Everyone from President George W. Bush on down who is touting a hydrogen-based energy future is undecided about how it will be accomplished, but natural gas is always part of the equation, and that may have to change, according to an ExxonMobil official.

Regardless of the ultimate timing for developing the fuel (source or the hydrogen) and the infrastructure, the U. S. energy industry needs to be developing systems that are compatible in the future, said Don Gardner, a senior technical adviser at ExxonMobil. “We have to consider the full system from the source of hydrogen through the end use of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel,” he told last week’s National Hydrogen Association annual conference in Los Angeles.

“Finally, we need to capture this information in a way that facilitates an informed debate among all the stakeholders that are going to have to come together to make hydrogen fuel cell vehicles a reality,” Gardner said. “Along the way, we have to put this in the context of current energy systems.”

The ExxonMobil analysis of economic and energy growth in the first 20 years of this century projects economic growth worldwide averaging about 3% annually, and energy growth of about 1.7% annually to meet that economic growth. Energy demand as represented in barrels of oil is 200 million barrels in 2000, compared to a projected 300 million barrels in 2020, Gardner said. .

Natural gas demand is the fastest growing energy segment, Gardner said, growing at an average 2.3%/year rate, and projected to account for 24% of the world’s energy demand in 2020. Coal use is also projected to hit about 25% of the world’s energy demand by 2020,. driven by very strong demands in India and China, he said.

In this context, fueling 200 million vehicles in the United States that will grow to about 300 million by 2020 is a “massive undertaking,” said Gardner, noting that transportation is going to be the fastest growing of the energy end-use sectors over the first 20 years of this century.

To move to a hydrogen vehicular fuel system will require maintaining the current more than $1 trillion petroleum-based system that processes and distributes 350 million gallons of gasoline daily to a network of more than 170,000 retail stations. Assumptions about various transition strategies must also be carefully assessed for all possible angles, he said.

“Making hydrogen the end-game of natural gas does nothing to address the fact that North America is becoming a net importer of natural gas,” Gardner said. “Ultimately, hydrogen will only have a desired impact on energy use and emissions if it can be deployed on a large scale.”

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