Technology development is really the only way forward and other countries seem to understand this better than we do
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
So said Professor Peter Drucker whom the Drucker Institute neatly describes as “a writer, professor, management consultant and self-described social ecologist, who explored the way human beings organise themselves and interact much the way an ecologist would observe and analyse the biological world”.
To be honest I’ve never had a lot of time for management consultants. I believe process rarely leads to progress because it’s created by people with little or no real vision or ambition. Real progress is produced by people who don’t just do the vision thing but are prepared to pick up the tools of their trade and make stuff happen.
But on this Drucker is right. Creating the future is the way to predict it and to do that you have to engineer it. We predict a low carbon world that uses clean technologies and some are certainly working hard on creating that but sadly others – mainly politicians, bureaucrats and of course the financial sector – are getting in the way by imposing processes that not just hold things up but are throttling our ability to create.
How things have changed. In Belgium during 1943 and due to the lack of availability of petrol, we saw the first use of ammonia as a fuel for buses. The Belgian motor-bus fleet apparently logged thousands of miles during WWII with no difficulties. It was a technology born out of a need as urgent as the need to deal with climate change is today.
Go back even earlier to 1834 and we find the first electric vehicles, one of which was built in Scotland by a Robert Anderson.
Except for once common but now extinct humble electric milk floats, bread vans and trolley buses, by the mid-1970s, ideas like electric vehicles were still the stuff of garage inventors, fuel cells were only seen in mainly American laboratories, the first practical solar cells (developed in the old Bell Labs in the US) were only 20 years old and the only regular use of the hydrogen word was related to bombs.
Now, we are using Belgian-built fuel cell powered electric buses which use hydrogen as the energy carrier and some researchers are looking at using liquid ammonia as it would be much easier to store.
It also contains much more hydrogen by volume than liquid or compressed hydrogen and is over 50% more energy dense per litre.
All you need is a “cracker” to split the hydrogen and nitrogen before feeding it to the fuel cell and as I mentioned some months ago, such a device now exists.
At the 2006 renewable energy exhibition and conference in Aberdeen, David McGrath demonstrated how to cook hamburgers on a hydrogen burning barbecue. A year later, he demonstrated a full blown hydrogen fuelled cooker. The year after that he developed a concept for a “hydrogen house” where heating, cooking and electricity production came from the use of hydrogen. McGrath was even demonstrating a small fuel cell powered vehicle.
All this took place 10 years ago yet we’ve made remarkably little progress since in Scotland in taking any of these technologies further forward.
As to why that is, then it has a lot to do with how we’re addressing the threat of climate change.
There would appear to be two distinct factions. One believes that the problem can only be solved by taxation and associated contractual and administrative processes and the other believes that the only way forward is through technology.
Of course, the faction that thinks taxation is the way forward also believes that this will push industry into developing new technologies.
Experience and the not insignificant fact that we’ve had to import pretty much all the clean energy technology we’ve applied so far would tend to suggest that this particular hypothesis is ideological nonsense.
There are certainly some interesting but mainly small and therefore quite vulnerable UK companies doing things like building hydrogen refuellers, electrolysers and fuel cells. One UK fuel cell builder actually lost 80% of its value recently because its funding plan fell through. Others are bumbling along mainly burning up shareholder’s resources.
However, there are none in Scotland which is actually the place where for geographical reasons demand for such technology could be quite high. Although we are making progress in heat storage, batteries, large heat pumps and medium tidal, I’m afraid we can’t get away from the fact that the development of clean, low carbon energy technologies as a meaningful industrial sector has so far pretty much eluded us.
Unlike Denmark we don’t have any Vestas-size companies to boast about.
We need some vision to compete with ideas like that put forward by the City of Leeds which is looking at converting its gas network to hydrogen for use for cooking and heating.
This is, of course, what Scotland’s Western Isles should do. Rather than trying to persuade the National Grid to give them an interconnector to allow them to build a wind energy export business they should simply go off grid and build a hydrogen network. Arguing with the bureaucrats over geographical charging ideology won’t get them anywhere fast.
Technology development is really the only way forward and other countries seem to understand this considerably better than we do. For example, with carbon taxes and high energy prices steel production in the UK is on a shoogly peg.
The Swedes, however, have decided to take the technology route and are beginning a project that uses hydrogen in the steel making process. The companies involved are, of course, partially state owned and the aim is to make steel making an entirely zero carbon process.
You will recall that the coal-fired power station at Longannet has recently closed down and indeed the UK Government has said it intends all coal fired generators will be shut down by 2025.
That’s a pity because I’m afraid technology has removed one of the main reasons for killing off coal which is, of course, carbon emission levels. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that combining coal gasification which produces hydrogen with fuel-cell technology cuts carbon emissions by at least half and what it does produce is very pure so could be used for conversion to new products.
What we need in Scotland isn’t a hydrogen office like the one in Methil that’s demonstrating a collection of imported technologies but an Office for Hydrogen Development that drives the technology forward and creates a meaningful supply chain.
Let’s hope the next Scottish Government can see the logic of this and gets behind the idea.
We could hold a hydrogen barbecue and discuss it.
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