Everything seems to happen in threes. There are three different hydrogen producing news stories:
Purdue has scientists using aluminum to create hydrogen. One cancer patient is generating hydrogen from salt water And in the Economist, they reported that biology is being used to generate hydrogen.
What do all of these stories show? Not just that we do not know everything yet, but that innovation can come from someone tinkering, it can come from a dedicated center, and it can come from a completely different field: biology.
The cancer patient was trying to find a cure for cancer and stumbled on salt water creating hydrogen. The science is now being worked on in New York.
The Purdue engineer knew about this process in 1967 from work in semiconductors and is now applying it.
The biologist works in synthetic biology which usually works to make drugs using enzymes from different species.
There may be hope in using hydrogen as a fuel if these take less energy than is being used to create them. And since right now, there is not enough ethanol or bio fuel to meet our energy needs, that there are 3 new methods already is promising. I will be looking for more creativity in hydrogen.
