Shots Across The Bow

Jeremy Rifkin and The Hydrogen Economy

I just finished reading The Hydrogen Economy, and if the blurb on the back ("Now the hydrogen movement has a marquee spokesman."--Peter Coy, Business Week) is accurate, the hydrogen movement is in deep trouble.

The first clue was the simple observation that, out of 250 pages of text, only about 40 actually deal with hydrogen power! Even more telling, in those 40 pages, there is virtually no discussion of precisely how hydrogen is to be harnessed. Instead, Rifkin talks about how we will use renewable sources of energy to produce the hydrogen, without mentioning that those sources are nowhere near enough to produce the amount of hydrogen needed to replace fossil fuels. He dismisses the tremendous cost differential, assuming that further research will reduce it, again with no specifics. For the last thirty pages, he sings the praises of the new hydrogen economy, how it will end the monopolistic practices of Big Oil, and how everybody will produce their own energy in a distributed network, and how "all manner of things wi' be well."

Unfortunately, he seems to have no clue about how this will happen. He looks at hydrogen power and fuel cells as a black box solution. Once we have them in place, and they work the way he envisages, then everything will be wonderful. The problem is that, his blithe pronouncements to the contrary, there are several very real difficulties in implementing his vision, difficulties that are not amenable to easy solution. For instance, he speaks of using hydrogen to store energy from renewable resources, but he neglects to mention that the energy released through oxidation of hydrogen is less than the energy needed to generate the hydrogen in the first place. Funny how, even though he uses and abuses the concept of entropy thoughout the first portion of the book, he neglects to take into acount it's very real impact on hydrogen usage.

The book does make an excellent case for moving away from oil, and that is its biggest strength. Rifkin presents a clear, well argued, and well referenced argument that we are at the end of the fossil fuel age, and need to move on to a new source of energy. While I disagree with some of his points, particularly those based on the global warming model, he still presents a compelling case on his other two points, that cheap oil is going the way of the dinosaurs, and even if it weren't, relying on an energy source controlled by unstable States is foolhardy.

Had Rifkin titled the book The End of the Dinosaur Economy, I would have nary a quibble. But based on his title, I was looking for a discussion of the pros and cons of a hydrogen based fuel system, aong with some discussion of how to make the transition. Instead, I got a picture of how bad things are now, compared to how good things could be, with no map of how to get from here to there.

Posted by Rich at September 24, 2003 4:05 PM | TrackBack