Hawaii
Energy Policy Forum > 2003
Articles
Mister Natural Japan's Masatsugu Taniguchi is creating
the first nonpolluting economy in the world--and trying to
make a buck, too
Benjamin Fulford
forbes.com 12.23.02
Skipping stones across an inlet, the 64-year-old
cement executive hardly seems like someone out to change
the world. But Masatsugu Taniguchi aims to do exactly that.
He is leaving Taiheiyo Cement Co. to start a new career on
Yakushima Island, south of Kyushu, Japan, a place designated
by the U.N. as a world heritage nature preserve. His mission:
to create the world's first zero-emission, hydrogen-based
economy--and to pull it off through no-nonsense business
principles, not tree-hugging wishful thinking.
"
I heard that Iceland was planning to switch its economy over
to hydrogen, and I realized we could do it way faster on
Yakushima," says Taniguchi. The 338-square-mile Yakushima
makes a perfect test case. It is a steep granite island drowning
in 320 inches of rainfall a year. That means it can, says
the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, potentially
generate 233 megawatts of hydropower without having to build
any dams bigger than 100 feet. Strong ocean winds are another
potential source of energy. In addition to harnessing hydroelectric
power from an existing 60-megawatt plant to make silicon
carbide, used in various industries, Taniguchi realized he
could make plenty of cheap hydrogen fuel with current technology.
Hydrolysis--running
an electric current through water to produce hydrogen--yields
fuel that is usually not economically
competitive with other forms of energy. In Yakushima's case,
though, there is a huge surplus of electric power that can't
be stored or exported to the mainland; creating hydrogen
and forcing it into tanks at 350 times atmospheric pressure
makes economic sense. Such hydrogen can be exported in tankers,
similar to those that carry liquefied natural gas. To set
up the infrastructure, Taniguchi created a consortium called
the Yakushima Clean Energy Partners (YCEP) and would like
to gather $24 million from private investors, including automakers,
other major companies and various municipalities.
That initial
investment should provide the island's 14,000 residents with
enough clean electricity to shut down its
heavy-oil-powered generator in 2004. In the longer run, by
2020 or so, Taniguchi envisions that there will be sufficient
hydro and wind power to supply 500,000 mainland cars with
hydrogen. This will be a huge boon to the island's tourism
industry, which employs 24% of the work force (fishing and
forestry are also big here). Already 200,000 eco-tourists
a year flock to see the island's towering 1,000-to-7,200-year-old
cedars, phantasmagoric plant life and hordes of monkeys.
"
It is a wonderful idea," says Yuji Kawaguchi, Honda's
top researcher for future auto technologies. He says it's
the best private-sector plan he has seen for a hydrogen economy.
By contrast, he criticizes several U.S. and Japanese government
hydrogen plans as being too geographically scattered. He
has shown a strong interest in turning the island into a
giant laboratory when the switch to fuel cell vehicles begins
in earnest 10 to 15 years from now, as well as in testing
the safety of hydrogen gas stations, the long-term reliability
of cars and the economic viability of fuel cells.
YCEP aims
to be profitable from the start, initially by selling electricity
to the residents and later by peddling hydrogen
to automakers. Tourists who visit Yakushima will be required
to ride hydrogen-powered buses. First, however, Taniguchi
must get bureaucrats to loosen overall restrictions that
prevent, for example, the importation of fuel cell buses
that already meet European and American safety standards.
The island is likely to be designated a special economic
zone with relaxed hydrogen regulations within 2003, so that
in 2004 the first hydrogen buses and cars will be running.
Toyota
announced in July that within a year it would introduce 20
fuel cell cars. It is due to give four of them to the
Japanese government as well as two to the University of California's
Irvine and Davis campuses in December. The lease is $10,000
a month for 30 months. By 2008 the price should be somewhat
lower--and many Yakushima residents, subsidized by the government,
are likely to be driving them. By 2020 or so, depending on
the progress of fuel cell technology, the last of the island's
9,500 gasoline cars will be gone and only water-vapor-emitting
fuel cell autos will remain, according to Taniguchi's plan.
Can
the Yakushima model be exported? It might make sense for
vacation spots, like Kami Kochi National Park in the
Japanese alps, that have an abundance of potential hydroelectric
power. Imagining hydrogen-powered cars and buses in Yosemite
and Yellowstone is a little more difficult, given the unpredictable
snowfall and the fact that visitors to U.S. parks drive in
from cities where gasoline remains the norm. Still, the city
of Tokyo has already banned diesel cars (effective October
2003), and there is talk of eventually banning all hydrocarbon-based
cars from the city center.
It will take visionaries like Taniguchi to bring the hydrogen
economy closer, say realists like Masasuke Takata, a professor
at Nagoaka University of Technology in Niigata, and to keep
the public's expectations a few notches below the utterly
impossible. Says he: "Ten years ago people were predicting
hydrogen would be economical within a decade, but gasoline
kept getting cheaper." He nonetheless believes that
fuel cells are already making inroads, as combined heating
and electric systems for large buildings. Within a decade,
he says, if gasoline prices rise and fuel cell cars get cheaper,
the switchover could begin.
Taniguchi has a reputation as
an enviro-capitalist stretching back decades. Graduating
from the Kyushu Institute of Technology
in 1960 with a degree in mining engineering, he discovered
there was no work underground, so he joined what is now known
as Taiheiyo Cement. But he put his training to work, filling
empty iron- and copper-ore ships with lime and selling it
to mines that exported the ore (lime is used to neutralize
acid used in mining). "As I visited mine sites around
the world I began to feel with my own skin how seriously
they damaged the environment and wondered if there was not
a business opportunity here," he says. Taniguchi traveled
the world in search of ideas that would both make money and
reduce the damage caused by industry.
Realizing a lot of industrial
waste contained ingredients that could be profitably recovered,
he became an enthusiastic
recycler of gypsum in Japan. Scrubbers used in thermal power
plants, for instance, require limestone to capture sulphur
from their exhaust. The reaction creates gypsum that can
be sold to companies like wallboard makers. That particular
variety of waste recycling is now common around the world,
and Taiheiyo makes a big business of it.
Taniguchi was also
inspired to use cement furnaces to aid in the disposal of
household garbage. In Sweden he visited
a plant where refuse is rotated in an unused rotary kiln
for three days, allowing bacteria that thrive in that temperature
to quickly degrade it into fertilizer and bits of plastic. "It
smelled so bad that when I left even my underwear stank," he
recalls. He realized that if the building were sealed and
the foul exhaust pumped into a 3,600-degree cement furnace,
the odor disappeared.
Taiheiyo was able to create a $375-million-a-year
sideline in waste treatment with, Taniguchi says, a 20% operating
margin. "If businesses start taking an offensive instead
of a defensive attitude to environmental issues, then many
opportunities appear," he says.
The practical side of
this dreamer was forged early. Taniguchi was just 8 years
old and just a mile and a quarter from ground
zero when the atom bomb hit Hiroshima. Aside from losing
his hair for a while, he was unharmed. The grisly experience,
he insists, did not affect his views on the environment or
atomic energy: "I just think that people are so scared
of nuclear energy that power plants end up so over-designed
for safety they are not profitable."
Just the kind of attitude to face his greatest challenge
yet.
|
