Physics Today December 2004- The Hydrogen Economy

Energy Production, as it relates to consumer use, manufacturing, and utilities we all use daily, like internet access and telephony, is a major interest of mine. The Hydrogen Economy is a big idea that has been a long long time coming. It's not clear, despite it's persuasive nature, whether it will eventually make it all the way to the real world.

Portions of it obviously will. This is a state of the art article on the prospects and challenges such an integrated solution will have.

Something that isn't considered very often is partial introduction of hydrogen as an energy carrier within an isolated industrial process. If hydrogen can be commercially successful within a limited context, the powers of standardization and mass production can drive the spread to other processes, and other industries. Trying to build an integrated solution will probably always fail, because people who are reading your 'complete manifesto', interpret it within the context of their own applications, and it never is quite tailored, or quite useful enough in the details. The trick to to make them come to you. When people design processes, they design them with a hundred assumptions and design limitations. The trick is to become one of those design goals, and then you're not a cost, not a change, just another constraint, and another compliance.

Good luck to em, though. The Hydrogen economy is extremely intertied with efficiency, intelligent design, renewable energy sources, and decentralized design, across the board. A few successes in their camp means many in all of the above.

And that would be significant.