Three inextricably linked issues pose a major challenge facing society today:
The world's increasing demand for energy;
World population growth;
The need to assure a viable world for future generations.
To meet these requirements the energy industry is developing new energy production technologies from all sources, fossil-coal, oil, gas, nuclear- as well as renewables-biomass, water, wind, solar. The ancient processes that harvested sunlight and converted it into carbonaceous materials stored in the earth essentially limit fossil-based resources. The ‘Club of Rome’ thinking was that the cost of recovering these finite resources should increase, as it would require an increasing effort. However, we now know that fossil fuel sources are more abundant than predicted then, and we continue to learn to reduce their production cost. At the same time, the cost of renewable energy is decreasing even more rapidly, but in most cases the actual cost is still high. There are two more factors that influence the competition between fossil and renewable energy:
Costs to bring energy from its source of production to the sink (consumer, industry), the energy infrastructure;
The cost associated with the emissions, especially greenhouse gases, of conversion of the energy source,.
The energy infrastructure is changing from large-scale electricity producers connected to large and small-scale consumers towards a "distributed energy" infrastructure, as smaller scale energy conversion offers opportunities for integration of various energy usages (power, traction, heat, cold). That improves the overall energy efficiency, reduces costs, but is linked to a gas pipeline network. Such energy infrastructure needs to have the capability to balance supply and demand, thus the possibility to store energy. Greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2, will need to be reduced to avoid climate change. However, it is still uncertain how the ‘world’ is going to drive that process. Inevitably CO2 sequestration will add costs to fossil carbonaceous energy production.
At the same time, it offers new opportunities for e.g. enhanced oil/gas recovery with CO2, and thus generate a new learning process to reduce the costs associated with CO2. One way society can build a much more versatile energy infrastructure is the so-called hydrogen economy. Hydrogen can be distributed and stored more easily th