GM and The Gas Company, based in Hawaii, have announced an initiative that will provide hydrogen to fuel cell vehicles that the automaker plans to roll out there as soon as 2015.

The Gas Company currently converts waste products from petroleum refining into methane, hydrogen, and some liquid fuels, and pumps these gases around Oahu in a pipeline. About five percent of that gas stream is hydrogen. The new initiative will see the company install devices that can separate that hydrogen at fueling stations, and pump it into the pressurized tanks that store the gas on board GM's vehicles. The devices cost about a quarter as much as installing a new hydrogen fueling station, the company says.

The new approach is meant to address one of the biggest challenges with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles: the lack of widespread infrastructure for refueling. In some ways, Hawaii is the ideal place to start using these vehicles widely, since you only need a couple dozen fueling stations for the whole island of Oahu. The new approach could also be environmentally friendly, especially if The Gas Company follows through with its plans to make hydrogen out of plant and animal oils, and to capture it from landfills.

In another way though, Hawaii makes less sense for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are best suited for driving involving high loads, high speeds and long distances, continuous driving. But most people on Oahu live and work and play in an area just 5 miles long and 25 miles wide. That's perfect for electric vehicles, which can be affordable if they only need to store enough energy to trot around a small area.

Electric vehicles can also be more energy efficient than fuel cell vehicles. It's hard to say what's better in this situation, but if the electricity comes from wind turbines on the island, then charging a battery and using that electricity to power a car is probably going to be more efficient than extracting, pressurizing and distributing hydrogen, which also has to be converted it into electricity in the car.

From wind turbines to cell phones, rare earth minerals play a big role in advanced technology, and they could be key for future clean energy. But congress is worried about the fact that almost all of these materials come from China, and could be subject to tight export controls by that country's government.

The subject was discussed yesterday at a hearing, where experts called on the U.S. government to take steps not only to promote domestic production of these materials, but to fund research to find ways to recycle them, to use less of them, and to do without them altogether.

The work has already started. In one recent example, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, recently awarded $4.5 million to develop motors and generators that use magnetics containing low amounts of rare-earth materials. The project is ambitious:

High energy permanent magnets are critical components in the new energy economy due to their widespread use in advanced motors for hybrids and electric vehicles and in advanced wind turbine generators, and the currently dominant Nd-Fe-B magnets use materials that are not domestically available and are subject to critical supply disruptions. If successful, this project will return the U.S. to global leadership in advanced magnetic materials and will facilitate the widespread deployment of low cost hybrid and electric vehicles and wind power using domestically available materials and dramatically decrease U.S. oil imports and greenhouse gas emissions.

A year ago today, T. Boone Pickens, founder and chairman of BP Capital Management and oil tycoon, revealed his Pickens Plan, which called for wind farms to replace natural-gas power plants, freeing the natural gas for powering cars and trucks, all in an effort to reduce imports of oil (and probably to find new markets for domestic natural gas). In support of that plan, Pickens signed a deal for 667 wind turbines for an enormous 4,000-megawatt wind farm to be built in the Texas Panhandle.

Now that plan is in shambles. Bad credit markets and a lack of transmission lines for the wind turbines have led him to scrap the panhandle project, at least for now, he confirmed today. But he still has to do something with all of those turbines he's ordered. "I'm committed to 667 wind turbines and I am going to find projects for them," he said in a statement.

During the past year, he's also backed off some from his plan to switch to natural-gas cars, which has been widely criticized as impractical, focusing instead on pushing for a fleet of natural-gas tractor trailers.

Lack of transmission is turning out to be a major impediment for wind farms. For example, most of the applications for 67,000 megawatts of wind farms in the Midwest are stuck waiting in line because of a lack of grid connections. (See "Lifeline for Renewable Power.")