The World in 2030

226 The World in 2030
Ray Kurzweil is also characteristically confident about the
future for this fuel:
The emerging paradigm for energy storage will be
fuel cells, which will ultimately be widely distributed
throughout our infrastructure, another example of the
trend from inefficient and vulnerable centralized facilities
to an efficient and stable distributed system. 435
However there are considerable problems to be overcome in
the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology even if the
long-term benefits are alluring. As James Canton describes
in ‘The Extreme Future’:
Hydrogen has problems other than (current) high
cost. It is unstable and needs to be controlled. The
manufacture of hydrogen requires other energy use
such as nuclear or oil (or geothermal). The technology
needed to store and pump hydrogen into vehicles
is still primitive and not yet adopted for wide
usage. But none of these obstacles is impossible to
overcome. Hydrogen will transform the future of energy
and ensure a more secure and reliable source
of fuel for consumers, business, mass transportation
and even for space travel. Hydrogen is coming fast.
By 2035, or even sooner, hydrogen will be a viable
alternative to oil and gas, meeting as much as 35 per
cent of our energy needs. 436
Perhaps the real difficulty in switching to hydrogen as the main
fuel for road transport is the lack of infrastructure. Hydrogen