In article , Doug Carter wrote:
Neither crude oil nor natural gas have to be involved at
all. Solar panels or nucler reactors can supply the
energy to crack water directly.

And there's the rub - nuclear reactors, which the sheeple are so afraid
of! You can have the best, safest nuclear reactor design, that's
demonstrably less harmful by orders of magnitude than a coal-fired power
station, yet it'll never get built because people are too afraid. They
all think Chernobyl, when Chernobyl was really a product of abysmal
design. Or go on about Three Mile Island, despite not a single person
being injured in the TMI accident (thanks to reactor design that wasn't
anything remotely as atrocious as the Soviet ones).

Fuel cells are undoubtedly better than the ICE (for the reasons you
state, and you can realistically use regenerative braking in a vehicle
to get some of the energy back instead of dumping it as heat).
Additionally, the fuel cell is essentially an "abstraction layer" - once
you have your transport network powered by fuel cells, and, say, we
figure out nuclear fusion, you don't have to change everyone's cars -
you just make the H2 with your new energy source. But the rub is even
fusion contains that scary "N" word.

As for solar power, photovoltaic cells are still pretty inefficient, and
are a long way from being a viable way to get the hydrogen.

So the rub with the hydrogen economy that at least in the forseeable
future, it's just the oil economy in disguise. Hopefully what it will do
is allow us to diversify our energy sources...but we're still a long way
off from that.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"