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TRANSITION TO HYDROGEN ECONOMY COULD YIELD IMPORTANT NATIONAL AND GLOBAL BENEFITS
Responding to rising public interest in hydrogen as a likely replacement for oil, Rocky Mountain Institute today published a documented primer on hydrogen to clarify the abundant conflicting, confusing, and often ill-informed commentary on this fuel.
SNOWMASS, Colo. (PRWEB) June 30, 2003 - Responding to rising public interest in hydrogen as a likely replacement for oil, Rocky Mountain Institute today published a documented primer on hydrogen to clarify the abundant conflicting, confusing, and often ill-informed commentary on this fuel.
The report's author, physicist Amory B. Lovins, said: "Inexpert interest in hydrogen has elicited competing opinions and has spread a host of misconceptions, among them that hydrogen is too volatile and explosive to use as a fuel, and that making hydrogen uses more energy than it yields, making it impractical. In fact, the rapidly growing engagement of business, civil society, and government in devising and achieving a transition to a hydrogen economy is warranted, and if properly done, could yield important national and global benefits."
The chairs of eight major oil and car companies have said the world is entering the oil endgame and the start of the hydrogen era. President Bush further emphasized the commitment to developing hydrogen fuel-cell cars in his 2003 State of the Union address. Yet myths continue to cloud the hydrogen debate - most recently, the absurd idea that 10-20% of hydrogen used will leak, creating climate problems. (Actual leakage will be about 10-400 times less than that, and will be reinforced by a hydrogen economy's displacement of many of the fossil-fuel activities that release significant amounts of hydrogen today.)
Lovins' peer-reviewed white paper, "Twenty Hydrogen Myths," is written for both lay and technical readers. It explains, among other things, why much of the hydrogen needed to displace the world's gasoline is already being produced for other purposes, including making gasoline. The transition to hydrogen should not need enormous investments in addition to those that the energy industries are already making. Instead, it will displace many of those investments.
The paper also concludes:
| | - Converting to hydrogen may require less net capital than business-as-usual, and should be largely self-financing from its revenues.
- A well-designed hydrogen transition will also use little more, no more, or quite possibly less natural gas than business-as-usual.
- A rapid hydrogen transition will probably be more profitable than business-as-usual for oil and car companies, and can quickly distinguish the business performance of early adopters.
- A hydrogen industry big enough to displace all gasoline, while sustaining the other industrial processes that now use hydrogen, would be only severalfold bigger than the mature hydrogen industry that exists today, although initially it will probably rely mainly on smaller units of production, nearer to customers, to avoid big distribution costs.
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To download a free copy of RMI's new report, "Twenty Hydrogen Myths," visit http://www.rmi.org. Copies can also be ordered by calling 970-927-3851.
About Rocky Mountain Institute
Rocky Mountain Institute is a 21-year-old, independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit, entrepreneurial applied research center. Its ~50 staff foster the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, prosperous, and life-sustaining. Its work emphasizes advanced technologies and creative use of market forces, and is integrative, transdisciplinary, and trans-ideological. One of its major current projects is writing a compelling technical, economic, and policy roadmap for getting the United States off oil rapidly, attractively, and profitably - even for oil companies.
About the author
Amory B. Lovins is cofounder and CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute. A consultant physicist, he has advised the energy and other industries for 30 years as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. Published in 28 books and hundreds of papers, his work in ~50 countries has been recognized by the "Alternative Nobel," Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Happold Medal, eight honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lind-bergh, Hero for the Planet, and World Technology Awards. He advises industries and govern-ments worldwide, including major oil companies, and has briefed 17 heads of state. For the past dozen years, he has also led the development of quintupled-efficiency, uncompromised, same-price automobiles and of a profitable hydrogen transition strategy. Much of his wider work is synthesized in Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (http://www.natcap.org) written with Paul Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins. His latest book, Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size (http://www.smallisprofitable.org) authored with RMI colleagues, was named by The Economist as one of the best three business and economics books of 2002.
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