By 2011, Kelly hopes to be turning 750,000 tons of hazardous waste a year into hydrogen for use as an alternate energy source to fossil fuels.

And that's just at one facility. If everything goes as planned, he expects to open many more processing plants between now and then.

Ultimately, he sees drivers worldwide pulling off the road in their hydrogen-powered cars into refueling stations, where they will fill up on hydrogen created and distributed by ForeverGreen Enterprises.

"Most of us view this as an opportunity to have a true and lasting impact," he said recently of the 22 employees of his three-year-old company.

"Can we be the catalyst for change?" Kelly asked rhetorically. "Yes we can. Yes we are. Yes we will."

One person Kelly won't have to convince is President Bush, who singled out hydrogen as an alternative energy source in his 2003 State of the Union address and subsequently committed $1.2 billion toward research.

Kelly, 49, of Tinton Falls, believes he has an innovative solution for lowering production costs -- generating hydrogen from hazardous materials which the companies that produce the waste will pay ForeverGreen to dispose of for them.

Kelly retired from his job as a Wall Street executive 10 years ago to spend more time with his family. He spent the next several years mulling his next career move.

He co-founded ForeverGreen in 2002 with Randy Cole, a former colleague on Wall Street with a background in technology.

Producing an environmentally safe, alternative form of energy was a concept that evolved over time, he said, but whose origins could be traced to the oil embargo and subsequent gasoline shortage of the mid-1970s.

Kelly said the memory of waiting in long lines to purchase gas never left him, and the fear that it could -- and probably would -- happen again promptted him to begin looking at alternative fuel sources. But over time, he grew disappointed with the pace of technology.

"We need new energy. We're running out of oil," he said.

Already in the works for ForeverGreen is a $100 million hydrogen processing plant on 35 acres in rural DeKalb County, Ind. Groundbreaking should occur later this winter and the plant should be up and running by the end of the year, according to Kelly.

The closely held company has so far generated no revenues and is actively seeking investors.

Using a process called progressive molecular dissociation, ForeverGreen's production plants will break down all manner of hazardous waste into its most basic elements to extract hydrogen.

ForeverGreen calls the final product Green Hydrogen because the gas will be created from hazardous materials in such a way that the remnants will no longer be pollutants.

Hydrogen gas is currently used in a number of industrial processes, including refining gasoline and the manufacture of steel, fertilizer and detergents.

But the future, according to Kelly, lies in so-called fuel-cell applications in which hydrogen is used to create power that could one day serve as an alternative to oil and its refined by-product gasoline.

"Our real goal is to create hydrogen transportation corridors," said Kelly.

In other words, he wants to build hydrogen pipelines from ForeverGreen's production plants to fueling stations across the country that will one day serve the hydrogen-powered cars he believes are in America's not-too-distant future.

He makes a convincing argument.

According to Kelly, the fuel-cell engine powered by hydrogen is about three times as efficient as the internal combustion engine, the long-standing method of powering cars.

Consequently, if a car can travel 20 miles on $3 worth of gas, the same car could travel 60 miles on $3 worth of hydrogen.

Kelly was quick to note that there is a limited amount of the oil used to make gasoline, while hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.

"It's a question of how to go about unlocking that hydrogen to use it," he said.

Kelly thinks he has the answer.