Quote:
Originally Posted by IamIan
The point I was making was that the 6:1 ratio of today you were looking at might becoming a narrower margin in the future ... and although the margin will be narrower ... Hydrogen will still be less energy efficient from source to load ...
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The real problem, though, is not the (in)efficiency of generating hydrogen, or the problems with fuel cells. It's that hydrogen is difficult to store and transport. You have to compress and/or liquefy it, which takes lots of energy plus heavy pressure vessels and/or vacuum-insulated containers - and even then, it leaks a lot. Then it's light, which means that hauling a useful quantity to a filling station takes IIRC something like 9 times as many truck trips...
I'm sorry (and I apologize for the unavoidable intrusion of politics), but the so-called "hydrogen economy" was never anything more than a Bush administration scam, misdirection to get people believing there'd be pie in the sky, bye and bye, instead of going to work on real energy & environmental problems.