HOW ABOUT HOMEMADE HYDROGEN?

Link submitted by the fine engineer, author and energy reporter Forbes Bagatelle-Black.

The Solar-powered Home Hydrogen Fueling Station
Green Wombat, January 25, 2007 (Green Wombat.com)

- …[Dr. Sukhvinder Badwal, a fuel-cell scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO] leads a team that is developing a solar-powered home hydrogen fueling station that can be installed in a corner of your garage.
- It’s about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by standard-issue rooftop solar panels. The first version of the home fueling station is expected to produce enough hydrogen to give your runabout a range of nearly 100 miles (150 kilometers) without producing a molecule of greenhouse gas…

- The solar-fired fuel-station-in-a-box overcomes two big obstacles to the much-hyped hydrogen economy. One is the multibillion-dollar expense of building national networks of pipelines and fuel stations to replace the corner Chevron (CVX). The other is the fact that today most hydrogen is produced by burning fossil fuel to create hydrogen gas—not exactly a clean and green process. The home hydrogen fuel station solves those problems in one package that Badwal hopes will ultimately sell for about $500. Commercial trials are expected to begin in two years…

- Honda (HMC) also has been working a solar-powered hydrogen fuel station… designed to provide heat and electricity for the house as well as fuel for cars…still being refined and the company has not yet announced a time table…
- For Badwal, using renewable energy - solar panels or a small wind turbine - is key…the real impact of the home fueling technology could be in China and India, where efforts to combat global warming could be doomed by the explosion in the car-buying middle classes…He sees the potential for CSIRO's hydrogen technology to be distributed to villages in the developing world, eliminating the need for big, expensive and dirty coal-fired plants…