Easy Hydrogen a Nice Idea, But No Quick Fix.

I admit it. I'm biased against hydrogen. I rarely write anything about it here because, frankly, I remain overly dubious about hydrogen ever making a meaningful impact on personal transportation. The number of hurdles that hydrogen has to surmount to become viable (processing, infrastructure, vehicle development, etc) are well chronicled. And after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, we don't seem any closer to the proverbial "hydrogen economy."

That all said, there's some interesting research going on at Penn State. In work funded by Air Products and Chemicals and the National Science Foundation, scientists have filled out patent applications for a process that converts organic waste to hydrogen "cheaply and efficiently."

Now let's be clear. If I tried to track all the research that's going on this area, I'd have to quit my day job (and you people aren't clicking on my adwords enough to let me do so...) And frankly, much of the research falls into the, shall we say, overly academic space (like using spent eggshells as a fuel source.)

There's something about Professor Bruce Logan's research, though, that's interesting. Maybe it's because he seems to solve problems associated with cellulostic ethanol (to difficult to break down the sources) and hydrogen (too expensive/wasteful to produce the hydrogen) in one fell swoop.

Using microbial fuel cells and a variety of fairly generic ingredients (e.g. off the shelf exchange membranes, acetic acid, etc.), the researchers were able to generate hydrogen at a rate about 4x - 5x more efficient than standard water hydrolysis. The results, it would seem, are remarkable:

"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added to the process. Water hydrolysis, a standard method for producing hydrogen, is only 50 to 70 percent efficient."

Too good to be true? Time will tell. And we'll have lots of it, because even if Logan's research continues to bear fruit, there's still a long way to go before hydrogen is the future fuel many want it to be.