Dateline: June 10 2025
For heavy duty trucking, hauling, shipping and ploughing, diesel has been the stalwart fuel of choice since the development of the diesel engine more than 120 years ago. With high thermal energy efficiency and abundant, convenient liquid fuel, diesel is hard to beat. Whole armies are powered by diesel — including some submarines — and many industries would grind to a halt without it.
But there’s a dark side to diesel: pollution, noxious exhaust gasses and carbon emissions. Though a modern diesel truck produces less smoke in 200km than grilling a burger, there are millions of older engines that are hardly clean. Diesels can run on vegetable oils, and billions of gallons of biodiesel are consumed every year, but that competes with food crops and doesn’t do enough to combat climate change.
Hydrogen has been touted as the ultimate clean fuel, and can be extracted from water using solar power for a net zero solution. But it’s costly and difficult to handle, and relies on vast quantities of surplus “curtailed” power to be viable. Infrastructure to store and transport hydrogen to where it’s needed is complex and underdeveloped.
Now there’s an alternative. Liquid ammonia is easily stored, transported and distributed, and can be used both in combustion engines as well as feedstock for electric fuel cells. It’s proving itself as a zero-emissions substitute for diesel in tractors, trains and ships. Recent breakthroughs have reduced emissions on the production side too, and now “green” ammonia is becoming mainstream.
So, for heavy duty hauling and shipping, who needs hydrogen?
- Published on June 9 2022
Hydrogen economy explodes
Cheap solar powers the next energy revolution
Dateline: April 5 2036
Now that solar power has become so ubiquitous and abundant that it’s almost free, energy companies are turning to the most efficient and harmless way of storing excess electricity for later use — hydrogen. It’s more than 30 years since Jeremy Rifkin predicted the hydrogen economy, but it’s finally in full swing.
The beauty of hydrogen is that it’s easily manufactured from water if you have lots of spare power, can be stored and transported, burnt as ultra-clean fuel, or simply converted back into electricity by a fuel cell, on demand.
Batteries have come a long way in terms of energy density and charging speed, but they still lag far behind in conversion efficiency terms, and cost. Batteries are also heavy, making them impractical for long-range drones and hybrid planes. Hydrogen is pure and simple, the most basic element in the universe. In fact, it’s the fuel that powers our sun to deliver solar power to earth in the first place.
Not that hydrogen is without its problems. There’s a reason SpaceX chose liquid rocket fuel over liquefied hydrogen for their Starship booster; it’s much easier to handle in risky environments. Hydrogen leaks easily and is extremely explosive, but modern chemical storage methods are secure and convenient.
With solar costing about one US cent per kilowatt hour, but only available in daylight hours, it makes sense to store all that “free” electricity, at scale, to power the grid when the sun’s not shining; and to balance unreliable supply with equally variable demand.
Resource companies have long shifted their focus from coal, oil, and natural gas to lithium, silicon and platinum as solar has taken over; now it’s time to join the exploding hydrogen economy. Specialised materials and services for storage and handling, and nanotech membranes and catalysts, are in high demand.
After all, in most countries, electricity has become a basic human right. And every company wants to combine profit with purpose.
- Published on April 4 2019
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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