The Hydrogen Gold Rush Is On


Move over, Ben Franklin. Todd Livingstone has a plan to solve the energy crisis by capturing huge amounts of energy from lightning.
The idea itself is not new. But Livingstone, an inventor and electronics technician from Boston -- the town where Benjamin Franklin was born 300 years ago next month -- has added a unique twist. Using lasers to capture lightning bolts, he wants to channel them through a large tank of water, producing near-limitless amounts of hydrogen.
The implications, says Livingstone, are "mind-boggling." Put up a network of lasers in a lightning-prone area like Florida, he says, convert that energy into hydrogen, "and we could create more energy than the world needs."
Livingstone has a small-scale prototype of the system and a patent application on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He's busy negotiating with potential investors.
There's only one problem. His system, according to knowledgeable scientists, probably won't work any time soon. So far, at least, lasers can't capture lightning.
Livingstone isn't the only person with a scheme to save the world through hydrogen. The last two years has seen a boom in hydrogen investment. In 2003, President Bush announced that the federal government would invest $1.2 billion into hydrogen over the next five years. General Motors has said it is spending at least a billion dollars on hydrogen and fuel-cell technologies, and companies like BP, Chevron and Shell are also making significant investments.
All that money has spawned a gold rush of inventors, all seeking the mother lode of cheap hydrogen. There's plenty of fool's gold in the dash for the moolah, and marvelous hydrogen inventions are shaping up as the perpetual-motion machines of a new age.
"Eighty percent or more of the ideas that come directly to us violate the laws of physics," says Patrick Serfass, a spokesman for the National Hydrogen Association.
"When you put that kind of money out there, anybody who has even the most marginal technology related to hydrogen comes out of the woodwork," says Joseph Romm, an assistant energy secretary during the Clinton administration and author of the book The Hype About Hydrogen.
Plenty of sound science relates to hydrogen, and a number of real-world technologies are either under development or already in use. Mazda recently announced it will begin selling a hydrogen version of its RX-8 sports car within three years. And a number of applications are being used in large-scale stationary projects or handheld devices, says Serfass.
A Folsom, California, company called Jadoo Power Systems, for example, is selling a hydrogen fuel cell for professional video cameras that outperforms existing battery packs, according to Serfass. And at a Dow Chemical plant in Freeport, Texas, fuel cells made by General Motors are turning excess hydrogen from the chemical-manufacturing processes into electricity, which is then used to help power the plant.
But as with any new technology, figuring out which ideas are based in legitimate science and which are crackpot isn't always easy.
"I spend a lot of my time trying to separate those two," says Serfass, who reviews anywhere from five to 10 new hydrogen-technology proposals a month. With many of them, like "the perpetual-motion machines, or projects claiming 100 percent efficiency, it's clear immediately they won't work," he says.
Sometimes the presentation provides a preview of an idea's scientific value. Serfass said the red flags go up "when they say this technology has been proven for a long time, and they've presented it to executives at a lot of different companies, but no one has ever called them back."
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