Labor has committed $1.4bn in government to, “make Australia a world leader in the burgeoning hydrogen industry.” Hydrogen is the energy flavour of the month, with Chief Scientist Alan Finkel a  fan of its fuel potential, especially if greenly extracted.

The Opposition says it will allocate $1bn from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to “support clean hydrogen”. A Labor government will also make “hydrogen production, storage and transport a funding priority of the Australian Research Council.”

Good-o, but the ARC is already on to it, supporting dozens of projects on hydrogen’s potential. In 2004, the ARC funded University of Wollongong’s Hua Kun Liu to develop a “high reversible hydrogen storage capacity to meet all the demands required for energy conversion applications, in particular, for hydrogen storage/fuel-cell vehicular applications.”