The idealized "hydrogen economy" is one of those alluring pipe dreams - like LENR - which for 20 years has been "so close but so far away" as they say. Cheap hydrogen simply cannot happen as electrical water-splitting - which leaves direct-solar as the only logical "enabler" technology. well . nuclear reactor water-splitting is imaginable, but far from ready.
No we find that the missing enabler technology could be discovered and coming from an unlikely pairing of Wisconsin and Saudi Arabia. http://news.wisc.edu/24010 The catalyst that makes solar water-splitting possible is called COPS. It is a cobalt phosphate sulfate. It can split water using only sunlight, but is it ready for prime time? Solar hydrogen could be a game changer. But the devil is in the details. Can it be made efficient enough? How do you keep algae from passivating the device? Is home storage safe? In many ways, the hydrogen economy could happen more rapidly and efficiently than one based on LENR. There is room for both with 6-7 billion humans needing more and more power, but the eventual winner will be based on cost and reliability (assuming "renewability" is guaranteed). Both nickel and cobalt and probably lithium are renewable for an extended period - several hundred years. Hydrogen from solar - has the advantage of an infrastructure which is in place with half a billion automobiles - the engines of 100% of them can be converted to burn hydrogen. Solar hydrogen has awaited this kind of catalyst from the start but we have heard overoptimistic talk from the "Ivory Towers" before. Dan Nocera (no-sera) from MIT is infamous for his group's highly publicized succession of overblown and unrealistic claims about breakthroughs - none of which have made a dent. He has single-handedly disappointed more energy futurists and idealists than Randell Mills, Stanley Meyer, Joseph Newman, Greg Watson, Eugene Podkletnov, James Patterson and Reidar Finsrud all rolled into one. Rossi may be the next addition to that list. Que sera, sera . but this tech announcement from Madison does not sound quite as cheesy and self-serving as recent bogosity from MIT. In the end, the problem with direct hydrogen from solar could be "competition" . but. surprisingly, not competition from LENR - competition form single cell organisms which will infiltrate almost any device using water. Heck, my Pur water filter only takes a week to build up green algae, which could be the Achilles heel of the COPS breakthrough.
