Contributor

Peter Hoffmann

Author and former Washington and foreign correspondent, McGraw-Hill World News

Peter Hoffmann, a former Washington and foreign correspondent for a major business/technology news service, McGraw-Hill World News, has been writing about hydrogen energy since the first oil crisis of 1973. From the late '60s to the early '80s he was stationed in Bonn from where he also covered what was then communist Central Europe, eventually as
deputy bureau chief. In between he was bureau chief for four years (1970-74) in Milan, Italy. His articles on hydrogen energy have appeared
in Business Week, The Washington Post, the Friends of the Earth magazine Not Man Apart, Germany's GEO, Britain’s Financial Times European Energy Report, Italy's Ambiente, and McGraw-Hill's Chemical Engineering and Chemical Week. He contributed the "hydrogen" entry to the 1986 New Book of Knowledge, a Grolier encyclopedia for young people. Peter and Sarah Hoffmann - she is H&FCL’s production manager - translated a seminal hydrogen energy book, Hydrogen as an Energy Carrier (Carl-Jochen Winter, Joachim Nitsch, editors - Springer Verlag, 1988, New York, Berlin), as well as several other books from German to English. Peter’s 1981 book, The Forever Fuel - The Story of Hydrogen, published by Westview Press, was called, "the book on the subject" by Kirkus Review. An extensively updated and revised version, Tomorrow’s Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet (Foreword by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-IA), was published in September 2001 by MIT Press; a soft-cover version came out in 2002. The November/December 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine said in its review, "this book has everything the reader needs to know about hydrogen -- its discovery, the numerous attempts to use it as a fuel, its (quite good) safety record, and the practical and economic difficulties that must be overcome if hydrogen is to realize its potential as a nonpolluting, non-carbon-emitting fuel." A New Scientist review said, "it clearly expounds the key issues surrounding hydrogen energy." And Chemical & Engineering News commented, "Peter Hoffmann discusses hydrogen and fuel cells - a key technology that is driving forward a hydrogen economy - with clarity and a light touch." Translated versions have been published in Korea and Italy.