Hydrogen commons

People get all worked up about what sort of energy to use. Current reserves are about 40 years of oil, 150 years of coal, 85 years of urnaium (that's what powers nuclear power stations) and 60 years of natural gas. These aren't anti-fossil-fuel scaremongering figures, they're just a random selection of sources from within the industry.

That's based on current usage levels. Global usage is going up, so we're going to run out faster. Also, long before we run out, demand will outstrip supply which will mean we won't be able to afford much fuel, even though there's "lots" left.

But opponents of renewables go on about how they don't generate as much energy as claimed, and point out fatal flaws, like solar doesn't work at night and wind farms don't work if it's not windy.

The answer is actually really simple - we need ALL these sources of energy, and more besides. We also need some common way of storing, transporting and using energy. Currently, that appears to be hydrogen.

Elecricity can be used to drive almost any machine or process, but it's very hard to store lots of it. That's why we don't (generally) have electric cars or aeroplanes. We can't take the spare electricity that wind farms produce on windy days and store it in barrels or gasometers, to use on still days.

But hydrogen can be stored and piped around (it's a bit tricky, because hydrogen is explosive and needs to be heavily compressed or super-cold, but we can do it). Hydrogen can easily be burnt, like petrol (gasoline), to turn engines and power aircraft. And it's really easy to make hydrogen. You just need to pass electricity through salty water, and hydrogen gas bubbles out. Try it at home - just run a couple of wires from a 9 Volt battery into a glass of salty water.

This leads to an interesting, renewable, ever-lasting source of carbon-neutral power: build off-shore windfarms that pass the electricity they generate straight through the sea water to generate electricity, then pump it to shore. Start building them just beyond sight of the shore, and keep going, year after year, until you've got enough. In the mean time, you can generate hydrogen from any form of electricity, e.g. nuclear or fossil-powered power stations.

Because you can store hydrogen, you no longer have to worry about how generate power when the sun goes behind a cloud at your solar farm. You can also power cars and aeroplanes directly from it.

So there's the idea: we need a common fuel that can be generated anywhere from any other source of energy, that we can transport and store, and use to power anything. As soon as we've got that, all our energy problems disappear. And hydrogen would be just ticket.