The Hydrogen Economy

Abstract

A rather obvious but long-ignored fact is that the supplies of raw materials and fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil on our planet are limited. For decades, it was believed that these deposits were so enormous that in the foreseeable future, we would not have to fear the exhaustion of those known deposits or of the resources not yet economically exploitable. Recently, however, since the report of the Club of Rome and in particular the diagrams published by the Meadows on the limits of growth, this viewpoint is no longer defensible.1 Because of the recent uncontrolled exponential growth of the world’s population, and the additional growth of energy demands due to increasing living standards per capita of population, exhaustion of known ore deposits and fossil fuels can be expected in the foreseeable future (see Table 2.1). The scenarios of the Meadows indicate a decade of breakdown, somewhere between 2020 and 2070, in which the per capita amount of food available for the world population will undergo sharp (>10% per year) cutbacks and the production-time curve will have passed through its maximum.