Skeptics of the Energy Economy tend to hang their hat (with some justification) on the fact that hydrogen is hard to transport and hard to store. But even while there are emerging technologies that may address those twin problems, there are increasing signs that it may not be important.
I wrote recently about the add-on device being used by truckers to generate hydrogen on the fly from water; the hydrogen is injected into the engine cylinders to increase fuel mileage and as a side benefit, create drastic reductions in pollution.
A Florida engineer has developed a similar system that also uses electrolysis to split water atoms, but instead of throwing the oxygen away, he combines the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom to create a new gas with a chemical composition of HHO (instead of H2O).
The new kind of gas has some remarkable properties, including more efficient metalcutting. The gas is presently undergoing certification for use in welding and metalworking shops and factories.
But if you bolt the device onto the side of a car engine and use some electricity from the alternator to power it, you can apparently get a 30% increase in fuel mileage at a cost of about 70 cents an hour. Since an hour of driving is going to consume somewhere between two and three gallons of gas at a cost of $4-$8, this system is a real winner if it works the way it is claimed.