Remember Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani? The man who is famous for that saying about the Stone Age? You know: the Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones?
Well, Sheikh Yamani is back to making his outrageous comments. This time, he predicts that the future is growing short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. Yes, the handwriting is on the wall, and it is not written in oil. According to Yamani, OPEC won't be able to exist another 50 years if hydrogen can be produced as a low-cost alternative energy source.
Yamani's view fits with recent thinking in the US where motor vehicles now consume twice as much oil as the country produces.
Consumption growing
And that consumption is growing, too, with the National Research Council projecting that the US will consume 1.5 billion gal/year of gasoline by 2050, assuming that most vehicles are highly efficient conventional, hybrid, or flexfuel vehicles.
However, NRC also says that if most of the vehicles are fuel cell and battery electric vehicles, gasoline consumption will decrease by almost 70% to less than 50 million gal/year, or half the current US oil production.
But there's another startling point to be considered. "The potential for hydrogen production [in the US] is more than eight times the transportation fuel consumption," according to Ali A. Jalalzadeh-Azar, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Jalalzadeh-Azar published his views at this year's Renewable Hydrogen Workshop, where expert speakers addressed topics of renewable resources, hydrogen generation equipment, and related technologies.
Hydrogen workshop
More than 130 people from around the world attended the Renewable Hydrogen Workshop, which aimed "to encourage an open dialogue about the progress and challenges of creating hydrogen from renewable sources."
Jalalzadeh-Azar had further interesting news for them, too: that renewable resources for hydrogen are abundant, but their large-scale utilization requires overcoming economic challenges and infrastructural limitations arising from what he calls "spatial and temporal gaps between the energy source and demand."
That's academic talk for supply chain, and what he means is that we have a long way to go before we can move from sourcing hydrogen in abundance to making it available on an everyday basis for transportation.
Still, he concluded: "Well orchestrated policies and incentives, along with analyses and R&D, can help overcome these challenges." Unfortunately, unlike Yamani, Jalalzadeh-Azar gave no timetable for this process.
Could it be 50 years? Could Yamani be right?
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