The use of hydrogen as energy carrier for the transport system has been discussed and tested in research niches since many years. High oil prices and the growing awareness that this will not be a temporary but a permanent situation fosters the search for alternative fuels and new technologies to propel the transport system, which, so far, in Europe depends to more than 97% on fossil fuels. Two of these alternatives would be hydrogen and biofuels that both can be generated from a number of different sources including a number of non-fossil and renewable sources. Hence, large research net-works like the European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform or the US California Fuel Cell Partnership have been set up to overcome the barriers that currently hinder the widespread use of hydrogen for transport, which are especially the fuel cell itself and the hydrogen storage system. However, shifting transport towards hydrogen and biofuels is not at all only a technical issue. Instead, it would induce structural economic changes developing a large-scale industry producing hydrogen, trade flow changes reducing trade of fossil fuels and increasing trade of feedstock for hydrogen and biofuels production, offer new employment opportunities and reduce environmental impacts of transport e.g. in the case of hydrogen produced from renewable energy sources. This paper draws on work currently undertaken in the European TRIAS pro-ject. In this project a number of scenarios is developed for Europe describing the diffu-sion of biofuels into the transport markets as well as a shift of the transport system to-wards hydrogen until 2030 and 2050. The TRIAS project integrates four models POLES, ASTRA, VACLAV and Regio-SUSTAIN that together cover the multi-facetted impacts of such a large scale change of the transport and energy system. The paper will describe the base scenario and a number of alternative scenarios on how to foster and manage a shift towards the new fuels in Europe: a carbon tax funded shift, a shift subsidised by funds from general budget and an accelerated shift where Europe would be the first world region to introduce hydrogen for transport on a large scale. For these scenarios an integrated sustainability impact assessment will be carried out providing results for the transport system in terms of changing demand, cost changes, structural change of the vehicle fleets and environmental impacts, for the energy system in terms of energy prices and demand for different energy carriers, for the economic system in terms of growth implications, sectoral shifts and changes of trade flows and for employment. For the covering abstract see ITRD E137145.
Samenvatting