Business Times 22 Nov 08;
LIKE it or not, the world will enter the post-petroleum era, even without global warming, says Michio Kaku. 'The Saudi Arabians are worried that we are hitting the top of peak oil, that's the Hubbert's Peak.'
Marion King Hubbert was a Shell geophysicist who predicted in 1956 that America would hit the peak in oil production around 1965-1970. 'People laughed at him and thought he was a fool, but he hit it right on the button,' Professor Kaku notes.
'And now the big question everyone is asking is, are we hitting Hubbert's Peak for world oil production? When I interview the experts, they say that we are either on the top of Hubbert's Peak - at the top of the bell-shaped curve, at 50 per cent exhaustion of world supplies - or within 10 years of Hubbert's Peak.
We would have to discover a new Saudi Arabia every 10 years to maintain the current consumption of oil in the future. Now, that's impossible. We will always have oil, except that it's going to be very expensive in the future.'
The long-term strategy is to prepare for a post-petroleum world, and that's where nanotechnology can help, says Prof Kaku. 'Nanotechnology can help to increase the efficiency of solar cells. But the next 10 years are going to be very chaotic. No one clear winner will emerge to replace oil.'
Formed from plants and animals that lived even before the dinosaurs, oil is very efficient energy, Dr Kaku points out. 'The number of joules per kilogramme is enormous, it's concentrated sunlight. We cannot replace oil with electric batteries anytime soon. However, with the rising price of oil as we hit the top of Hubbert's Peak, and the falling price of solar hydrogen, the two curves will cross in about 10 years. Which means that now is the time to think about the transition that will take place 10 years from now. Now is the time to be at the forefront of this revolution, in renewable solar hydrogen technologies, which in 10 years will become as cheap as oil, in fact cheaper than oil. But it means then that in the next 10 years, there will be chaos - no clear winner will emerge. You take a look at wind, you take a look at natural gas, at coal, at nuclear energy, all have problems. But I think a winner will (eventually) emerge - solar hydrogen, that's where we're going to go. And then within 20 to 30 years, there's the possibility of fusion power. That's the long-term solution.'
In the near term, advances in nanotechnology will help to bring down the price of solar hydrogen. 'Right now, it's still several times more expensive than fossil fuels, but prices are going down, especially with new nanotechnology and thin films (with) which we hope to increase the efficiency of solar cells. Solar cells today have an efficiency of 12-15 per cent or so. You can get past 15 per cent efficiency but they're very expensive. To have cheap solar cells of 60, 70 per cent efficiency, that's like a holy grail. We don't have that yet.'
