The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

worry incessantly about supply disruptions and vulnerabilities. Oil infrastructure is under constant threat from oil spills and terrorism, for example, at Saudi Arabia’s Abqaia facility, where Saudi forces thwarted an Al Qaeda attack in 2007.¹¹³ More than two-thirds of all the oil shipped in the world passes through the heavily militarized bottlenecks of the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca. When prices hit one hundred dollars a barrel, the United States sends roughly a half-trillion dollars per year to oil-producing countries—including political foes like Venezuela—just to secure its transportation fuel. Few would dispute that securing stable access to oil supplies is a driving force behind U.S.-led military actions in the Middle East.

In light of all this, world leaders, financial markets, and even oil companies have already decided that it’s time to add other options to the energy basket. They know the world is entering a time of unprecedented energy demand just as our great oil fields are aging and new ones are harder to find and more expensive to tap. Future production will increasingly come from new discoveries that are smaller, deeper, and riskier; the remnants of depleted giants; and unconventional sources like tar sands. It seems probable that the world will eventually begin regulating carbon emissions one way or another, at least by a token amount. For all of these reasons the cost of using oil—regardless of geological supply—is expected to rise.

Obviously, energy conservation measures are the cheapest and most immediate way to soften this blow, and will comprise a key part of its solution. But however we end up feeding our vehicles in 2050, it won’t be the same as how we did it back in 2010. We are moving from a narrow fossil-fuel economy to something much more diverse—and likely safer and more resilient—than what we have today. We will explore this exciting range of possible energy futures next.

“You got five minutes?”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and my weight-lifting neighbor, whose hobby is driving racing cars, was standing at my front door. He was grinning fiendishly.

Moments later, my happy excitement had curdled to pure adrenaline and fear and the feeling that I was about to die. My neighbor tapped the accelerator and there again was that terrifying sensation of heart and lungs being pressed against the back of my chest cavity. My body sank into the open-air cockpit, inches above the mountain curves of Mulholland Drive, as the Tesla Roadster screamed silently around them at ninety miles an hour. Flower-fragrant Southern California air pushed up my nose. Smells like a funeral, I thought weakly, and gripped the windshield frame harder. Someone was howling, probably me. I was trapped in the fastest roller coaster of my life and there were no rails pinning it to the ground.

It felt like an hour, but true to his word, my maniac neighbor had me back home safely in five minutes. He was on his way to Universal Studios to give the CEO a ride. The day before, it had been Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Faster than a Ferrari from thirty to sixty, and just two cents a mile!” he said, beaming and waving as he drove off. I wandered inside, collapsed on my couch, and wondered if I might be having a heart attack. That’s when I realized that electric cars weren’t just for eco-pansies anymore.

It is rapidly becoming obvious that plug-in electric cars will be the great bridging technology between the cars of today and the cars of a hydrogen fuel-cell economy later this century (should there be one¹¹⁴). Plug-ins differ from conventional cars and hybrids (like the Toyota Prius, first sold in Japan in 1997) because they are powered mainly or exclusively from the electric grid, not by gasoline. And because plug- ins emit very little tailpipe exhaust (zero for fully electric cars with no hybrid conventional motor), that means urban air quality is about to become cleaner.

One of the biggest reasons to be happy about the phase-in of plug-in electric cars has less to with solving climate change or reducing dependency on foreign oil, and more to do with quality of life for all those new city people. Take, for example, my home. It’s only a thousand square feet in size, with one bedroom and one bath, but my wife and I love it. It clings to the Hollywood Hills, high above everything, with sweeping views of the downtown Los Angeles skyline and beyond. Every morning one of the first things I do is step out on the deck to check out the view. It’s usually crummy, the skyscrapers and distant mountains obscured by the orange-stained smog of ten million belching tailpipes. But on good days, when winds clear out the fumes, we win a breathtaking vista spanning over fifty miles, from blue ocean in the west to snow-covered peaks in the east. It’s stunning, and I’m looking forward to those rare views becoming downright ordinary over the next forty years. The public health benefits of this are obvious. Today, as a resident of Los Angeles, I suffer a 25%-30% higher chance of dying from a respiratory disease than my parents, who live on the Great Plains.¹¹⁵

This is not to suggest that electric cars are environmentally benign, because they aren’t. All of that new electricity must come from somewhere, and for the foreseeable future it will mostly come from power plants burning coal and natural gas. And while the vehicles themselves emit virtually no pollution, these power plants do. ¹¹⁶ Producing millions of electric batteries also requires mining huge volumes of nickel, lithium, and cobalt. There are many technology hurdles remaining with battery lifetime, disposal, and price. Mileage rates are improving (the Chevrolet Volt goes 40 miles, the Tesla 244 miles as of 2010) but still well below the range of a conventional car. Recharging takes several hours unless a system of battery-exchange service stations can be set up. For these reasons and others most first-generation plug-in electrics will likely be hybrids, with a small gasoline or diesel motor that kicks in when the battery range is exceeded. To the extent that they are driven beyond this range, cars will continue to emit pollution and greenhouse gas from their tailpipes.

There is also the “liquid-fuels” problem: Not all transport can be electrified. There is no foreseeable battery on the horizon that will power airplanes, helicopters, freight ships, long-haul trucks, and emergency generators. These all require the power, extended range, or portability offered by liquid fuels. For these forms of transport, gasoline, diesel, ethanol, biodiesel, liquefied natural gas, or coal-derived syngas will be necessary for decades. However, electrification of the passenger vehicle fleet will help ensure adequate supplies of these liquid fuels. And perhaps one day, our descendants will be grateful that we left them enough oil to still make plastic affordable.

So peering forward to 2050, we find a world more heavily electrified than today, and an assortment of strange new liquid fuels. Where will these new energy sources come from? Will clean renewable electricity replace hydrocarbon-burning power plants? And what about hydrogen power, the fuel of space ships, sci-fi movies, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s specially designed Humvee?

Let’s start with the last. First, it is important to remember hydrogen is not truly an energy source but, like electricity, an energy carrier. Pure hydrogen makes a wonderful fuel but isn’t just lying around for the taking.¹¹⁷ Instead, just like making electricity, it must be generated using energy from some other source.¹¹⁸ A feedstock material is also needed from which to strip hydrogen atoms. The most common feedstocks in use today are natural gas or water, but others, like coal or biomass, are also feasible sources of hydrogen. Energy is used to crack the hydrogen from the feedstock—for example through electrolysis of water¹¹⁹—yielding a portable fuel in gas or liquid form. One kilogram is packed with about the same energy as a gallon of gasoline.

But unlike gasoline, the hydrogen is not then burned in a combustion engine. It is instead converted to electricity on-site, by feeding it into a fuel cell. Fuel cells essentially reverse the hydrolysis reaction, combining hydrogen with oxygen to create electricity and water. The newly made electricity is then used to power the car, appliance, furnace, or whatever, with the water by-product either released as vapor or recycled. Like plug-in electrics, fuel-cell cars release no tailpipe pollution or greenhouse gases (besides water vapor¹²⁰). However, they are released at the hydrogen plant, unless fossil fuels or biomass can be avoided as sources of energy or feedstocks. In principle, solar, wind, or hydroelectric power could be used to split hydrogen from a water feedstock, making the entire process quite pollution-free from beginning to end.

Sounds wonderful, and many energy experts and futurists believe that one day we will have a full-blown hydrogen economy. The ultimate dream is to use solar energy to split hydrogen from seawater, thus providing the world with an infinite supply of clean hydrogen fuel—and even some freshwater as a bonus—with no air pollution or greenhouse gases. But nothing like that will be in place by 2050.

Years of research are needed to resolve a rat’s nest of challenges concealed within the previous two paragraphs, with major technology advances and cost reductions necessary in all areas.¹²¹ Basic research in hydrogen manufacture, transport, and fuel cells is still lacking. The cost of making a fuel-cell vehicle is extremely high. A completely new physical infrastructure is required, including manufacturing plants, pipelines, distribution and bottling centers, and filling stations. Hydrogen is explosive, so there are many safety issues to be resolved, like how to safely pack enough of it into a vehicle to drive three hundred miles, comparable to vehicles today. One way is to use highly pressurized hydrogen, but the collision safety of ten-thousand-psi tanks remains