Wow. This is quite the PR spin piece.

It makes it sound like these hydrogen reserves are a new discovery.

The presence of potentially vast reserves of underground hydrogen was has been known since at least the 1970s. It is not that unusual for drillers to encounter hydrogen when drilling deep formations.

The simple fact is that the petro cartels did their best to keep this knowledge out of the public eye and continued to promote fossil fuels as the only viable fuel, spending millions on PR to stifle hydrogen infrastructure even while “investing” in hydrogen research and promoting electrólisis sourced hydrogen as a clean “future fuel”.

They knowingly poisoned the climate while sitting on vast reserves of a fuel that would have completely changed the situation that the planet now faces.

I’m so done with these monsters.

Here’s some conspiracy theory gold for you right here:

In the early 1990s I got certified in a network technology that provided gigabit speeds over UTP on a PCI bus card. (They also had a VESA local bus version) The speeds were so high at the time that the bus couldn’t keep up so the cards also featured significant memory for caching. I hooked up with the company at one of my many forays to COMDEX.

I got the invite at COMDEX to come to (?) “the national science institute” or something like that during a schmooze party I was invited to, put on by the company in their hotel space. It didn’t hurt that the rep that was getting me excited about the tech was erudite and a solid ten and she wasn’t bashful about leveraging both her talents and her gifts. I’m only flesh and blood, and it was a very different time. Try not to judge me too harshly.

When I went to get certified, they took me to an (!) underground bunker (!) made in an old (gypsum?) mine. It had a massive concrete security entrance going into the side of the hill with a massive door securing the facility. Inside, It was an expansive compound with extensive independent capabilities.

There were several laboratories and a bunch of different offices. The “wideband” network technology was the brainchild of a professor and his postgrad research team, and NGL the guy was brilliant and obviously loved by his team. Roger Billings, if I remember correctly (it was a while ago)

The courses were Interesting but pretty basic with a little signals theory, TCP/IP routing fundamentals, basic stuff as it pertained to wiring limitations etc. but the place was completely out there. There were acres of mostly unlit mine space, closed off to the offices but accessible.

After a few days underground (meals and lodging provided) we got done with the courses but there were still two days left in the program… which I found curious. There was an awkward transition in course material into hydrogen fuels, fuel cells, hydrogen storage, and the vast reserves of hydrogen to be found underground. We toured their fuel cell lab, and they revealed their prototype fuel cell powered car, that was made in the early 1980s(?). We were briefed on global warming and the potential catastrophic effects.

Then those of us that passed “wideband administrator” course were given our certs.

Then we were informed about a book that the prof had written called “the hydrogen worldview” that outlined a comprehensive plan to shift oil extraction to hydrogen and rebuild the national fuel infrastructure to utilise hydrogen.

Talking to people there, I gathered that the prof never, ever left the compound, because he had received credible threats (they didn’t mention from who)

They gave me a hard bound copy of the book. I read it, I was kinda unimpressed because I didn’t really buy into global warming stuff (they were still talking about how fossil fuels were going to spark the next ice age, that later turned it to be Oil PR.) at the time it seemed like ok, cool, but why?

Anyway, the whole thing was wierd. I did install some “wideband” equipment under contract for a couple of financial trading outfits, but it was only about a year and a half before pre-specification gigabit cards were hitting the market, and the handwriting was on the wall because wideband was nowhere to be seen in the spec RFCs.

A few years later I found a paperback copy of his book at a 2nd hand store. It was half as thick and had no mention of half the stuff in the book I had taken from the facility. I found that weirdly unsettling at the time.

I look back on the whole episode now and think holy shit.