日本竭力打造的“氢能社会”靠谱吗？

刘颖

The Japanese government has joined forces with some of the country’s biggest manufacturers to push for what it’s calling a “hydrogen society,” in which everything from buses to cars to homes are powered by the plentiful, zero-emission fuel.

A big coming-out party for the hydrogen society is planned for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, when hydrogen-fueled buses will ferry athletes and fans around Olympic event sites. The government and companies including Toyota and Iwatani are working together to build a network of hydrogen fueling stations—there are around a dozen across the country already, with the goal of 35 up and running by 2020.

Toyota has pitched in by developing a hydrogen-fueled car, the Mirai (“Future” in Japanese), which went on sale in Japan in late 2014. Honda and Nissan have hydrogen cars in the works. There’s also a push to install hydrogen fuel-cells in homes and apartments.

Overall, Tokyo has committed a reported 40 billion yen, or more than $300 million, to promoting hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Part of that will go to subsidize the purchase of hydrogen cars, with incentives of 2 million yen, or nearly $20,000 per vehicle—much higher than those for electric vehicles.

Hydrogen, on the face of it, sounds nearly magical. Take the most plentiful element in the universe, combine it with oxygen, and you get water—and electricity. That’s the vision Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was pushing last year when he said that hydrogen is “environmentally friendly” and “doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide.”

But that’s only half the story behind hydrogen, and the other half is less of a fairy tale. Unlike gasoline, solar, or nuclear, hydrogen isn’t an energy source—just a method of energy storage.

MORE: An energy expert’s love-hate affair with Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell Mirai

“Hydrogen is an energy carrier in the same sense that electricity is,” says David Keith, Harvard researcher and author of a skeptical assessment of hydrogen fuel. It takes energy to produce hydrogen fuel, and, says Dr. Keith, “the environmental impact . . . depends almost wholly on where the electricity comes from.”

So where will the hydrogen for the “hydrogen society” come from? The government’s road map focuses on overseas imports, and one near-term possibility is reportedly hydrogen produced from Australian coal, then shipped to Japan. While that scenario might help Tokyo’s local air quality, it would have little if any impact on global carbon levels.

Even countries with more diversified energy sectors have struggled to make hydrogen fuel work outside of niche applications. Canada made a very similar push in 2010, when it rolled out hydrogen-powered buses for the Vancouver Olympics. Those buses are now mothballed due to high operating costs. Vancouver was getting its hydrogen from Quebec—nearly as far away as Tokyo is from Melbourne.

The U.S. has also arguably been burned by hydrogen. In 2003, President George W. Bush announced the FreedomCAR Initiative—an effort framed (in those pre-fracking days) as an aid to American energy independence. The effort to fund hydrogen development was criticized at the time for diverting funds from renewable energy research, and the Obama administration shifted policy priorities to electric vehicle development.

In 2004, California announced plans to build 150 to 200 hydrogen fueling stations, but fewer than thirty exist today. And this was in a country where large volumes of hydrogen fuel are easily (though not cleanly) obtained from domestic natural gas.

In the decade since, the case for hydrogen may have gotten even weaker, thanks to the slow but steady proliferation of better batteries, electric vehicles, and renewable energy sources worldwide. Japan’s hydrogen society, even if it were to succeed locally, would be disconnected from the future that’s shaping up in much of the rest of the world.

At this year’s Automotive News World Congress, Elon Musk (admittedly far from a neutral party) called hydrogen “extremely silly”—perhaps the most polite in a long and continuing string of dismissals from the Tesla head. It makes little sense, Musk pointed out, to go through the trouble of using even renewable electricity to generate hydrogen fuel, when you could just put that energy directly into a battery pack.

It makes even less sense when you have to build new, expensive hydrogen filling stations to do it—then spend years hoping that demand for them will materialize. On opening day for one mobile hydrogen fueling station in Tokyo in March, there was only one customer. The station, like the car that it topped up, was heavily subsidized, with total fueling station subsidies reaching 7.2 billion yen ($60 million) in 2014.

This kind of large-scale infrastructure investment, whether or not it’s a good bet on the future, deepens Japan’s staggering public debt—the highest in the world relative to GDP. Over the past 10 months, S&P, Fitch, and Moody’s have all downgraded Japan’s debt rating, with a Fitch spokesman telling Reuters the move was motivated by concerns over debt levels. Meanwhile, the country continues to restrict immigration as its population ages—raising the question of who, exactly, is going to be riding those hydrogen buses.

刘颖

丰田汽车公司的“未来”燃料电池汽车使用的燃料电池。类似的技术曾经在电影《回到未来II》中出现过。

日本政府正在竭力打造所谓的“氢能社会”。不过，这项听上去非常美好，非常清洁的计划，恐怕不会为全球减排事业做出多大贡献，而且势必将进一步加剧日本早已十分沉重的公债负担。

日本政府联手该国几家最大的制造企业，力推所谓的“氢能社会”。在这个构想中，从巴士、汽车，再到普通家庭所使用的能源，都将是供应充足，零排放的氢气。

日本政府计划将2020年东京奥运会打造成为一场“氢能社会”的盛事。届时，载着运动员和观众来往于奥运场馆的公交车将以氢气为能源。目前，日本政府已经联合丰田、岩谷等企业着手建设氢气加气站网络，现在已建成十余个氢气加气站。其目标是，到2020年，全日本将建成并投入运营35个氢气加气站。

丰田研发的“未来”氢能源轿车已经于2014年年末在日本上市。本田和日产也在分别研发各自的氢能轿车。同时，日本政府也在积极推动建造商为住宅和公寓安装燃料电池。

据报道，迄今为止，丰田已经投入400亿日元（约合3亿多美元）用于推广氢气作为替代燃料。部分资金用于向购买氢能轿车的车主提供补贴，每辆氢能轿车的平均补贴额度达到200万日元（近2万美元），这远远超过了对电动汽车的补贴金额。

乍一看来，氢似乎是种神奇的能源。它是宇宙中最丰富的元素，跟氧结合后，就得到了水——另外还有电。这就是日本首相安倍晋三去年不遗余力地推广氢能的原因所在。安倍称，氢是“环境友好型”的能源，而且“不会排放任何二氧化碳”。

但这只是故事的一面，另一面并不像童话那么美好。氢与汽油、太阳能或者核能不同，它本身并不是一个能量来源，仅仅是一种蓄能方式。

哈佛大学研究人员大卫•基思曾经撰文对氢能的应用潜力表示怀疑。他指出：“氢和电一样是一种能量载体。”而生产氢能也是需要耗费能源的。“对环境的影响……几乎完全取决于电来自哪里。”

那么，“氢能社会”的氢能将从哪里来？从日本政府的路线图看，这些氢能源主要依赖进口，有报道称，近期的一种可能性是从澳大利亚的燃煤中制取，然后运到日本。虽然该方案可能对东京本地的空气质量有益，但对全球的二氧化碳水平来说，即便有些作用，也是极为有限的。

即便是一些能源组成更加多样化的国家，也很难让氢能走出小众应用的范畴。加拿大在2010年也同样大力推动过氢能，还专门为温哥华冬奥会启用了一批氢能公交车。但由于运营成本太高，这些公交车现在已被悄然封存。温哥华冬奥会期间所使用的氢能来自魁北克省，两地之间的距离几乎与东京到墨尔本的距离差不多。

美国也曾在氢能上吃过苦头。2003年，美国总统小布什宣布启动所谓的“自由车”计划，旨在为美国的能源自主出一份力。这项资助氢能开发的计划，当时就遭到了不少非议，因为它转移了原本用于可再生能源的研发资金。奥巴马政府则将政策重点转移到电动汽车的研发上。

2004年，加利福尼亚州宣布计划建设150至200座氢气加气站，但目前仅建成不到30座。要知道，美国还是一个能够比较容易地（虽然不是干净地）从国内的天然气资源中获取大量氢能的国家。

自从2010年以来，性能更好的电池、以及电动汽车和可再生能源，以缓慢但却稳定的态势在全球范围内逐渐推广开来，倡导氢能的声音随之变得更弱了。日本的氢能社会即便在本国取得了成功，未来也将与世界其他地区正在逐渐成型的新能源社会脱节。

在今年的《汽车新闻》世界大会上，埃隆•穆斯克公开称开发氢能“极为愚蠢”（当然他远远谈不上中立）——在一长串被马斯克公开否定的东西里，氢能受到的指责可能还是最客气的。马斯克指出，哪怕制取氢气使用的是清洁能源，但既然你已经能把它直接放进电池里，为什么还要费力地用它来生产氢能，这样做完全没道理。

更没道理的是，你还得建设一批新的、昂贵的加气站，然后花上好几年，希望把社会对氢能的需求培养出来。今年3月东京一家氢气加气站开业那天，这座加气站只迎来了一名顾客。这座加气站就像它所服务的氢能汽车一样，也拿到了大量的补贴。2014年，日本所有氢气加气站的补贴总额达到了72亿日元（6000万美元）。

在日本这样一个公债与GDP比率全球最高的国家中，如此大规模的基建投资（且不说这个赌注胜算几何）将进一步加剧该国早已十分沉重的公债负担。在过去10个月里，标准普尔、惠誉国际和穆迪都调低了日本的债务评级。惠誉国际的一名发言人对路透社表示，此次下调债务评级，主要是出于对日本债务水平的担忧。与此同时，尽管人口老龄化问题愈加严重，日本政府却仍在继续限制移民政策。这也不禁令人担忧，未来究竟由谁来驾驶这些氢能公交车呢。