commercial and non-commercial interests would be critical to establish effective and long time viability of the new energy regime.

Pak-Arab Fertilizers Limited managing director Engineer Tanvir Ahmad was the chief guest while institute director Prof Dr Saeed Ahmad Khan presided over the seminar.