Paying for the future

“Fuel cell research is to be strongly recommended as a route to protecting the earth’s resources”

So said one Professor Wilhelm Ostwald – surely a wise proponent of the kind of far-sighted approach to the management of energy and the environment that we need in the 21st century.

The thing is, he said it in 1897. And for most of the last 106 years, renewables and environmentally-benign power delivery systems like fuel cells have remained a small part of the energy picture.

It’s true that some renewable energy technologies like wind power are growing fast. Prof. Ostwald’s native Germany, for example, already has installed capacity to supply 15 million people. But the world remains overwhelmingly dependent on oil and gas reserves concentrated in a few countries. Will renewables ever make it possible for poor and rich countries to reduce their dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf region, which accounts for some 60% of reserves? If so, when?

Some people maintain that oil was not a major factor in the United States government’s action in Iraq in recent months. Markets will always need to operate, goes the logic, and the Iraqis would always need to sell the oil from the world’s second largest reserves. But this is to assume that US military and strategic planners do not see oil as a strategic commodity too important to be left to markets, and that events like the 1973 oil embargo and the economic crisis that followed won’t recur.

It is also to ignore the direct interest of members of this US administration and those close to it in contracts relating to war, reconstruction and development, and to believe that major US oil corporations are happy to see the French, Russians and Chinese eat their lunch.

And all this at a time when, as Lutz Kleveman describes in the New Great Game, reliable access to the giant reserves of the Caspian is starting to look like less of a sure thing (it won’t be environmental and human rights campaigners, but the Russians who stymie completion of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline described in an earlier Globolog, Human Decency and Britney Spears).

Whatever the relative importance of energy to other major factors that led the US to war, the American-led coalition is now committed to the region for a quite some time. At best, according to an optimistic assessment by Anthony H. Cordesman, an ‘offensive victory’ is likely to take a minimum of 8-12 more months to improve security in Iraq. During this time, the coalition will continue to sustain casualties even as the costs escalate to around $80 billion in this fiscal year, with a further $100bn reconstruction costs.

But just throwing money at the problem is unlikely to be enough. Iraq, suggests the International Crisis Group (ICG), will only work with a three-way distribution of responsibility between the coalition authority, the Iraqi governing council and the UN. This, says ICG chief Gareth Evans, would be “realistic enough for Washington, the wider international community and the Iraqi majority all to accept”.

Also essential, in Globolog’s view, is an apology to the Shi’a population of Iraq. It would be the right thing to do. More importantly for the coalition leaders, as Cordesman recognises, the present war will be lost or won depending on whether the Iraqi Shi’a join in: achieving greater legitimacy in their eyes is now a key military objective for the coalition.

Sunshine policy

“The costs [of the Iraq war and occupation] will far exceed what oil revenues reap in the short term and in the long term”, Edward Chow, a former international executive at Chevron Corp, and now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, told the Christian Science Monitor earlier this week (and it’s not clear he’s accounting for any proportion that might go to the Iraqis themselves).

If it becomes increasingly apparent that Chow is right with regard to the interests of the American people as a whole – as distinct from vested interests – then this administration, and its successors, will need to do something at least to seem to be lightening the burden on present and future taxpayers. [Similar thinking is already evident with regard to Afghanistan, where, according to the New York Times of 25 August, President Bush is viewing the situation “like a businessman”, and has decided that investing reconstruction money now could lead to en earlier exit for American forces and save money in the long run. The US currently spends $11bn a year on its military forces in Afghanistan and $900m on reconstruction aid].

To what degree could that growing realisation open up political space for more investment in alternatives to fossil fuels? Could we finally escape the oil addiction, described so vividly by Rabbi Arthur Waskow on openDemocracy’s climate change and energy discussion board? Could the need for greater energy security lead to massive government-supported programmes to make renewables, akin to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Programme?

“Hi there! Can we interest you in a zero-emission, sustainable energy future that promotes world peace?”

Such notions have been a staple of advocates of a renewable energy revolution since at least the 1970s. The message can seem like a stopped clock. But even stopped clocks occasionally tell the right time.

Investment so far is modest. The US federal government has pledged $1.7bn for research on hydrogen technology (equivalent to the immediate costs of the US presence in Iraq for about ten days). The European Commission has allocated $2bn over 5 years for hydrogen research and pilot projects. Japan is looking at investment on a similar scale.

Meanwhile, glimpses of the future may come from out-of-the-way places like the Patagonian city of Pico Trucado which, with Canadian assistance, is going to run all its public vehicles on hydrogen produced by wind turbines. Other glimpses may be right under your nose. During the recent blackout in the north-eastern United States, the police station in New York’s Central Park continued to shine brightly, powered by fuel cells, albeit ones that run on natural gas (even stranger shards of the future may include fuel cell ‘bio-nano’ devices – of tremendous positive potential or, if you’re having a bad day, prefiguring the kind of dystopia found in The Matrix ).

Such initiatives may look like small potatoes, but they could be part of a more significant trend than is readily apparent. In its scenarios for energy to 2050 (discussed in a January 2003 Globolog on climate change), Shell looks at the long-term trend in fuel cell system costs.

From around $100,000 per kilowatt (kW) in the 1960s (an astronomical sum, affordable only in…the space programme), they have fallen steadily – particularly since the 1980s – and the price could reach $500 per kW by 2006, and $50 by around 2010. This means fuel cells could be cheaper than both gas turbines and internal combustion engines within three to seven years across all applications, and not just boutique ones. Once the money is on your side, an energy revolution may be as easy as getting water to run downhill.

Shell thinks there are enough potential renewable energy resources in the world to supply around 200 gigajoules (GJ) each to 10 billion people. That’s more energy per capita than the present usage in the European Union. By 2050, world population is likely to be around 8.5bn. Extrapolating historical trends, it should be possible to at least double the efficiency with which energy is used over the next fifty years, and so provide the same services for everybody as 360 million Europeans currently enjoy with just 100GJ per capita.

A sustainable energy future, therefore, is clearly achievable. But it depends on actions taken now, especially in rich countries like the United States. A new US administration in 2004, for example, could make a crucial difference. And Prof. Ostwald’s dream could become a reality just 165 years after William Grove invented the fuel cell in 1839.