Hydrogen and the big energy options☆

Abstract

THE PRESENT situation of world supply and demand of energy is very much based on the availability of cheap oil and gas. Even under today's condition of roughly $12/barrel the energy price is still inherently cheap. Presently, the total world energy consumption is close to 8 TW years/year or 8.5 billion tons of coal equivalent per year. Out of that there is 3.5 TW years/year in the form ofoil, 1.5 TW years/year come from the Persian Gulf region alone. For your convenience you may recall that 14 million barrels/day are equivalent to 1 TW year/year. Another way of putting it is to say that the world today has 4 billion people with an average pep capita consumption of 2 kW years/year or in short, 2 kW. However, this average comes from widespread contributions, in North America the per capita value is close to I l kW, in Europe close to 4 kW, while in most of the developing countries the consumption is 0.2 kW. These numbers refer to commercial energy, in case of the developing countries one has to add another 0.2-0.3 kW of noncommercial energy in the form of wood, dung, etc. The world population will continue to grow. It is practically unavoidable to expect 8 billion people by the year 2030. This is not a long way off. It is within the expected lifespan of my children--and this may be one way of looking at it. Another way is the observation that 50 years is just twice the lifetime of a power plant. This conference talks about innovation and technological progress where two lifetimes of power plants may be just adequate. Improving the barely acceptable 0.2 kW/capita in the developing parts of the world now means an increase of today's world average of 2 kW to higher values which is the second reason for the increase of world energy demand. In the developed parts of the world there is reason to hope for improvements in the efficiency of energy uses which would lead, by contrast to the first two trends, to a decrease of consumption. A way of looking at it is the energy coefficient which is the ratio of relative energy growth to relative growth of the gross national products. In the past, this coefficient was close to one, while there are reasons to hope for lower values in the future. A conceivable value is 0.8; however, values as low as 0.5 may be worth considering. Ifideed, it does not make any sense to consider the consumption of energy as a value by itself. Energy consumption is deeply embedded in economy and societal attitudes, and it is therefore this complex as a whole that must be considered when the future evolution of world energy demand is to be understood. At the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) we have done this, to a degree. We have considered seven world regions. North America is such a world region. It is an industrialized region with a market economy and is rich in resources. So is the Soviet Union with Eastern Europe but it is a centrally planned economy and so we made it another region. South America and South East Asia are examples for other world regions. We then carefully accounted in detail for uses of energy in the various sectors such as transportation, industry or private homes and we did this within the bracket of a low and a high expectation of growth. It is not the purpose of my speech tonight to elaborate on this; hydrogen and the big energy options is the topic. So it may be sufficient to report here that an increase of the average per capita consumption from 2 to 3, respectively to 5 kW/capita is within reason. With 8 billion people by the year 2030 we are therefore talking of 24 TW years/year and 40 TW years/year, that is a factor of 3 and 5 when compared with today's energy demand. Values of 24 or even 40 TW years are not really satisfactory numbers. Our analysis indicates that for instance India will grow, for the lower case, to only 0.9 kW/capita of commercial energy. But there is a fire wood crisis and the increase from today's 0.2 kW/capita to 0.9 kW/capita will be needed to replace today's noncommercial energy. Contrary to the statements in some quarters, one should not feel very comfortable about these expectations for the year 2030.