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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (472811)	10/8/2003 1:37:17 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

I found this gem. a pdf sc.doe.gov It's a recent release for doe about the hydrogen economy. The conclusions or the trillion dollar reseach grant wish... AND using free utility xpdf under linux I can quickly cut and paste text out of a pdf file CONCLUSIONS The hydrogen economy offers a grand vision for energy management in the future. Its benefits are legion, including an ample and sustainable supply, flexible interchange with existing energy media, a diversity of end uses to produce electricity through fuel cells or heat through controlled combustion, convenient storage for load leveling, and freedom from harmful environmental pollutants. These benefits provide compelling motivation for a broad effort across the research, development, engineering, and industrial sectors to implement hydrogen as the fuel of the future. The challenges to reach a hydrogen economy, however, are enormous, considering today's state of knowledge and technical capabilities. The hydrogen economy consists of many physical and chemical processes linked in an interdependent network that connects production, distribution, storage, and use. Hydrogen in its various forms flows throughout the network, linking primary sources like hydrocarbons or seawater to storage media like alanates to end-use functions like fuel cells. Many of the processes in the network have been demonstrated in laboratory or prototype tests at some level, but nearly all of these processes remain to be proved in competitive environments against existing technology for cost, performance, and reliability. The gap between present-day technology and commercial viability is vast. To be economically competitive with the present fossil fuel economy, the cost of fuel cells must be lowered by a factor of 10 or more, the cost of producing hydrogen by a factor of 4, and the performance and reliability of hydrogen technology for transportation and other uses must be improved dramatically (Abraham 2003). This gap cannot be bridged by incremental advances of the present state of the art. Bridging the gap requires not only creative engineering, but also revolutionary conceptual breakthroughs in understanding and controlling the physical and chemical processes that govern the interaction of hydrogen with materials. Such breakthroughs can only come from comprehensive basic research focused on the behavior of hydrogen at the atomic level, exploiting the remarkable recent advances in materials synthesis capabilities, forefront characterization tools, and creative theory and modeling. The best scientists from universities and national laboratories and the best engineers and scientists from industry must work in interdisciplinary groups to find breakthrough solutions to the fundamental problems of hydrogen production, storage, and use. The formulation of such a basic research program must be coordinated with the needs of applied research and development and have coupled experimental and theoretical components for maximum impact. The hope is that these discoveries and related conceptual breakthroughs from basic research will provide a foundation for the innovative design of materials and processes that will produce qualitative improvements in the performance, cost, and reliability of the production, storage, and use of hydrogen so that an economically competitive hydrogen economy can eventually be realized. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham outlined four research challenges for achieving the hydrogen economy in his address to the National Hydrogen Association (Abraham 2003):