Op-Ed Contributors

Debate: Energy

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-23 08:06

Hydrogen is energy of the future

By Zhou Tianyong

The country's rapid economic growth has increased the demand for energy. But the supply is not rising correspondingly with the demand. The double pressure of increasing energy supply while reducing carbon emissions demands something of an energy revolution. Choosing the right type of energy to meet the rising demand, however, is a strategic problem.

The country, in my opinion, should adopt a catch-up (with developed countries) strategy and concentrate on developing hydrogen energy.

Energy can be generated from three types of resources. The traditional resources are coal, oil and natural gas. The transitional ones are oil-treated coal and batteries for automobiles. Energy generated by nuclear plants, and solar panel and wind farms, too, belong to the second group. Hydrogen energy is the last, or the ultimate source of energy.

A typical energy revolution would follow-up the developed world strategy. This follow-up strategy would allow the traditional energy generators to remain the main sources of supply while transitional energy technology is developed. In the second stage, transitional sources would replace the traditional ones. During this stage, research would concentrate mainly on developing hydrogen energy technology. In the final stage, hydrogen energy would become the primary source.

But even if the follow-up strategy were to be adopted now, it would take 40 years to completely industrialize the hydrogen energy sector.

Another problem is that if the government adopts the follow-up strategy, the country would always lag a step behind the developed countries. As things stand today, the developed countries are likely to intensify research in transitional energy sources. And once they obtain fruitful results, they will apply them to their energy industries, and follow it up by transferring them to China, which on all likelihood would still be relying on transitional energy sources.

Importing mature technologies from the developed countries means lower risk and lower initial investment. Besides, the transitional energy technology will help develop the industry faster. But the transitional energy technology will one day be replaced by hydrogen technology, which is still the most advanced and environmentally friendly. If China were to pour in huge funds for research in, and development of, hydrogen energy technology, the huge investment in transitional technology would become a big waste of time, money, energy and precious manpower.

Experiences in other sectors tell us to develop the ultimate energy technology, instead of concentrating on transitional energy sources.

The follow-up strategy we adopted for TV sets, film rolls, video recorders, TV image tubes and many other products made us realize that by the time we had imported the technologies from abroad, they had become outdated. To overcome that, we imported more and got more outdated products. That circle has not ended yet.