interview > Skúlason > skulason 18

Skúlason 18 (1:33)
Topic(s): Future Transport / Hydrogen
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Video Transcript

It takes quite a bit of time. If you think about the amount of vehicles—I think there are about 60 to 80 million vehicles produced per year and we have today somewhere about 700 or 800 million cars in the world today. If you actually put them bumper to bumper together, they go 125 circles around the globe. That's the car fleet; you cannot change that overnight, so it will take some time. Other transport means, like boats, it will take time to change the engine system, how we build boats, how we operate them and all the infrastructure about that and then if you go to airplanes, it's still going to be another shift. So we're talking about the very, very large change in the way of how we behave and live. But we can act now; you have locations which are doing things now.

You can actually buy hydrogen cars now if you have the money to do it. They're still more expensive than conventional cars but you can buy them. If you would have been here a year ago, I would have said I don't know where you can buy hydrogen cars. So development is happening pretty fast but for changing. The lifetime of the car you buy today is 15 years, so still the gasoline car of today will be alive in 15 years. Ships live 30 years. So if I buy a new fishing troller today it will still be operating in 30 years, so I cannot, people are not going to sell their technology just to buy a new one. It's going to fade out. So I think, actually, in 50 years, if we can make Iceland a hydrogen economy in 50 years, I think a lot of people will remember that in history in the future.