As posted early, hydrogen may one day be a viable alternative to fossil fuels but at the present time, it is just not a cost effective fuel for a whole host of reasons.

Hydrogen is used in industry in things like Hydroxegen welders.

I saw a forerunner to this type of welder back in the 70s when a guy by the name of Brown ( can’t remember his first name ) made the front cover of Electronics Australia.

Mr Brown had his office and lab at Alburn and a mate and I were given a tour of his set up and one of the projects he was working on was his version of a Hydrogen - Oxygen electric welder. Very strange watching him weld copper rods to house brick, demonstrating what these welders could do without any special gear or chemicals.

30 years ago he was making statements that hydrogen cars would be the way of the future but now, as then, no one knows how far into the future we have to go before they become everyday commodities.

Having said that, there are now service stations in California that have Hydrogen on tap.

The use of hydrogen gas is being promoted to help reduce the amount of smog that plagues some of California’s cities. The problem is that in the USA something like 93% of all hydrogen produce, is done so using fossil fuels, which means California has just moved the pollution from one location to another.

One point, raised in Robin William’s move, “Man of the Year”, why are petroleum companies promoting hydrogen, when everything researched about it, to date, shows that it is highly unlikely to be a feasible alternative to fossil fuels for decades?

On a different line, someone else might be able to point in the right direction, but I remember seeing a news item, late last year where a term from either Sydney University or the University of NSW, were working on a new device that, once developed, looks like and sits on your roof like a solar panel but did a direct conversion of light to hydrogen gas. Anybody know more about it.

Contrary to what you may think of my posts on this subject, I would love to see hydrogen in common use to day and a good few years ago, I played around with the stuff and would love to be doing it again, but as I see it, there is no economically clean way, at this stage, to produce it for your own use.

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