“YES, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it…will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light…Water will be the coal of the future.”
The words of Pencroft, Jules Verne’s visionary engineer in his novel The Mysterious Island, were science fiction in 1874. But today a new band of prophets is predicting once again that hydrogen will achieve the unimaginable. This new fuel, they say, will finally end our love affair with hydrocarbon fuels and shift energy production from the big and centralised to the small and dispersed – a process they…
