Hier ist die Lösung Herr Schröder ! - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[M_B_S]

As far back as Jules Verne, visionaries have predicted that society will someday be utterly transformed by energy based on hydrogen. The lightweight gas, the most abundant element in the universe, can be made from water. It is wondrously clean, emitting mainly pristine steam when burned. When fed into fuel cells, which generate electricity, it offers unprecedented efficiency--these electrochemical reactors extract twice as much useful energy from fuel as internal-combustion engines can.

In fact, hydrogen-powered fuel cells promise to solve just about every energy problem on the horizon. In homes and offices, fuel cells would keep the lights on when the grid can`t. Cars propelled by the cells wouldn`t foul the air. Hydrogen-based energy would mean less global warming as we shift away from fossil fuels.

None of this is as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds. Potent commercial forces are bringing the hydrogen economy along faster than anyone thought possible only a few years ago. In the next two years, the first wave of products based on hydrogen-powered fuel cells is expected to hit the market, including cars and buses powered by fuel cells, and compact electric generators for commercial buildings and houses. Technology for generating hydrogen is ready now: "reformers" that extract hydrogen from natural gas, and "electrolyzers," Jules Vernian devices that extract hydrogen from plain water. Those electrolyzers, if powered by so-called renewable-energy technologies like wind turbines and solar panels, could truly put an end to oil. Wind turbines and solar panels are emerging fast; after long decades of development, they have entered a Moore`s law-like pattern of rapidly falling costs. All these advances add up to a startling reality. Major oil companies have begun to bet quietly but heavily on a hydrogen future. So have many of the largest manufacturers, including United Technologies, General Electric, Du Pont--and every major car company.

Like all disruptive technologies, the hydrogen revolution must overcome major barriers to achieve ubiquity, however. The greatest hurdle is cost: Fuel cells are too pricey for all but niche applications, and they`re likely to remain so until economies of scale kick in. Likewise, fully installing the infrastructure needed to produce and deliver hydrogen on a massive scale--think of the refineries, pipelines, and gas stations that have been built to support the oil economy--will take decades and require tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, support for hydrogen technology in Washington, D.C., has been almost as evanescent as the gas: For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, the Department of Energy`s hydrogen research budget was $27 million, a minuscule 0.14% of the DOE`s total budget--and earlier this year the Bush Administration proposed roughly halving that allotment.

Still, it`s hard to dismiss a technology that promises a way to kiss the sheikhs goodbye. Suppose further unthinkable things happen--a fundamentalist coup in Saudi Arabia, say, or terrorist attacks on the kingdom`s brittle petroleum infrastructure, either of which might precipitate an oil crisis. Could we put the Hydrogen Age on the fast track?

Hydrogen experts, though accustomed to thinking in decades instead of years or months, are already mulling that question, and their answer can be summed up as "yes." A major source of hydrogen is instantly available: natural gas, or methane. Already it is widely processed into hydrogen for manufacturing plastics, "hydrogenated" vegetable oil, and other products. Making hydrogen this way is not totally environmentally friendly--reforming methane generates carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming. But it`s strategically friendly: Today 99.5% of the methane consumed in America is produced in the U.S. and Canada. What`s more, companies such as Praxair of Danbury, Conn., and Air Products & Chemicals of Allentown, Pa., operate a limited but widely dispersed hydrogen infrastructure in the U.S., including pipelines, storage terminals, tanker trucks, and reformers.

Such assets represent a kind of hydrogen-economy starter kit. To jump-start the transition, the first order of business would be to outfit service stations to fuel the hydrogen-powered cars that will soon reach the market, says C.E. "Sandy" Thomas, president of H2Gen Innovations, an Arlington, Va., startup developing novel low-cost methane reformers. Revving up the hydrogen economy would also probably require heavier spending, by industry or government, to accelerate the low-cost mass production of fuel cells, says John A. Turner, a principal scientist at the DOE`s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. The technology faces the classic chicken-and-egg problem, he explains: To compete with piston engines and achieve mass commercialization, the costs of the technology must come down by at least a factor of ten. That can happen, but probably not without the cost savings that flow from mass production.

Voices Mount in Call for
"MANHATTAN II" Project
to Wean America and the West
Away from Imported Oil

[dagotchi]

Mann MBS, der Schröder kann doch kein Englisch !

[raila]

Jedenfalls mehr
als ein Ami-Präsident oder engl. Premier Deutsch kann, um dem Eindruck eines Bonhomme entgegenzuwirken. Da gibt`s auf der Weltbühne ganz andere "Kaliber", derer man auch in diesem board lakaienhaft nachhechelt!

Übrigends sind die genannten "Neuigkeiten" uralt. Die Lobby bestimmt den Weg und nicht die Logik, geschweige denn des Volkes Nützlichkeit.