The transition to a sustainable energy supply is one of the major challenges that humans will face during the twenty-first century. This transition is inevitable, but there are many scenarios discussed for how and when this will happen. Humans have relied on renewable energy for most of history, and will do so again, as affordable supplies of fossil fuels decline in the coming decades (or centuries). However, there is wide agreement that the world should not give up the benefits of modern technology. The transition to a ‘green’ energy supply has already begun, and technologies for collecting and converting energy from the environment, new means of energy storage, and increased energy efficiency have progressed greatly. That is why there is legitimate hope that the coming change will be possible without a major reduction in the quality of life.

Individual mobility and long-distance travel have become vital elements of human existence. This mobility and the freedom it enables are taken for granted by most, and even considered a fundamental right. Most of this mobility is provided by the more than 900 million motor vehicles that now populate roads around the globe. An enormous number – and expected to grow to more than 1.1 billion in less than a decade. If all the motor vehicles on the globe were put bumper to bumper, the resulting giant traffic jam would be 4.5 million kilometres long, or wrap around the globe more than 100 times.

The development of the vehicle fleet in the selected countries was estimated regarding their demographic and economic perspectives. Recent predictions by Alho et al. (2006) are that the population size in the European Economic Area (EEA) including Switzerland will increase slightly from the current level of 392 million to 427 million inhabitants by 2050. This median scenario by Alho et al. (2006) was chosen as the basis for the estimation of the fleet sizes for the first half of the twenty-first century, followed by a slight decrease from 2050 to 2100. This has been complemented by data from the Council of Europe (2005) on the population increase between 1995 and 2004, where Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, and Poland show a 0% increase, France and Switzerland between 2% and 5%, and Spain between 6% and 10%.

The economic aspect of the development is represented by the GDP, which shows the increase in value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year (not taking into account purchasing power parity but taking into account inflation). It is used as a measure of economic development. The values are taken from the World Factbook (CIA, 2008). The computed fleet sizes are a result of data-deduced growth curves and take the values shown in Figure E.1.

Study motivation

Future transportation systems face a broad range of requirements. They must be economic, clean, low-carbon, efficient, and reliable (to name just a few). These characteristics must be based not only on the vehicles, but also upon their fuel supply chains. Using hydrogen as a fuel offers a possible solution to satisfying global mobility needs, including sustainability of supply and the potential for significant reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Because hydrogen is an energy carrier that must be produced from primary energy resources, sustainability also implies that the hydrogen must be cleanly and economically produced, whether this involves carbon capture and storage (CCS), renewable energy resources, or long-term nuclear solutions.

Introduction

During combustion or electrochemical conversion, the reaction of hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen produces energy and pure water. Thus, in itself, it is an environmentally benign process. However, when judging the environmental merits of any fuel or energy carrier, it is important to consider the other, often complex processes related to additional stages of its life cycle, particularly its production, transport, and storage. Only by considering the cumulative burdens on the environment and the total consumption of primary energy resources can a fair comparison be made between the available and proposed options.

LCA is a central element in the assessment of technologies and production routes, enabling a comparative evaluation of the environmental performances of different options. LCA methodology, sometimes referred to as ‘cradle-to-grave’ analysis, considers cumulative burdens stemming from the entire lifetime (construction, operation, and dismantling) of the directly and indirectly related industrial activities involved in the production of goods or the provision of services. By considering the consequences of an option according to these principles, a fair and unbiased evaluation of the merits and shortcomings can be achieved. In turn, an LCA forms a crucial aspect of a broader understanding from the perspective of sustainability, and can inform a decision-making process of the true level of either energy dependency or security that an option is likely to represent. For options which are ‘renewable’ or ‘non-fossil’ with regard to the direct conversion processes, a complete account of the background processes will determine whether a reduction of the reliance on conventional fuels will actually occur. Particularly for emerging energy systems, such as the use of hydrogen in transport, conducting such assessments at an early stage of development is important in order to identify the most promising options as well as determine environmentally significant aspects of an individual production route.

Preface

When the project that forms the basis for this book was initiated in 2006, hydrogen was enjoying immense popularity as a possible alternative to fossil fuels as an energy storage vector. Record-breaking attendance at fuel cell exhibitions was common, and the news media was full of the ambitious market introduction plans of fuel cell company representatives and the grand hopes of politicians. It is now 2011, and the euphoria surrounding hydrogen has shifted to batteries and all-electric vehicles; the ‘electron economy’ is being advertised in much the same way. Hype surrounding transportation technology is a common phenomenon, and history provides us with many examples of announcements of ‘major breakthroughs’. Some, like fuel injection, caught on; others, like the ‘Nucleon’ nuclear powertrain, did not. Whether hype hampers or helps society to find and to implement the best solutions for our pressing social and environmental problems is debatable. What is certain is that a thorough analysis of technological alternatives, and perseverance in execution once the best solution (or set of solutions) has been identified, should never be superseded by action plans driven by media attention.

The Alliance for Global Sustainability is the framework that facilitated collaboration between John Heywood’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alexander Wokaun’s team at the Paul Scherrer Institute in investigating vehicle technology alternatives ‘Before the Transition to Hydrogen’. With generous financial support from the Swiss Competence Center for Energy and Mobility (CCEM), these two working groups met biannually with sponsors and partners from industry and professional associations, to share ideas and to engage in exciting multidisciplinary research. The results of the Swiss team’s research are contained in this book. Even though, occasionally, the opinions of the partners from opposite sides of the Atlantic regarding the potential of the various transportation energy technologies investigated did not converge, the collaboration was highly successful because of the high value that both research teams placed on objective and unbiased analysis. In particular, the MIT group’s strength in combustion engine technology and policy research proved to be highly complementary to the PSI group’s technical know-how regarding fuel cells, global energy system modelling, and scenario analysis.

Introduction

The earlier chapters considered a number of important factors for the transition to alternative fuels and vehicles, including issues of market introduction, environmental and resource impacts, possible vehicle configurations, and comparative pollutant emissions. These are highly relevant and practical considerations for assessing the options and processes to facilitate a shift to alternative fuels. In this chapter, we expand on these earlier chapters to consider a possible transition to alternative fuels and transportation technologies in a broader, global, and longer term context. Specifically, we consider energy system interactions and technological change, major driving forces of global economic and demographic change, resource availability, and climate change policy. This complements and extends the approach in Chapter 5 which analysed factors driving deployment of new vehicle technologies from consumer and regulatory perspectives.

Let us briefly introduce each of the important global and long-term issues mentioned above, considering first energy system interactions. To assess the suitability of different technological options for the transport sector over the longer term, it is also necessary to consider technological options in the energy sector (for supplying fuels to transportation), and trends in other end-use sectors (which compete for the same energy carriers used by transportation). In the energy sector, the pace of technological change, bottlenecks to the deployment of new technologies (such as a hydrogen refuelling network), and technological lock-ins (for example, the current integrated system of oil production, distribution, and refining) are further factors likely to influence the suitability of potential alternative fuels and technologies in transportation.

Introduction

Over half of all oil is used in transportation, and global demand is steadily increasing (EIA, 2008a). The exclusive dependence of our mobility on fossil fuels raises serious concerns over energy security, cost, environment, and human health. Creating a more sustainable transportation system has been the subject of much attention from stakeholders in the governmental, consumer, and industrial arenas (Kasseris, 2006; Stern, 2006). Technological developments are necessary to move toward sustainability in personal transportation while meeting dramatically increasing demand for mobility from developing countries, particularly India and China (IEA, 2008b: 393, Table 16.4). Carmakers understand that consumers will not readily tolerate any reduction in the quality of service provided (Stremler, 2008) while at the same time government is expected to regulate industry to protect human health and mitigate climate change. There are no easy answers to the transportation energy question, and there is a clear need for an accurate description of the inherentlydifficult trade-offs associated with vehicle technology options.

In the near term, improvements in vehicle efficiency can be achieved by incremental modifications in combustion engines, accessory load reduction, low-rolling-resistance tyres, and downsizing/lightweighting (Weiss et al., 2000; MacLean and Lave, 2003). In the long term, fuel cells and batteries with high-energy densities promise to drastically reduce transportation emissions at constant performance and safety. The trend toward powertrain electrification introduces not only a new set of technical challenges but also many new supply chain and social acceptance challenges. Biofuel is another alternative that is being actively researched and developed, but often faces hurdles when considering land-use change (Hertel, 2009) among other things. There tends to be bias in the various whitepapers and technical reports released by the lobby groups of the respective transportation technology developers, each attempting to present the facts in a way that promotes their own technology over their competitors.

Introduction

Hydrogen has the potential to become a sustainable energy carrier of the future, particularly for transportation. Until recently, H2 emissions to the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources have been largely disregarded and viewed in large part as a product of incomplete fossil fuel combustion. As H2 production and the fraction of energy-based H2 applications increase, a potential accumulation of H2 in the atmosphere from direct emissions, losses and leakage, and changes in chemical processes in both the troposphere and the stratosphere could result. Vehicle exhaust gas is currently an important source of anthropogenic H2 to the atmosphere, and losses of H2 from production, distribution, storage, and other end-use systems could become increasingly significant contributors. With changing vehicle fleet composition and increasing H2 demand and production for industrial and direct energy-based end-uses, an assessment of well-to-wheel H2 emissions, including H2 emissions from current and emerging vehicle technologies, will help assess the magnitude of future technological anthropogenic H2 emissions to the atmosphere.

Objectives and scope

Apart from the challenging technical questions associated with the production, transport, and storage of H2, future anthropogenic H2 emissions are an area of increased interest due to their prominence in the global H2 budget (see Figure 4.1). Currently, large uncertainty is associated with the contribution of H2 from technological processes, primarily from fossil fuels (white arrow, Figure 4.1). A detailed analysis of H2 emissions from the major anthropogenic processes that contribute to the present and future global H2 budget has been performed in this work and serves to better quantify the contribution from this sector.

1. INTRODUCTION

Renewable resources of energy have immense potential to supply a much larger fraction of the world's electricity, fuel for transportation, and heat and other energy services. Renewable energy can be utilized through a variety of sources, approaches, systems, and technologies:

1. • Plants and algae require sunlight for photosynthesis before they can be converted to biofuels or biopower;

2. • Hydropower capitalizes on rain and snowfall resulting from water evaporation and transpiration;

3. • Wind generates electricity directly by turning a turbine, or indirectly in the form of ocean waves, but the wind itself is driven by the sun;

4. • Tidal and geothermal energy are the only renewable energy resources that are not a direct result of solar energy. Tides rise and fall due to gravitational attraction between the oceans and the moon. The heat trapped in the earth itself is due to both leftover heat from the formation of the planet, and the radioactive decay of elements within the crust, such as uranium and thorium.

When the potential for these energy sources is quantified, the numbers are startling. One recent assessment, which collected actual data on wind speeds (at a hub height of 80 metres) at 7,753 surface stations, identified about 72 terawatts (TW) of potential. One fifth of this potential could satisfy 100 per cent of the world's energy demand and more than seven times its electricity needs. If we exclude biomass and look at solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy resources, the world has roughly 3,439,685 terawatt-hours (TWh) of potential — about 201 times the amount of electricity the world consumed in 2007 (see Table 2.1).

So far, less than 0.09 per cent of the potential for renewable energy to meet global energy needs has been harnessed. However, that percentage is starting to increase.

1. INTRODUCTION

Despite a growing concern about fossil energy's contribution to environmental degradation and, particularly, global warming, oil, natural gas, and coal have remained the major sources of energy worldwide. In particular, oil has been the most commonly used type of fossil energy for about a century because of its abundance and also its relatively easier process of extraction, transportation, and utilization compared with coal and gas. Ever since its commercial extraction started in the second half of the nineteenth century, oil has gradually managed to end a few centuries of the domination of coal as the main and an inexpensive source of energy globally since the modern industrial era, with its ever expanding energy requirements, began about 200 years ago. Natural gas, considered an environmentally cleaner type of fossil fuel compared with oil and coal, has slowly increased its share of the global market since the 1960s. However, oil is still the dominant energy fuel in terms of global demand and, thus, consumption. Its current pre-eminent status will likely remain unchallenged in the foreseeable future notwithstanding the necessity of substantial cuts in the usage of pollutive fossil fuels, including oil, to mitigate and eventually reverse global warming caused chiefly, but not exclusively, by greenhouse gases emitted from such energy.

Against this background, it is no wonder if oil has been a key issue globally as a major commodity in demand that is of crucial significance both for oil exporting countries and oil importing ones. For the former, it is a source, if not the source or the single largest source, of revenue, while it is a vital necessity for oil importing countries relying on oil as a main or the main source of energy for their economies. Two logical consequences can be drawn from such realities. First, oil exporting countries unsurprisingly play a major role in the global energy markets and also in international affairs because of their ability to affect oil importing countries' economies.