Monday, October 20, 2008

KOREAN TECH MAKES HYDROGEN UP TO 30 TIMES CHEAPER TO PRODUCE -- CLEAN ENERGY SOLVED?

by Thomas Ricker, posted Oct 20th 2008 at 5:55AM

With oil prices in free-fall and the world's economies in the toilet, short-sighted governments and C02-denying GM execs will undoubtedly defer priority given to clean energies in the next round of fiscal budgets. Too bad, because Korea's S&P Energy Research Institute has just issued a press release about a new discovery it claims puts the era of clean energy within reach. Dr. Sen Kim claims to have achieved the separation of Hydrogen using just 0.1kwh of energy compared to the traditional 4 - 4.5kwh required using the ol' electrolytic method. Dr. Kim postulates that "manufacturing the H2 by our method will lower the cost of H2 as much as 20 - 30 times" compared to electrolytic H2. That makes SPERI's method suitable for H2 fuel production from say, an in-home hydrogen fueling station. So is this the solution to all of our clean energy concerns? Perhaps, but we've heard these economical hydrogen-generation claims before. Let's wait for the claim to be more thoroughly vetted by bigger brains than our own before getting too hopeful.

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