Nothing ages faster than the future. A few years ago there was general agreement that if the internal-combustion engine ever was replaced by something clean, that something would be the fuel cell. A fuel cell is a way of reacting hydrogen and oxygen together in a controlled way and extracting electricity from the process. It was to be the precursor of what was known as the hydrogen economy, in which that gas would replace fossil fuels and power almost everything.rnLeaving aside the problems of transporting and storing a light and leaky gas, what no one was very clear about was where the hydrogen itself would come from. You would have to make it from something else. That something would either be a mixture of fossil fuel and water (fuels can be reacted with steam to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide, but you still have to get rid of the carbon dioxide), or just water itself, via electrolysis.
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