Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs — lend us your ears! You will be able to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, as well as smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

“There’s been a rediscovery of prize competitions in the private sector, and now it looks like government is starting to follow,” said Thomas Kalil, senior fellow at Washington think tank the Center for American Progress, recently told the Christian Science Monitor.

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have offered prizes for technology. Now in case anybody needs a bit of extra motivation for developing hydrogen as an alternative fuel, legislation creating the “H-Prize” passed the House last Wednesday (May 10) on a 416-6 vote. A companion bill is to be introduced in the Senate in the near future.

The H-Prize is modeled after the privately funded Ansari X Prize, which resulted last year in the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice.

The measure would award four prizes of up to $1 million every other year for technological advances in hydrogen production, distribution, storage or utilization. One prize of up to $4 million would be awarded every second year for the creation of a working hydrogen vehicle prototype.

The grand prize would go for a development deemed “transformation technology,” in the next 10 years.

Anyone can participate, as long as the research is performed in the United States and the person, if employed by the government or a national lab, does the research on his or her own time. And benefits to the new competitive opportunity have been cited to include national security, cleaner air from burning pollution-free hydrogen, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and new jobs.

“Perhaps the greatest role that the H-Prize may serve is in spurring the imagination of our most valuable resource, our youth,” said co-sponsor Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill.

“Prizes can draw out new ideas from scientists and engineers who may not be willing or able to participate in traditional government research and development programs, while encouraging them, rather than the taxpayer, to assume the risk,” said Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y.

Vasilios Manousiouthakis, head of the Hydrogen Engineering Research Consortium at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that the prizes likely would motivate some academic researchers and that the measure might drive university researchers to look for commercial applications of their work, or to form partnerships with industry.

Bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., said the Department of Energy would put together a private foundation to set up guidelines and requirements for the prizes, reports LiveScience. The H-Prize Act of 2006 will provide federal funding to award prizes to researchers who successfully develop groundbreaking new technology to start a road toward a hydrogen economy. However, it should be noted that the prize would not take away funds from any federal hydrogen programs, including the $1.7 billion hydrogen research program that President Bush first detailed in 2003, according to Inglis.

The Energy Department announced earlier this year that it would provide $119 million in funding for research into hydrogen fuel cells, including $100 million over the next four years to projects to improve components of fuel cell systems.

Prizes like this tend to get intelligent people who aren’t at universities or in national labs motivated, and sometimes contributions come out of unexpected places. Perhaps this will generate the kind of private-sector excitement that came with the X Prize.