This being the year 2022, going back 15 years takes us to the year 2007. It was September of that year when I published on this blog, an article I had previously published in English in a Montreal based Arabic Newspaper under the title: “Global Warming In Perspective,” commentaries by which I continue to stick because I believe they remain relevant today as they were at the time.
Two motivations
convinced me to write that article. The first was generated by the confusing
cacophony surrounding the science of climate change or lack of it, attributed
as it was to a majority of climate scientists from around the globe. The second
motivation was generated by the worst kind of intrusion into the politics of
the subject. It is that, motivated by a blind hatred for the wealthy Arab countries,
an army of know-nothing Jewish pundits — ranging from Steve Paikin here in
Canada to Tom Friedman out there in America — were advising their respective
governments on how to make cars and other products without using petroleum as
raw material. Their stated intention was to destroy the Arab economies.
Having
spent decades of my life, learning, designing, doing experiments of all kinds
and then teaching them for a living, I felt qualified to design an experiment
that would clear the confusion surrounding the reasons for climate change, thus
determine if, as some were saying, the change was caused by human activities.
Description of that experiment is part of the 2007 article. As far as I know,
no one that has the means to finance doing that experiment, has taken up the
idea, and so I gave up advocating it.
Where I
stand today with regard to climate change, is where I stood then. In addition,
I am more adamant today than ever before about the need to discover and/or
develop all possible forms of energy because the need for them to advance human
civilization, grows exponentially year after year whereas the traditional
sources of energy in use today, are dwindling just as fast.
Waiting
for the breakthrough that would deliver the icing on the cake, I followed with
great interest such developments as the attempts to generate electric power
using nuclear fusion, and was disappointed by the hoax that had the world
believe, for a brief moment, that “Cold Fusion” had been achieved. As to the
research done on fuel cells, it may have appeared like a waste of effort at the
time, but looking at the matter in retrospect, it now seems that these cells
have served as prototypes for the batteries which today, are used to store
somewhat large quantities of solar and wind energy.
But the
icing on the cake did not happen till Green Hydrogen appeared on the scene. But
what is Green Hydrogen, anyway? It is the H in the familiar H2O, itself known as water. In fact,
water can be broken into its constituents: the hydrogen and the oxygen.
Hydrogen alone is a fuel that burns; oxygen alone is a catalyst that helps all
kinds of fuels to burn. When 1 atom of oxygen and 2 of hydrogen fuse into a
molecule by a natural (cosmic) process, they become water.
They can
be set apart by an artificial process called electrolysis. To do this, you add
a pinch of impurity into a container filled with water, and bring into it the
two electrodes of an electric current. The water molecule breaks up, producing
oxygen at one electrode and hydrogen at the other. Each constituent is
collected separately because both are used in a variety of industries. And here
is the sinch: If you do the electrolysis using electricity produced solely by
green power such as wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, wave or tidal, you
would produce the celebrated Green Hydrogen.
Because hydrogen
is a gas, it can be compressed into a liquid. Why is that important? It is
important because there are two ways by which you can store electricity for
future use. One way involves the storage of static electricity in a device
called capacitor. These are two parallel plates separated by an insulator. The
electrons (that become electricity when they move inside a closed circuit)
accumulate on one plate where they remain idle till the circuit is closed. The
trouble with capacitors, however, is that they can store only a limited amount
of electrons, thus remain impractical for use in transportation. In fact, you
would need a capacitor the size of a house to drive a car to the supermarket
and return home.
The
other way to store electricity involves the use of liquid chemicals, such as
the acid based batteries, which can store relatively large amounts of
electricity. However, they too are large in size but not as much as the
capacitors would have to be. They are heavy in weight, however, which limits
their usage in everyday practices. But enough improvements have been made to render
them indispensable to a modern economy.
Then
came Green Hydrogen, the icing on the cake. It is pure energy that needs only a
cylinder in which it can be compressed. It is used as fuel in power stations to
produce electricity, and is light enough to serve as substitute for gasoline in
transport equipment.
Egypt is
one of the countries that stands today at the leading edge of this new
technology. Smart money from around the world are falling over each other
trying to find a spot in Egypt where they can participate in this promising
endeavor.
You
would think that someone like Clifford May, who would write an article about a
COP27 that is held in Egypt, would mention Green Hydrogen at least once, but he
did not. I wonder why.
Does he hate Green Hydrogen this much? Or is it Egypt that he hates? If this is the case, he knows where to find company. There is one in Toronto and one in New York.