Word: fossilize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...turbines. In Japan scientists are perfecting paper-thin solar cells that will be cheap to produce and could turn every house into its own electricity supplier. These ventures, along with many others, are beginning to draw the outlines of a world in which energy use keeps rising and, though fossil fuels remain an important power source, CO2 levels in the atmosphere actually begin to drop...
Cars like the NECAR4, housed in a lab near Stuttgart, could help make that happen. This experimental vehicle, being jointly developed by Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Canada's Ballard Power Systems, gets its energy from hydrogen--the most abundant fuel in the entire universe. Hydrogen, unlike fossil fuels, contains no carbon atoms and thus generates zero carbon dioxide. However, it could produce some pollution, since burning hydrogen taints the atmosphere by rearranging air molecules to form nitrogen oxides and ozone...
...produced sustainably with renewable electricity from the sun or wind. But even under the most optimistic predictions for improvements in renewable technology, the electricity required to split H2O into H and O would be prohibitively expensive. So the first large-scale plants will probably wrest hydrogen from old-fashioned fossil fuels...
...danger in pulling hydrogen from fossil fuels is that it leaves carbon dioxide behind. If the CO2 is simply vented into the atmosphere, global warming will be as big a problem as ever. There is an alternative though: pump it into the ground. In Norway, for example, the energy company Norsk Hydro is building a power plant that will be fueled with hydrogen drawn from natural gas. The CO2 that's left over will be reinjected into an oil field on the continental shelf. Not only will this take the carbon dioxide out of circulation but it will also pressurize...
...Fossil fuels will remain an important energy source for the foreseeable future, but they will eventually run out and the world will have to switch to what environmental visionaries have been dreaming about since the original Earth Day: endlessly renewable power from wind...