Meanwhile, students at the University of Birmingham recently built the UK's first hydrogen-powered locomotive.
Even more important, the plasmatron could speed the long- awaited transition to hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles.
The budget for hydrogen-powered vehicles, once the darlings of the alternative-energy lobby, has been slashed.
Perhaps, he speculates, the explanation lies in entirely new and unanticipated kinds of hydrogen-carbon interaction.
That mixture is then fed into a fuel reformer that turns it into a hydrogen-rich gas.
The truth is that, in energy terms, today's hydrogen-powered vehicles don't help at all.
Its namesake, The Hindenburg, was a hydrogen-filled German airship that exploded in the air in 1937.
All-electrics are next in line while hydrogen-fueled vehicles are a few car lengths behind.
The know-how exists but the cost of creating a new hydrogen-powered auto sector is now prohibitive.
Most prototype hydrogen-powered vehicles use more energy than the fossil-fuel vehicles they replace.
This week it unveiled a prototype version of its 7-Series saloon car that has a hydrogen-powered engine.
It is building huge wind farms on its coastline and even runs some hydrogen-fuelled buses in Beijing.
Engineers in the US say they have invented a hydrogen-powered robot that moves through water like a jellyfish.
The hydrogen-powered buses should be on the streets of the city by 2010 in time for the Olympic Games.
This means that far more hydrogen-friendly pores are exposed than with other materials.
At the moment, for example, arcane regulations make it illegal to drive a hydrogen-powered vehicle in much of Europe.
Hands across the aisle: George W. Bush got one thing right: He liked green cars, especially the hydrogen-powered ones.
Equally important, the hydrogen-impregnation technique requires far less gas than the oxygen-based one.
Hydrolysis--running an electric current through water to produce hydrogen--yields fuel that is usually not economically competitive with other forms of energy.
That would allow the infrastructure of a hydrogen-delivery network to be introduced gradually, rather than being put in place more-or-less instantly.
Natural gas is considered to be a bridge fuel between crude oil and the clean hydrogen-based energy sources of the future.
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And if Honda needs to be the one to solve the issue of creating infrastructure to enable hydrogen-powered vehicles, so be it.
His mission: to create the world's first zero-emission, hydrogen-based economy--and to pull it off through no-nonsense business principles, not tree-hugging wishful thinking.
Among outside experts there's a consensus that if hydrogen-fuel-cell cars ever make economic sense, it will be a long time from now.
But hydrogen-powered cars cannot exist without hydrogen filling stations, and vice versa.
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And, fortunately, they are closer at hand than hydrogen-related technologies and the infrastructure that will make them useable on a truly national basis.
The FCX, on the other hand, runs on the world's most plentiful element--hydrogen--and doesn't produce any of the pollution that today's gasoline-powered cars do.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in hydrogen-engine experiments. gm and Ford argued about which would have the greatest increases in fuel mileage.
Tourists who visit Yakushima will be required to ride hydrogen-powered buses.
Perhaps, but we've heard these economical hydrogen-generation claims before.
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