GREEN HYDROGEN and THE FUTURE OF AVIATION: Part 2

If you have long been following the progress of the hydrogen economy, you probably missed an esoteric piece of history that began with the Matsunaga Hydrogen Act of 1990. Here is the clause from the Act.

Created the Hydrogen Technical Advisory Panel (HTAP) to advise the Secretary of Energy.
I searched through the details and could not find language to allow this to occur, but I think HTAP unilaterally decided to report to both the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Congress.
For all I know, this might have been unconstitutional. That is, a panel that had equal access to the executive and legislative branches of the Federal government.
For example, when HTAP submitted the recommended hydrogen budget to the Secretary of Energy, we also sent this same budget request to both houses of Congress.
The result was that the Department of Energy tended to annually have the same budget to make approval easier.
He, is, by the way on a $10,000 savings bond.

When I chaired HTAP, I called a panel meeting where the members spent a couple of days fashioning an elaborate and progressive (meaning incredibly optimistic) 20-year budget, beginning in the early 90s at less than $10 million/year, increasing in 12 years to almost $80 million/year. This was all reported in the 1995 Progress Report entitled The Green Hydrogen Report. Surely enough, during the George Bush the Younger reign as president, the USDOE hydrogen budget one year exceeded the solar technology budget.

Then, over the past two decades, the hydrogen budget declined, until the Biden administration, when, with the spur of Congress, hydrogen again saw increases.

While the hydrogen budget is now lower than solar, hydrogen is higher than wind energy and geothermal energy.

I also mentioned yesterday that when I drafted this hydrogen bill, I combined the focus of renewable hydrogen with another pathway for a hydrogen jetliner. We thought that NASA was the appropriate department, but also added transportation.

This led to NASA's Rockwell X-30 demonstration project, designed to fly from Washington to Tokyo in two hours. Our motivation was to initiate the early work leading to something like the National Aerospace Plane for commercialization. The program went on for four years and was spun off to the Department of Defense black operations in the 1990-92 period. Can't seem to get budget info, but the program was sent to the skunk works operation of Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, California. Unofficial reports indicate that perhaps $2 billion was spent, but the project was diminished, whatever that means. If that figure is true (which then means more money was spent for this obscure effort than the total Department of Energy hydrogen research budget since the beginning of time), then the USA should be positioned to someday move into a future hydrogen jetliner like the National Aerospace Plane.

Watch this video of where commercial flight will someday go. I wrote The Future of Sustainable Aviation for the Huffington post almost 14 years ago.

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for...

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

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