The Tokyo Motor Show 2015, held in November 2015, highlighted the ambitions of the Japanese automobile industry for electric drive vehicles. The Japanese are intending to market electric vehicles that will run either from batteries -particularly with hybrid engines- or with electric motors driven by hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
Vehicles running on hydrogen were also very much present at the Solutions COP21 exhibition mounted at the Grand Palais in Paris during the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21). We should also bear in mind that, more than ten years ago in his book Hydrogen Economy [1], Jeremy Rifkin predicted that the hydrogen energy industry would take the place of oil once that resource was exhausted. What are the prospects today for hydrogen as an energy vector? This is the question we shall try to answer here.
To read this Foresight Analysis, see Shaping Futures n°1, pp.9-16
[1] Rifkin, Jeremy, The Hydrogen Economy, New York: Tarcher / Penguin, 2003.
