Oh great Chevron bought it!!! They have no reason to sit on technology that competes with oil whatsoever.

FYI to the inventors, don't hold your breath on getting that thing out by 2009. Your benefactors are going to pull something out of their ass and tell you that they are not allowing you to release the product, just yet...

"There are still major obstacles to overcome (the fact that there is no renewable source of energy to produce hydrogen being chief among them)"

Sean, I think that's the point of this device-- It creates the hydrogen from other liquid fuels. It isn't clear whether this is actually any better than just burning the gasoline though--what happens to the byproducts that aren't hydrogen?

I already have a device that converts liquid fuel into the energy required to run my car. It's called MY CAR!

Creating hydrogen from glycerin is very interesting as there is a glut in the glycerin market, caused by biodiesel production.

Ahh, the forerunner to Mr. Fusion.

Sounds great, but how much energy is loss during the conversion. You can get Hydrogen from water by simply running a current through it, but the amount of Hydrogen gained doesn't equal the amount of energy used to create it. If it's the same with this microreactor than what's the point.

Does anyone have in mind Doc Emmet Brown's shoving waste into his future modified Delorean's microreactor?

When they can make cars fly and travel in time using rotten apples and empty drinks cans... then i'll be seriously impressed.

Finally! An expensive way to turn my valuable hydrocarbons into cheap cheap hydrogren. Santa must have got my letter.

Electrolysis can render both Hydrogen and Oxygen from COMMON TAP WATER!

Send for my free brochure today!

i wonder if its possible to put a reasonable number of these together so that they would be able to lift a person off the ground a la jetpack style

Missing the point.

Maybe this ain't THE ONE. But, with all the diverse resources on the problem, it's likely there will be ONE at some point... hopefully soon.

Problems find solutions; maybe from future memory, as Arthur Clark described time reality.

In the car business, air bags were ready to save lives long before processors fast enough to sense and fire in a life-saving way could be built. Perhaps fuel cells are in that same holding pattern, with a likely solution on the horizon.

Difference today.... If brilliant minds (who stay at Holiday Inn Express) blogbash THE ONE into submission before its prime time, we could all wind up sucking gas for another hundred years.

Any kind of fuel that begins with "bio" is evil. In Mexico corn is so expensive now that poor people can't afford it anymore. The amount of corn needed to fill the tank of an SUV would feed a person for a year.

Burning food to go to the grocery store. How sick is that?

Having said that, research into hydrogen generation must continue.

What I really want to see though is solar power satellite that beams energy back to Earth.

@HKLV: Interesting point, I agree. This seems like a great step in the right direction; it just needs to be refined some more to become the holy grail of a new source of energy.

too bad you can't power it with urine. now that would be an answer there.

@Gary_7vn: I wouldn't be too quick to bio bash. Most biodiesel in this country comes from virgin soy oil which is used in products like soap, makeup, crayons, etc. It can also be made from recycled cooking oil, other waste vegetable oil stocks, even waste animal fat. There's been a lot of research into producing biodiesel from algae as well, which can be cultivated in un-arable land like deserts.

As for ethanol from corn, yeah that's asking for trouble.

like gary said, all bio's are bad (minus cellulosic, if it makes it out of the lab). and if you do your homework, you know h2 is bad as well.

gotta go all electric. even if it's coal based grid powered, that's a lot less co2 generation than ice's. battery tech will surely outpace h2 tech, plus the fact that there's already an EV 'refueling infrastructure' in place.

Nuke + batteries.

@z111: What about Biodiesel from waste vegetable oil? It isn't displacing any crops. Alge-grown biodiesel doesn't take up too much space, and a large portion of the energy required for processing is solar.

"and if you do your homework, you know h2 is bad as well."

i've not done my homework. what's bad about H2? The only thing that comes to mind is the problem of storing it, and the inherent dangers that come with containment failures (ie, BOOM!)

This allows one to store the energy as relatively non-volatile fuel, which is converted on-the-fly, which pretty much negates that problem.

what i want to know is what to they do with all the leftover carbon atoms?

The issues with storing compressed hydrogen aren't that difficult to overcome... GM has already made tremendous leaps forward in this area, including some amazing high-pressure tanks that deform to great extremes, rather than rupturing. We'll see that in their first fuel cell vehicles in a couple of years.

The Hindenberg jokes are getting old, though... the fact is, anything that has the potential energy required to power an automobile forward has a lot of destructive potential in dangerous situations. Even a simple wind-up spring — powerful enough to move a car — could kill everyone nearby if it were to snap in an accident.

If we want to get away from gas and oil right now, we do have the technology at hand: Build nuclear facilities to replace all fossil-fuel power plants, and use their electricity to cleanly electrolyze water into hydrogen for mobile / storage uses.

Fission is not a permanent solution, but it'll work for the couple of decades it'll take to get solar to the efficiency levels where it can really sustain us. Nuclear now, Solar soon, Fusion finally.

The issues with storing compressed hydrogen aren't that difficult to overcome... GM has already made tremendous leaps forward in this area, including some amazing high-pressure tanks that deform to great extremes, rather than rupturing. We'll see that in their first fuel cell vehicles in a couple of years.

The Hindenberg jokes are getting old, though... the fact is, anything that has the potential energy required to power an automobile forward has a lot of destructive potential in dangerous situations. Even a simple wind-up spring — powerful enough to move a car — could kill everyone nearby if it were to snap in an accident.

If we want to get away from gas and oil right now, we do have the technology at hand: Build nuclear facilities to replace all fossil-fuel power plants, and use their electricity to cleanly electrolyze water into hydrogen for mobile / storage uses.

Fission is not a permanent solution, but it'll work for the couple of decades it'll take to get solar to the efficiency levels where it can really sustain us. Nuclear now, Solar soon, Fusion finally.

Sounds very cool. I just wonder what kind of by-products this little dandy device makes. I guess is depends on the source material.

@R2B2: We need to have a global "Manhattan Project" to develop alternative energy and we need to do it now. It's okay to reuse and recycle and all that but if you do the math, we'd wind up using all the available biomass in no time. Besides, biomass is just sun, plus water and nutrients, essentially it is solar power. Best to just harvest the solar directly and eat the corn.

The algae thing is a good idea, eats CO 2 as well!

Bio and all that stuff is not going to replace oil and coal. That stuff is energy rich and very difficult to replace. We need to think big, like the orbiting solar platforms. Fusion is the final solution. We need to try harder.

And we have to reduce consumption. That is one way forward. Switch to LED lighting, super insulated houses, using winter snow and ice to AC in the summer. Lots stuff

@jrghoull: I BET YOU COULD BUILD A REALLY COOL STAIRWAY OF THEM THAT WOULD ALLOW YOU TO ASCEND TO THE UPSTAIRS.