A world without oil
Iceland is already preparing for the day when<BR>
petroleum production ceases and the planet needs<BR>
an alternative power source. The tiny island is<BR>
switching to hydrogen, the most plentiful element<BR>
in the universe. ALANNA MITCHELL reports
REYKJAVIK -- The contraption sitting in Bragi Arnason's chemistry
lab doesn't look like much. There's a battered orange desk lamp
meant to represent the sun. Next to it, a clear hose runs through
an electrolyzer that resembles a science-fair project.
Prof. Arnason turns on the lamp. A few bubbles of gas trickle
through the apparatus, eventually sending a dime-store fan
spinning gently around. He is triumphant. He has just turned
hydrogen into electricity.
"In the second half of this century, this will be the main
energy source for mankind," he says, his face beaming.
"It's sustainable. It's clean. All you need is water."
Prof. Arnason, who is head of chemistry at the University of
Reykjavik, is the visionary behind Iceland's recent declaration
that it will become the first country to eradicate oil from its
economy. Icelanders figure that by 2030, all of their cars,
buses, ships and airplanes will run on hydrogen.
So fine. Replacing fossil fuels may work for an odd little nation
with only 280,000 souls and cars that never leave the island. But
the future energy source for all humankind?
Although it may seem hard to believe as yet another oil war
threatens to break out in the Middle East and as Canada lines up
to vote on the Kyoto Protocol on Monday, the post-fossil-fuel era
is already under way.
Politicians, economists, engineers, academics and business
leaders around the world understand that oil production is
slowing and will end within decades and they are planning for a
world without oil. And right now, the consensus is that hydrogen
-- the fuel that sent space ships to the moon and produces no
climate-altering pollution -- is the likeliest replacement.
The world's automobile makers are putting prototypes of the
hydrogen-powered car in their showrooms. The first wide-scale
pilot project using hydrogen to fuel transport buses begins next
June in 10 European cities, including Reykjavik.
In October, a hydrogen fuelling station opened in the San
Francisco Bay area for the handful of experimental hydrogen
vehicles in that part of the world. The group behind the plan,
the California Fuel Cell Partnership, expects to have 60
fuel-cell cars and buses on the road by next year.
Prognosticators such as U.S. futurist Jeremy Rifkin, whose new
book is The Hydrogen Economy (Putnam), argue that hydrogen
promises to be so easy to make and so widespread that the poorest
citizens in the world will eventually be able to produce as much
hydrogen energy as they need in their own back yards.
"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," Mr. Rifkin
wrote recently in The Guardian.
To understand how big the worldwide potential for hydrogen is,
it's important to know what tiny Iceland is doing with it and how
far the experiment has progressed.
But it's also important to know why Icelanders bother. Why not
just go with the petroleum flow for now, like the rest of the
world? To understand that is to understand Iceland.
Burrow deep into the Icelandic mindset, and you begin to see how
the world could look if all oil bets were off, if the Kyoto
Protocol were laughably irrelevant, the Middle East just a
geographic curiosity, the climate back to normal.
You begin to see the world as Bragi Arnason does.
For Prof. Arnason, 67, the journey to hydrogen started 40 years
ago on top of Iceland's biggest glacier. He was fresh from
earning his PhD in chemistry and wanted to map the country's vast
stores of volcanically heated underground water. The island sits
on top of an underground radiator fired by heat from the Earth's
crust, and steam rises constantly through fissures and faults
that shift day by day. (Beneath Iceland, two of the Earth's
tectonic plates are splitting apart at the rate of a couple of
centimetres a year.)
But once Prof. Arnason had mapped the reserves, he realized that
just a small fraction of the super-heated water was being used
for energy. At the same time, because Iceland has no fossil
fuels, it was importing more than 40 per cent of the energy
consumed in the country -- at tremendous expense.
Icelanders are accustomed to using up what's around them -- they
still have a taste for sour food (one prized dish is rotted
shark), developed when their forebears did without refrigeration.
So when Prof. Arnason realized that his country wasn't using up
the energy it was sitting on, he was horrified. "It is only
natural to say, 'Couldn't we produce our own?' "
Today, tacked on the drab concrete walls of Prof. Arnason's
office is his framed certificate as a finalist last year in the
World Technology Awards for the Environment, the tech community's
Oscars. He was nominated for his work on hydrogen.
The winner was Geoffrey Ballard, head of Ballard Power Systems
Inc., based in Burnaby, B.C. He won the award for his advances on
the hydrogen fuel cell, the technical breakthrough that allows
hydrogen energy to be converted quickly and cheaply into
electricity. This is what has caught the interest of the world's
car makers.
The fuel cell creates an electric current through a chemical
reaction, but unlike a regular battery, it doesn't wear out or
need to be recharged. All it needs is a continuous supply of
hydrogen because its energy is harvested from the atom itself.
Hydrogen has the simplest atomic structure of any element -- one
proton and one electron. The fuel cell separates the negatively
charged electrons from the positively charged protons through a
process called electrolysis.
Then the protons get sucked through a membrane that won't allow
the electrons through. The electrons are forced to travel through
an external circuit on their way to rejoin the protons. That flow
creates electricity.
In the meantime, the protons hook up with oxygen atoms in the air
on the other side of the membrane. When the electrons finally
join the group, the result is molecules of water made up of one
oxygen atom and two complete hydrogen atoms.
The advantages to hydrogen energy are huge. For one thing, there
is no combustion and therefore no pollution, no greenhouse gas
emissions and no need for a Kyoto Protocol. The water produced at
the end of the chemical reaction is so pure that astronauts on
the space shuttles drank the water produced as waste from the
liquid hydrogen fuel that powered their rockets.
As well, hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe.
So there's lots around to harness for electricity. And because it
is everywhere, no one would need to have control over the
production and distribution of the world's power.
That is why Mr. Rifkin is so excited about hydrogen. He believes
that it would give each of the planet's citizens equal access to
power.
But if the possibilities beggar the imagination, the downsides
come close to defeating it.
There are still huge logistical problems to overcome, such as
figuring out how a car can hold enough hydrogen to make it run as
far as on a tank of gasoline.
And if that could be worked out, there would eventually have to
be an infrastructure -- maybe more hydrogen pumps like the one in
California? -- to fill the cars up.
These are the problems the European Union, the United States and
Japan are plowing research money into.
Beyond this is another problem: To unleash the energy contained
within the atomic structure of this primordial element, you need
power. That's because hydrogen atoms exist on the Earth only in
combination with other substances. You have to use energy to
strip hydrogen away from whatever other atom it has combined
with.
As well, it takes energy to separate the hydrogen atom into
electrons and protons. The long-term hopes are that new,
renewable technologies will harness the power of the sun, the
Earth, the wind, the rivers or the waves to create the energy
needed to make hydrogen, the relatively more portable and
efficient type of energy that can run cars.
The reason Icelanders think that they can convert to a hydrogen
economy is that they already have plenty of cheap, renewable
thermal power, just the ticket to free up all that hydrogen.
Iceland can make as much hydrogen power as it needs, Prof.
Arnason says.
Of course, Canada is in the same boat, flush as it is with cheap
hydroelectric power and the potential for harnessing far more, he
points out. "You could start the transformation," he
says.
Right now, the chemists in Prof. Arnason's lab are puzzling over
the final details of storing enough hydrogen to run a vehicle for
as long as a tank of gas. The stumbling block for them is that so
far, a tank of hydrogen gas will make a car run for only about
100 to 150 kilometres. Whiel hydrogen gas would not be more
expensive than gasoline, it would be less convenient.
There are rivals to hydrogen's stake as the world's next big
source of energy.
British chemist Peter Rowland, after whom one of the
hydrogen-producing processes is named, believes biomass fuels
will eventually win the day because hydrogen is too volatile and
hard to control. Biomass, including such liquid fuels as ethanol,
could use the system now used for gasoline.
Still, a high-level workshop of car makers and energy experts
partly sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in October,
1999, came to the conclusion that none of the barriers to a
hydrogen economy is insurmountable.
The European Union, with its 360 million citizens in 15 nations,
will spend more than 2 billion euros (about $3-billion) on
research into sustainable energy, much of it on fuel cells over
the next five years. By 2010, the EU will get 22 per cent of its
electricity and 12 per cent of all energy from renewable sources,
mainly hydrogen fuel cells, says Romano Prodi, president of the
European Commission.
The first practical trial of hydrogen vehicles in Europe starts
next June, when 30 Mercedes-Benz hydrogen buses will hit the
streets of 10 cities, including Hamburg, Paris, Barcelona and
Reykjavik.
German-based DaimlerChrysler is set to mass-produce hydrogen
transport buses by 2005 at a cost that will rival that of diesel
buses. In its fiscal year 2001, the company spent $900-million
(U.S.) on research and development of fuel cell technology and
vehicles that use more than one fuel.
The Japanese government is in the second phase of a 30 billion
yen (roughly $360-million) project aimed at setting up the
infrastructure needed to supply hydrogen to consumers, both for
filling up cars and for stand-alone electricity generators.
But of all the countries, none is as far along as Iceland. It
vowed to replace the Reykjavik city buses with a hydrogen-run
fleet as the next phase of its transformation. Then it's on to
replacing private cars and the fishing fleet. Prof. Arnason sees
no reason this can't happen by 2030.
Politicians, academics and businesspeople from all over the world
are showing up in Reykjavik to soak up the determination and ask
for help to seize control of their own energy sources. Whenever
the visitors begin to wonder whether the oil-free future is just
too remote, the Icelanders send them to the Blue Lagoon spa on
the southwestern peninsula.
This, too, started as a crazy dream to use up what's available
and cut down on fossil fuels. It's so successful that it gives
Icelanders perfect faith that they can make hydrogen work too.
The great joke is that this salty, healing spa is really the
waste pit from Swartsengi, the geothermal electricity and
space-heating plant that was Iceland's first energy brainchild.
Swartsengi's stacks, yawning round windows and Star Wars-like
architecture form a backdrop for the spa.
About 30 years ago, the Icelanders drilled a kilometre or two
down to tap the hot salty water heated by the Earth's crust. It
burst out at about 242 degrees Celsius.
They figured out how to strip the energy out of the water and
convert it into electricity. Once they extract enough heat out of
it to get its temperature down to 100 degrees, they transfer some
of that heat to freshwater and run it through insulated pipes
into houses and other buildings all over Iceland.
The Blue Lagoon was formed when the seawater, cooled but
otherwise identical to the way it came from the Earth, was piped
out the back of the plant as waste. Scientists thought that it
would just quietly be absorbed back into the porous volcanic
land. Instead, the minerals it contained sealed the pores and
created an ever-expanding hot pool.
The Icelanders, never ones to waste an opportunity, began
flocking there to bathe in the healing fluids, tinged blue
because the silica in the water absorbs the colour red. The
lagoon's healing powers are so well documented that both the
Danish and Icelandic medical systems send people here to poach
themselves in the salty fluids.
As for Swartsengi, it is one of three plants that produce enough
cheap geothermal energy to heat 87 per cent of Icelandic houses
and industrial plants, says Thorsteinn Jonsson, head of
communications for the plant.
Energy is so plentiful that once the hot water heats up their
homes, they run it underground to keep sidewalks and driveways
free from snow and ice.
For all of Prof. Arnason's conviction, the brave new hydrogen
economy has shades of a fairy tale: Fierce little Iceland kicking
up against all the big money that has so many interests vested in
keeping fossil fuels the main source of energy.
But it's not a fairy tale. Rather than trying to keep hydrogen
fuel at bay the notoriously self-protective energy players and
car manufacturers are buying in.
DaimlerChrysler, Shell Hydrogen and Norsk Hydro are already
financial partners in Iceland's project, along with the Icelandic
people themselves.
Prof. Arnason used to wonder about it. Why the interest? Why not
try to shut it all down? He asked Shell. "They said: 'It's
very simple. We want to be selling energy in 50 years when
there's no more oil.' "
Alanna Mitchell is The Globe and Mail's earth sciences reporter.
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