David Sanborn Scott
University of Victoria, Canada
Title: Hydrogen and Electricity (Hydricity): The essential currencies to escape climate catastrophe
Biography
Biography: David Sanborn Scott
Abstract
Albert Einstein advised, “Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Following Einstein’s wisdom, the following energy system chain shows services, technologies, sources and currencies within five functional groups.
The role of energy currencies in energy systems is analogous to the role of financial currencies in financial systems. Neither is a source of energy or wealth, yet both are essential for facilitating energy or financial transactions. Each step, from left towards the right, is a demand-supply step. So where is carbon dioxide emitted? Service technologies emit CO2 when the currencies they use contain carbon. Harvesting technologies emit CO2 when the energy for harvesting is carbon based—like fossil-fueled mining machinery. So to develop a carbon-free system we must evolve towards using only carbon-free energy sources and carbon-free energy currencies.
There are many carbon-free sources—hydraulic, tidal, solar, wind, nuclear and so on. In contrast, there are only two carbon-free currencies. The first is the electronic currency, electricity. But electricity is a poor candidate for free-range transportation, such as cars, trucks, ships and especially aircraft. That’s why we also need a protonic (material) carbon-free currency. A protonic currency must contain only elements found in atmospheric abundance—otherwise when the fuel is burned, the emissions will be environmentally intrusive. Therefore, any candidate fuel can contain only oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Ammonia (NH3) satisfies this compositional constraint. But practical issues like low energy massdensity and toxicity make it troublesome. So we’re left with hydrogen as the only practical carbonfree fuel that can be universally employed for all tasks that today use carbon-based fuels. Hydrogen can also be used as a clean, efficient substitute for many material-harvesting tasks, such as using H2 rather than coke for reducing iron ore in steel making. A hydricity world will be cleaner, systemically more robust and more efficient. It will bring cleaner environments, and is essential to any chance we have to escape climate catastrophe.