As Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister, once said, “The stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.” But some oil will still be being pumped at the end, and it won’t be heavy, sour, far from water crude.
The US hydrogen strategy was positioned in the wrong federal department. It was put in the hands of people who deal with fossil fuels all day long and have a paradigm of burning them for energy, not a paradigm of electricity for energy. It fails Rumelt’s test for the first thing that makes a good strategy, and so its principles and actions will be failures as well.
All of us, most of the time, wander around on the surface of the Earth. A small percentage travel across rivers, lakes and oceans in boats of various kinds regularly. A smaller percentage than that get above the ground into the skies. And, of course, the tiniest rounding error on a gnat’s hairy thorax get above the atmosphere. So let’s talk about moving around on the ground in this next edition of sexy/unsexy, practical/impractical.
The narrative that Americans and many Europeans share about China and themselves is not aligned with observable reality, and the USA is in significant danger of economic decline even as the world improves.
Many people in the United States probably wonder why our rail network generally sucks. We’re the richest (by some measures) country on the planet, but traveling by train here would be like going back in time decades for many visitors. Japan, China, most of Europe, and even the little island … [continued]
Siemens Mobility and its consortium partners Orascom Construction and The Arab Contractors have signed a contract with the Egyptian National Authority for Tunnels (NAT), a governmental authority under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transport of Egypt. The deal will result in Egypt having the sixth largest high-speed rail system … [continued]
If Europe continues down the path of making hydrogen a mainstay of heat and transportation, they will invest in highly inefficient and ineffective infrastructure, substantially delay actual climate action, and pressure Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt to waste time and money that could be better spent.
Living in a rural area or in a smaller city has always come with the cost of needing to secure transport of some kind (like a shuttle, taxi, or a friend) to take you to the airport or train station, especially in the United States. But the trend towards remote … [continued]
COVID-19 was a discontinuity that fundamentally shifted aviation passenger demand, but the forces are nuanced and geographically distinct.
“While shared micromobility has only been in the limelight for a few years, its adoption is skyrocketing across the nation,” NREL Transportation Behavior Analyst Andrew Duvall said. “As we foray into the next decade of integrated, electric, and sustainable mobility, our research team set out to get a better understanding of the role that micromobility could play in the bigger energy and mobility picture.”
