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Cheaper, Cleaner Hydrogen Without Platinum
keithww writes "Looks like the hydrogen economy may have gotten a whole lot cheaper. Wisconsin team engineers gas from biomass
using common metals of tin, nickel, and aluminum instead of platinum. This looks like a good way to get rid of biowaste also." Of course, there's still a long way to go before the automotive industry is using it, but it is good news nonetheless.
Work is being done on using carbon nanorods to store hydrogen (amongst others by the Renewable Energies Research Lab in Golden, CO). These would be cheap and safely disposable and probably represent the future of hydrogen fuel tech.
While your assessment is accurate for oil-based products, it doesn't apply to biomass.
Burning things that have been produced by recently living organisms is not too bad, it's just another part of the normal carbon cycle.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they are re-introducing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that has been removed from the natural carbon cycle...
An interesting question is how efficient can we make energy production based on plant farming, which is an indirect way of utilizing solar energy - plants transform carbon dioxide (+ water + sunlight) into hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons are processed into non-fossil fuel and utilized - can this be more efficient than solar panels? I believe photosynthesis is a pretty efficient process, especially for fast growing plants, but this is something that hasn't (AFAIK) been tried on a large scale.