Tokyo Babylon

If you ask people who are interested in future tech or development what’s the next big thing, they’ll generally say hydrogen. There are good reasons for them saying so, but some equally compelling reasons why it’s not really the next big thing in my opinion, at least not for the reasons that most of them state.

Hydrogen has one big advantage over other fuel sources - it’s carbon free, which means generally non-polluting. We started out with wood and wood has a lot of carbon and not a lot of hydrogen so it’s dirty, petrol has less carbon and natural gas less still. The succession of ever newer fuel sources has been towards fuel with fewer and fewer carbon items until the theory goes we’ll all use hydrogen, which has none. So the first thing is its clean, burn it and you get water, though if you burn it in plane engines at altitude you’ll have water vapor where you should have any.

The problem has generally been that in water H20 the oxygen is bound to the hydrogen pretty tightly. How strong is it? Well it’s like what the National Rifle Association says when people talk of splitting them from their guns: “From my cold dead fingers”. It’s pretty strong. That’s a problem because it means you need to use a lot of energy to split the hydrogen fuel that you want from the oxygen that you don’t. What generally happens is the splitting action isn’t very efficient so the energy contained in the hydrogen fuel that you obtain is less than the energy you used to extract it. The bond is weaker in other forms, such as methanol or LPG, but as far as I know you have to cut down trees for the former and drill for the latter which rather undercuts the whole clean energy claim. It does however make it a capital intensive enterprise, which means neither you nor I could do it. It would be left to the same people who brought you the Exxon “We’re never going to pay” Valdez disaster, the oil inspired kangaroo court trial and murder of Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria and the Texas oil refinery explosion.

Now you see this has all happened before which is probably no great surprise to most of you. The French, God bless them, have a saying which translates as ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’. Ask any businessman what he’d like for his birthday and he won’t say free market he’ll say monopoly and he won’t mean the board game. Well maybe just the end bit where someone gets to take all your money and there’s not a thing you can do about it. So now let me tell you a little story about the birth of the oil industry.

When petroleum was still a fledgling industry it shared the nest with home brewed grain alcohol. Both ran cars, but most farmers would just make their own. Now if you’re a businessmen the idea of someone making something that you want to sell them isn’t exactly rum punch as far as you are concerned. Then of course along came prohibition. Suddenly if you wanted the choice to run your car on alcohol well you’d have Elliot Ness breaking down your door with a Thompson Machine gun in his hand. Big oil never looked back. It takes a lot of money to make petrol. You need to have drilling rigs, the refineries, the gas stations and all the nuts and bolts of a massive delivery system. You need to obtain it here and move it there, across state borders, all of which makes it wonderful for folks with that kind of cash, since they can monopolize it through shady dealings. Rockefeller did exactly this in the 19th century and became the first US billionaire. Oil elbowed coal out the way in everything transport related.

The same thing happened with hemp. Anyone can grow cannabis and make it into something to smoke, but it takes real money to process tobacco. Monopoly. There are many varieties of Hemp, with the high THC variant cannabis being only one of many varieties. Industrial hemp can be used as a food source, to make fabric including rope and sails that don’t rot in seawater. The Persians called the Hemp the king of plants because it was so versatile. But if you own timber companies like newspaper publisher Randolph Hurst then something that grows like a weed, produces fibre more cheaply and faster than trees would be rather upsetting. Before the Second World War hemp was a plant that threatened the security and livelihood of the US. During the war it was the plant that would help ensure victory and after the war it was demonized and made illegal again. Lumber requires a lot of capital investment, hemp does not. Rich would be monopolists naturally prefer the first option.

Now the thing about Hydrogen is it’s tricky, it’s elusive, it’s hard to contain. It requires a lot of expensive hi-tech investment to produce it, process it, store it and ship it. It’s harder to monopolize than oil or gas because water is everywhere, but its still a capital intensive undertaking, which makes it far easier for the big fish in the pond to eat all the little fish. The big fish will tell you it’s the will of the market, while all the time taking all of the market out of the business and leaving you, the poor sap in the street, all the poorer.

Now that’s one reason I’m against hydrogen. I don’t like getting fleeced by monopolists who then turn around and tell us that they’re powering the economy, making it sound like they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart. All the while talking about corporate responsibility while conveniently forgetting that corporations were established to limit liability; what you and I would call taking responsibility for your actions. Corporate responsibility is an oxymoron, a phrase that joins two seemingly contradictory ideas, like military intelligence, fighting for peace, deafening silence and honest politician. It’s a joke that far too many people seem to take seriously. If a corporation really wants to be responsible it should stop being a corporation, lose all their legal armor against acting virtuously, and accept responsibility.

Ok that’s why I’m against hydrogen on economic and political grounds. Now lets look at practical grounds.

Alright, so you’ve got your water. Now you need your energy to break off the hydrogen. That’s one step. You’ll lose energy because you’re paying a premium to obtain hydrogen as your energy medium, Then you have to transport it from where you make it, to the people that want to use it. You’ll need energy to do that. There’ll be seepage of course, it’s hard to contain a gas composed of one proton and one electron. So you’ve got waste as well.

Now compare that with using a battery. The energy from solar, wind etc comes off your production sight as electricity, and here’s the thing. It remains electricity. You don’t lose anything by using your hard won electricity to create another energy medium. It’s a one step process which is almost always better than a series of steps that are less than 100% efficient. It’s available everywhere. There’s no leakage and no loss. And you and I can do it by ourselves using off the shelf tech that’s relatively cheap and available. You could be energy independent, a wholesaler even. You could compete with the big boys. Battery tech is coming along leaps and bounds thank to nano-technology.

However if you go and ask people about this they’ll tell you it can’t work. They’ll say it won’t provide enough power. That your quality of life will suffer. That you’ll be left sitting in the dark. I’ve heard this all before and while I’m not particularly fond of sitting around in the dark it always remind of the New York Blackouts when so, so many children were conceived.

One oil company goes to great lengths to tell you that it would take a laughable, ludicrously high number of wind turbines to supply a city the size of Paris. I laugh and wag my finger at the tv screen every time I see it. Oh you bad, bad people you, I think. They mention conservation in passing but its the image of vast fields of windmills that sticks. However, energy should not be just about how it is produced it should also be about how its used. Most buildings in the world are by any standard unbelievably inefficient in terms of energy use. It keeps consumption high, which is good for suppliers, especially monopolies, but bad for everyone else.

There’s an office building in Harare, Zimbabwe which has no AC, but yet which is cool all year round, even when you could have a barbecue on your car roof. It doesn’t use electricity to moderate temperature. It does it by having a better design, in this case a design inspired by a termite mound, another structure which regulates its own temperature. So, let’s dispense with the AC.

Other buildings heat water from a solar array on their roof, or from having a wall gather heat from sunlight and then slowly release it into the buildings interior. Yet others obtain heat from a heat sink, which stores heat in the ground when it’s hot and releases when it gets cold. So let’s dispense with oil burner in the basement.

Then of course you have to light your building, but here again new bulbs mean plunging energy requirements. Refrigerating and cooking? New appliances are coming out all the time which have been designed to be more energy efficient.

Doing all that plus all the mundane little things like turning lights off in empty rooms could easily mean a 90% reduction in energy demand. When you consider that wind tech is getting better and better it could mean the difference between a windfarm the size of a small country and one that fits on top of a hilltop.

Of course I would be lying if I said I was totally against hydrogen. It would be a godsend for countries which are parched or scorched or both. Don’t park your car outside in Kuwait or you’ll need asbestos gloves to open your door. Since hydrogen burns to produce water an energy policy based around it would supply drinking water as well. A professor at a University in Alaska has talked about using volcanic heat from the Aleutian Islands to convert seawater into hydrogen and then shipping it to LA. Iceland is charging ahead with Hydrogen as well, but then they’re living on top of a huge volcano and have more geothermal power than they know what to do with.

But in the final analysis, for you and me, directly sinking renewable electricity into batteries would mean independence from today’s energy tyranny. Me? Well, when I get out of Tokyo I’m going to sit down and invest in some democratic, market friendly batteries, become self sufficient and never be a slave to monopolists again.