LONDON: More than a year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the world is a more dangerous place than ever before. And at the heart of the collective fear that continues to grip the human race is the struggle to control oil, the one critical resource without which our global economy and modern society would cease to exist.

Experts had been saying that we had another 40 or so years of cheap available crude oil. Now, however, some leading petroleum geologists are suggesting that global oil production could peak and begin a steep decline as early as the end of this decade, sending oil prices through the roof.

While the fossil-fuel era is entering its sunset years, a new energy regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilisation along radical lines. Hydrogen is the most basic and ubiquitous element in the universe. It is the stuff of the stars and of our sun and, when properly harnessed, it is the “forever fuel”. It never runs out and produces no harmful carbon dioxide emissions when burned: the only byproducts are heat and pure water. We are at the dawn of a new economy, powered by hydrogen, that will fundamentally change the nature of our market and our political and social institutions, just as coal and steam power did at the beginning of the industrial age.

Hydrogen is found in water, fossil fuels and all living things, yet it is rarely free floating, so has to be extracted from natural sources. Nearly half the hydrogen produced in the world is derived from natural gas through a steam reforming process. This has proved the cheapest way to produce commercial hydrogen, but natural gas emits carbon dioxide in the conversion process. Moreover, global production of natural gas is likely to peak sometime between 2020 and 2030, creating a second energy crisis on the heels of the oil crisis.

There is, however, another way to produce hydrogen without using fossil fuels in the process. Renewable sources of energy — wind, photovoltaic, hydro, geothermal and biomass — can be harnessed to produce electricity. The electricity, in turn, can be used, in a process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used, when needed, in a fuel cell to generate electricity for power, heat and light. People often ask why generate electricity twice, first to produce electricity for the process of electrolysis and then again to produce power, heat and light by way of a fuel cell?

The reason is that electricity doesn’t store. So, if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, or the water isn’t flowing, electricity can’t be generated and economic activity grinds to a halt. Hydrogen is a way to store renewable sources of energy to ensure an ongoing and continuous supply of power for society.

The real question, then, is one of costs. Wind, hydro and biomass are already cost competitive in many parts of the world and can be used to generate electricity for the electrolysis process. Photovoltaic and geothermal costs, however, are still high and will need to come down considerably to make the process competitive with the natural gas steam reforming process in the production of hydrogen.

Commercial fuel-cells powered by hydrogen are just now being introduced into the market for home, office and industrial use. The major automakers have spent more than US dollars two billion developing hydrogen cars, buses and trucks, and the first mass-produced vehicles are expected to be on the road in just a few years.

The hydrogen economy makes possible a vast redistribution of power, with far-reaching consequences for society. Today’s centralised, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, becomes obsolete. In the new era every human being could become the producer as well as the consumer of his or her own energy — so called “distributed generation”. When millions of end-users connect their fuel-cells into local, regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs), using the same design principles and smart technologies that made possible the World Wide Web, they can begin to share energy — peer-to-peer — creating a new decentralised form of energy use.

In the hydrogen economy, even the automobile itself is a “power station on wheels” with a generating capacity of 20 kilowatts. Since the average car is parked most of the time, it can be plugged in, during non-use hours, to the home, office or the main interactive electricity network, providing premium electricity back to the grid. If just 25 per cent of drivers used their vehicles as power plants to sell energy back to the grid, all of the power plants in the country (UK) could be eliminated altogether.

Power companies are going to have to come to grips with the reality that millions of local operators, generating electricity from fuel cells on site, can produce more power more cheaply than can today’s giant power plants. When the end-users also become the producers of their energy, existing power plants will change their role and become “virtual power plants” that can manufacture and market fuel cells, bundle energy services and co-ordinate the flow of energy over the existing power grids.

Hydrogen has the potential to end the world’s reliance on imported oil and help defuse the dangerous geopolitical game being played out between Muslim militants and Western nations. It will dramatically cut down on carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. And because hydrogen is so plentiful and exists everywhere on earth, every human being could be empowered, making it the first truly democratic energy regime in history.

Incredibly, 65 per cent of the human population has never made a single telephone call, and one-third has no access to electricity or any other form of commercial energy. The disparity between the connected and the unconnected is deep and threatens to become even more pronounced over the next half century with world population expected to rise from the current 6.2 billion to nine billion people. Most of the population increase is going to take place in the developing world where the poverty is concentrated.

Lack of access to energy, and especially electricity, is a key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world. Conversely, access to energy means more economic opportunity. In South Africa, for example, for every 100 households electrified, 10 to 20 new businesses are created. Electricity frees human labour from day-to-day survival tasks. Simply finding enough firewood or dung to warm a house or cook meals in resource-poor countries can take hours out of each day. Electricity provides power to run farm equipment, operate small factories and craft shops, and light homes, schools and businesses.

Today, the per capita use of energy throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the consumption enjoyed in the US. The global average per capita energy use for all countries is only one-fifth the level in the US.

Making the shift to a hydrogen energy regime — using renewable resources and technologies to produce the hydrogen — and creating distributed generation energy webs that can connect communities all over the world is the only way to lift billions of people out of poverty. Narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots means first narrowing the gap between the connected and the unconnected.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.