A new hydrogen-based solution which could revolutionise the energy efficiency of houses has been launched in a property in Lye, near Stourbridge.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham teamed up with the Black Country Housing Project to produce a small, refrigerator-sized unit which takes gas from the national grid and converts it into hydrogen.

This is subsequently used to generate electricity and heat in the house, while also not producing any excess carbon dioxide in the process.

Tests are ongoing and lead investigator Dr Waldemar Bujalski told the Birmingham Post: "For the same amount of natural gas, we can reduce the carbon footprint of a house by up to 40 per cent in comparison to one powered by fossil fuels."

Meanwhile, researchers in India have produced a polymer which could be 100 times more cost-effective than the current one used to construct hydrogen fuel cells.

The substance, a variant of polybenzimidazole, has been developed at the National Chemical Laboratory and could boost the government target of having a million fuel cell-powered vehicles on the road by 2020.

The news is a major advance as the electrolyte made from the polymer is far more effective than the Nafion - the industry standard - as it resists carbon monoxide and works at 150C.

In addition, polybenzimidazole can also eradicate the challenges of other cheap alternatives such as diluted hydrogen, which contains impurities and can reduce the fuel cell's performance as it works at higher temperatures and creates corrosive reactions.

Thirteen leading UK universities and 12 industrial partners have been recruited as part of a new £5 million project designed to produce cleaner, cheaper and sustainable hydrogen energy technologies.

The Delivery of Sustainable Hydrogen consortia will conduct research into finding advanced methods for the chemical and electrical generation of sustainable hydrogen, and policy measures to achieve a low-carbon hydrogen economy.

In addition, the researchers will be looking at the conversion of hydrogen and associated by-products into alternative industrial feedstocks and fuels, plus the socio-economic appraisal of novel hydrogen production technologies.

Hyundai, the largest automaker in South Korea, has revealed that it intends to start commercially producing its first hydrogen fuel cell car by 2012.

If the project is developed in the desired timescale, it would see the new vehicle rolled out three years after its planned Avante hybrid gas-electric vehicle, which is set to hit the market next year.

Elsewhere, General Motors has confirmed that it intends to commercially produce its plug-in Chevrolet Volt hybrid - which makes use of lithium ion batteries - in 2010.

The company is also currently testing 100 fuel cell-powered Chevrolet Equinox vehicles, while Honda commenced delivery of its fuel cell-powered FCX Clarity sedans during the summer.

The US Department of Energy has claimed that fuel cell vehicles should hit the mass market in 2010.

A team of researchers have created a room temperature aqueous phase synthesis of single-crystal platinum nanowires on the nanospheres of a regularly used fuel cell catalyst support, nanowerk.com reports.

Dr Jean-Pol Dodelet, Dr Shuhui Sun and Dr Frederic Jaouen - all from the INRS at the Universite du Quebec in Canada - found that using carbon black nanospheres as a substrate could provide a cheap and simple way of growing platinum nanowires.

They showed that the resulting nanostructures provided increased catalytic activity for the oxygen reduction reaction in comparison to the state-of-the-art platinum/carbon catalyst made from platinum nanoparticles.

Dr Dodelet told the website: "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that platinum nanowires have been used as electrocatalysts at the cathode of proton exchange membrane fuel cells."