By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.
The news is from Tokyo.
The image caption is.
The activists are looking out over Tokyo Bay.
I'm standing on a hill looking out over Tokyo Bay. Takao Saiki is a gentleman in his 70s.
Saiki-San is angry.
He says it's a total joke. "Just ridiculous!"
The construction site blocking our view across the bay is the cause of his distress.
Saiki-San's friend, Rikuro Suzuki, doesn't understand why we still have to burn coal to generate electricity. The plant alone will emit seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
Suzuki-San's point is a good one. Shouldn't Japan be cutting its coal consumption, not increasing it, at a time of great concern about coal's impact on the climate?
So why the coal? The answer is the nuclear disaster of 2011.
In 2010 about one third of Japan's electricity came from nuclear power, and there were plans to build a lot more. All Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down after the disaster. There is a lot of resistance to restarting them ten years later.
Japan's gas-fired power stations have been doing a lot of overtime. Natural gas is expensive in Britain.
The image caption is.
Rikuro Suzuki and Takao Saiki have been campaigning against coal power plants.
The Japanese government decided to build 22 new coal-fired power stations to run on cheap coal imported from Australia. It made sense economically. Environmentally, not very much. Japan is under pressure to stop using coal.
Japan's answer is to switch to burning hydrogen or ammonia instead of closing the old coal plants.
The investment made by electric power companies in coal-fired power plants would be useless without value in their balance sheet.
It would cause financial difficulties for electric power companies and banks. The challenge for Japan is that.
The plants can be converted to burning hydrogen or ammonia without producing carbon dioxide. This seems to be a good solution.
Japan's government has a lot more ambitions than that. It wants to be the world's firsthydrogen economy.
This is where Toyota comes in.
The image caption is.
The Mirai is Toyota's first zero-emissions electric car.
I'm in Tokyo and I'm at a hydrogen filling station. The new Toyota Mirai is on the forecourt. This is a big car, about the size of a Lexus.
I slip into the leather-clad cabin, press the "start" button, and glide out to the street. The car is quiet, smooth and odorless, and the only thing dribbling on to the road behind me is water.
The Mirai is Toyota's first zero-emissions electric car. The Mirai doesn't have a big battery under the floor. There is a fuel cell under the bonnet and hydrogen tanks in the back of the car. The reaction of hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell to form water releases energy into the air and into the electric motor. The same technology was used to power the Apollo missions.
This technology is odd to a lot of people. It's more complicated than batteries. He called hydrogen cars stupid.
Hisashi Nakai is the head of Toyota's public affairs division. He says the company's vision for fuel cells goes beyond cars.
He tells me that the important thing is realising carbon neutrality. We need to think about how we can use fuel cell technology to our advantage. hydrogen is a powerful and important energy.
Nakai-san says that Toyota is thinking of a future where hydrogen fuel cells are everywhere, in homes and offices and factories, as well as cars. It wants to be at the forefront of this new society.
The most important question is brought to us. Where will hydrogen come from to power Japan's zero carbon society?
"Blue hydrogen" is the answer.
The image is from the news.
The image caption is.
Coal piles are pictured at a power station.
You can make hydrogen from water using renewable energy. Green hydrogen is expensive.
Most hydrogen is made from coal or natural gas. It produces a lot of greenhouse gases. You can call it "blue hydrogen" if you capture greenhouse gases and bury them in the ground.
Japan says it is going to do this.
Japan and Australia opened a project to turn lignite, or brown coal, into hydrogen in the state of Victoria. The hydrogen is piped into a specially built ship which will carry it to Japan.
What happens to the greenhouse gases produced at the site? Right now, they are in the atmosphere. Japan and Australia are promising to inject greenhouse gas into the sea floor off the coast at some point in the future.
Climate change advocates are horrified by the plan. They say that the technology to capture and store greenhouse gases is not proven and that it will lock Japan into digging up huge quantities of brown coal for decades to come.
Prof Kaberger says the biggest hole in the plan is the economy.
The image caption is.
A coal-fired power plant is being built.
He says it is possible, but it will always be expensive. Fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage will always be more expensive than using fossil fuels alone, and now in many parts of the world renewable electricity is already cheaper than fossil fuels without carbon capture.
Prof Kaberger thinks the Japanese government chose blue hydrogen a decade ago because it was cheaper than renewable energy.
Japanese companies need cheap electricity to be competitive and clean electricity to be accepted internationally. They need renewable electricity. The Japanese economy will be harmed by the delay.
On the edge of Tokyo Bay, construction continues apace. The new power station will go online in the year 2023. It is expected to last for at least 40 years.
"I am ashamed of Japan, I am a 21-year-old activist," says Hikari Matsumoto, who is with us to look out from the hillside.
She says she is frustrated. Young people in other countries are out on the street protesting, but Japanese people are very quiet. Our generation needs to be heard.
Asia.
Japan.
Climate change.
Coal mining is done.
