Hydrogen Planes?

I came across this BBC report recently that suggests that the aviation industry has now given up on switching from kerosene to hydrogen as a fuel.

Excuse me? Did I read that right? Apparently, yes. For the past 10 years, the whole industry has been seriously looking for ways of moving away from fossil fuels to hydrogen.

Ironically, it appears they've had to shelve the idea because the process of creating hydrogen - hydrolysis - emits too much CO2. There was nothing wrong with the hydrogen itself, and they were quite prepared to re-design jets to accomodate the larger volume of fuel (we might have seen jets looking like Thunderbird 2), it's just it requires a lot of electricity to produce and, at the moment, that's mainly from coal.

So, the search is now on for a biofuel that a) comes from a sustainable source, and b) doesn't require the use of land being used for food.

The underlying reason for this search is not so much about battling climate change as it is looking after aviation's interests. The industry realises it's future is too dependant on a fast depleting fuel and needs to protect itself from, firstly, volatile fuel prices, then rising prices and finally, the effective end of oil.