The Humanity View

The thought of losing our human societies and civilisations is one that disturbs many people. This generally manifests itself in ways as diverse as stories, myths and legends of great catastrophies to big-screen action movies of Extinction Level Events.

Our industrial societies are very finely balanced at the moment, with critical dependencies on insecure, fragile or limited resources.

R. Buckminster Fuller succinctly summarised the situation by referring to those societies as using up their "savings account" rather than their "current account", an analogy based on the use of limited but easily accessed resources vs. those which are unlimited but for which you have to do some more work to receive.

Now, human-kind would likely survive most catastrophies but we would be reduced to surviving and not progressing. Therefore, it makes sense to ensure that our technology and knowledge is available throughout the world. To support the availability of the technology, which is likely to be necessary to access all of the knowledge, fundamental resources also need to be available everywhere.

The fundamental resources to sustain humans are water, food, shelter' and heat. Upping the technology level results in these equating to water, seeds, land, sun and electricity. Although the technology to support a Hydrogen Economy seems advanced and only minimally available, once fully deployed it will seem as common-place as a radio or light-bulb. As there is no intrinsic requirement on external resources, once in place the technology for the Hydrogen Economy is far more localised than the current economy.

The Hydrogen based cycle referred to above, has its core in providing these basic human resources.

First of all, deploy reliable generators of electricity that use primary energy sources such as solar radiation and wind. Wind-turbines are the most "fixable" technology as they only require materials that are in the machinery anyway or can be replaced with (albeit less efficient) simpler materials and designs.

These generators create H2 through the electrolysis of pure water. The O2 can be used in the treatment of sewage for recycling as fertiliser.

The H2 is used to generate reliable, on-demand electricity via a fuel cell. Some of that electricity is used to liquefy H2 for transport vehicles and tanker distribution. Some is used to pump sea-water or otherwise tainted water and de-salinate/ distil/ purify it for distribution for irrigation and as drinking water. Some pure water would be required to top-up the electrolysis units but in principle that is a closed system, re-cycling the pure water exhausted from the fuel-cell.

On the 22nd March 2005, the WMO's World Water Day, the United Nations declared an international decade for action 2005-2015 - Water For Life. It would possible, pragmatic and affordable to deploy the techniques and technologies presented above to support this activity. Not only by de-salinating water but by pumping ground water. However, the latter has to be carefully managed to remain sustainable as it depends on reserves renewed by rainfall, which is often lacking in areas of inaccessible or poor quality water.

It is possible to design vehicles to retain their exhaust water. This can be exchanged with LH2 at refuelling and the returned pure water re-electrolysed for H2. An extension to this principle is the long-endurance/ independent vehicle, which can incorporate retractable solar panels (or small deployable wind-turbine generators) as part of its roof-rack structure. Such a car/ truck is meant to go out into areas without filling stations but with adequate sun-light/ wind and to re-generate its fuel during the day once the occupants have reached their destination and are otherwise engaged whilst the vehicle re-fuels. The re-fuel functionality could be combined with or replaced by a base-station that is trailer based and simply collects solar radiation and/ or wind energy to generate H2 and LH2 from a recycled source of pure water. Not only can such a station generate electricity for the base, but can also re-fuel the trucks.

Whether such vehicles can be produced depends mostly on the creation of efficient solar-panels, wind-turbine generators, electrolysers and fuel-cells but this is likely to happen if the technologies are more widely used.

The fairer distribution of resources underpinning the adption of a hydrogen energy system means that aid for nations currently in chronic debt can be directed towards some of the deployment of the necessary technology and infastructure. This is in some ways analgous to the philosophy akin to giving a man a fish and he'll feed his family for a day but give him a fishing rod and he can feed them forever. The provision of electricity, mains transmission and water pipes means that there is no need to walk for miles in search of fire wood or water. Other than the obvious labour saving, this helps reduce the destruction of plant life, enables villages to be established with the ability to provide water and boil it to help clean it, until clean water can be piped in.

In this way, existing charities such as  Water Aid, together with poverty reduction campaigns such as Make Poverty History can work with electrical and chemical engineering companies to install the equipment to realise the hydrogen economy.