ENGINEERS are getting closer to developing safe, low-pressure hydrogen tanks for the next generation of electric cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells (快猫短视频, 24 May, p 18). David Jamieson, the Department for Transport鈥檚 clean fuels minister, agrees that hydrogen storage is still a major challenge. The only near-commercial methods for carrying hydrogen on board vehicles is to store it as a compressed gas, a cryogenic liquid or in the form of a solid metal hydride.
There are pros and cons to each, and the need is to find the one that allows hydrogen to be stored safely and economically without a significant weight penalty. Metal organic frameworks are interesting, potentially cheap to make, and are lighter and have a higher storage capacity than some of the existing techniques. More research needs to be done, and Jamieson is pleased that the UK Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium has been established to address problems of this kind. The good news is the consortium is backed by 拢3.4 million funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
IN LAST month鈥檚 ministerial reshuffle, Hilary Benn became the minister of state for international development and thus the government鈥檚 chief spokesperson on the subject in the Commons. International development is at the core of the personal politics of many MPs, and the events in Iraq and around the Great Lakes of central Africa have heightened its importance on the world stage.
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The UK was responsible for setting up the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, and strongly backs its stance in calling for a two-tier system of drug pricing so that poor countries can buy drugs more cheaply (快猫短视频, 17 May, p 8). Benn tells me that Britain is working hard to encourage pharmaceutical companies to provide medicines for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria at the lowest possible price in all least developed countries and across sub-Saharan Africa.
All stakeholders, Benn says, will need to prevent re-importation of differentially priced products, and the governments of developed countries must assure industry that the lower prices for poor countries will not be used as a benchmark for pricing in their own markets. Developing countries receiving the drugs will need to remove any tariffs and taxes that are now applied. Moreover, to encourage companies to offer their medicines at significantly lower prices to developing countries, the European Union has drawn up a regulation to prevent cheaper products from developing countries leaking back to EU member states.
Benn is splendidly articulate at the Commons dispatch box, and gives the Department for International Development an important lift in the pecking order of what MPs call the 鈥淲estminster village鈥�.
