By way of cars, trucks, vans, buses, scooters, forklifts and even submarines, Air Products reached a milestone when it completed its 50,000th hydrogen filling.  Fueling hydrogen powered transportation vehicles and other varied applications in 14 countries, Air Products reported hydrogen fillings have increased increasingly used at a pace of approximately 2,000 hydrogen fills per month.

Delegates from the United States, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia and South Africa met in Paris for a much anticipated  'Major Emitters Meeting' . "We achieved a consensus on the need for long-term and medium-term goals for reducing greenhouse-house gases," Jean-Pierre Jouyet, France's secretary of state for European affairs, told reporters after the meeting, the AFP reported. "But we have not got quantified targets at this stage and we regret this," he said. A report presented by the South Azfrican delegation stated that €127 billion in annual investments would be required to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, The 16 countries, accounting for 80% of the world's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, announced further meetings in May and June of this year. 

The European Economic and Social Committee in its opinion (INT 386) on the Joint undertaking for fuel cells and hydrogen indicated that the following measures are necessary:
−      a genuine simplification of procedures,
−      an information programme aimed at encouraging the necessary private and public funding to be released;
−       the establishment of appropriate vocational  training programmes to ensure  that  the skills of workers match the jobs created by this JTI.

At a meeting organised by Friends of Europe, Shell presented two alternative scenarios to respond to the challenge of 50%  increase in energy demand. The pessimistic 'scramble' scenario is characterised by a 'flight to coal' and nationalisation of energy resources in the context of increasing global competition for energy supplies.  In this scenario, "demand-side policy is not pursued meaningfully until supply limitations are acute. Likewise, environmental policy is not seriously addressed until major climate events stimulate political responses," according to Shell. An alternative and more optimistic 'blueprint' scenario, favoured by Shell, features greater global co-operation between governments and the private sector. A CO2 pricing mechanism accompanied by a functioning global carbon market would be a key feature of the blueprint scenario, as this would facilitate renewable energies and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. More info at www.shell.com.

In Germany, the growth of wind energy is being slowed by insufficient electricity grid infrastructure, hesitant investors, and rising raw material costs, notably for copper and steel, according to Ulf Gerder of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE). The BWE is pushing Berlin to up the country's feed-in tariff to 9.6 cents per kilowatt hour of wind energy produced on land. The government's current proposed rate of eight cents is not sufficient to convince banks to put up the necessary funding for new wind parks or for expanding electricity grids, according to Gerder. The European Wind Energy Association also cited the  lack of trained technicians and engineers as weighing heavily on the minds of the industry that is unable to fill dozens of vacancies for qualified workers. The European wWnd Energy Conference was held in Brussels from April 1-4, 2008 The Commission wants wind to provide 12% of the bloc's power by 2020, up from the current figure of 3.7%.  This would mean 9.5 gigawatts of new wind energy capacity to be installed annually over the next 12 years. There are concerns the industry will fall short of the target. In 2007, only 8.5 gigawatts were installed. 

The World Wildlife fund has published a study (http://assets.panda.org/downloads/plugged_in_full_report___final.pdf)  on the advantages of battery powered cars of internal combustion cars "Automotive transport is ripe for transformational change," it claims, and this cannot be achieved solely by finding new sources of carbonaceous material to liquefy. Instead, it says, the future lies in battery electric cars, which, though "relatively immature", can be "over 60% more energy efficient than today's conventional ICEV (internal combustion engined vehicles), across the entire plant-to-wheels life-cycle". ACEA the Association of Automobile Manufacturers'  Director of Environment and Economics Rolf Stromberger commented that the challenge is "to develop a stage of technical maturity which is acceptable for the customer – as they do not accept comfort deficits – and with no additional costs compared to existing technologies". Technical challenges linked to heavy and large batteries must also be resolved. He believes that electric vehicles are "one option for future mobility and they will find their market" but likely to remain confined to "certain utilisation behaviours" such as short distance travelling, where infrastructure to recharge the batteries can be made available. 

The EHA attended a Meeting of the French EU policy group Espace Europe Equipement on EU Transport policy. EU Commissioner for Transport Jacques Barrot gave a candid overview of upcoming policies regarding green urban transport and improvements of the  EU’s transport infrastructure. He summarized DG TREN efforts in four actions:
1. Regulation: Directive on the promotion of clean transport vehicles, Euro norms, 120g CO2 /km;
2. Investment: new rail infrastructure in collaboration with national governments: more national investment is needed in rail;
3. Tariffs:  proposal for a Directive on external transport costs scheduled for this Spring;

This April the section Hydrogen and Energy at EMPA at the EHT Zurich, the home of the Swiss Hydrogen Association Hydropole, has started a new project, SNF Hydyna, on Hydrogen dynamics in complex hydrides. Of the different storage methods, metal hydrides and complex hydrides exhibit the largest volumetric hydrogen density up to 150 kg m-3, which corresponds to more than twice the hydrogen density of liquid hydrogen.
Although many of these compounds are well known for their chemical behaviour, very little is known about their physical properties, e.g. structure, thermodynamic stability, electronic structure and hydrogen diffusion. This project investigates the hydrogen mobility and the hydrogen dynamics of a series of p-element complex hydrides and their influence on the stability and thermodynamic properties of the respective hydrides. Neutron diffraction as well as inelastic and quasielastic neutron spectroscopy measurements will be combined with nuclear magnetic resonance measurements. Project consortium includes SINQ (Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland), BENSC (Berlin, Germany) and ISIS (Didcot, United Kingdom). More info @ www.empa.ch/H2E/.

Seven days after Milan became the site of the WorldExpo in 2015 H2IT invited
local and national officials to presentations of hydrogen and fuel cell suppliers
of commercial hydrogen and fuel cell applications. H2IT has created a Taskforce to
define and promote a 7 year hydrogen and fuel cell integration plan leading up to the
 Expo in 2015. More info @ www.h2it.org.