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.

-