Feasible engineering doesn’t mean it actually delivers what the global warming hoaxters claim. What they claim is just a bundle of lies.
Electricity has to be generated for a natural gas-to-hydrogen reformer to operate.
Fuel has to be burned in trucks to deliver the huge tanks needed to transport hydrogen.
Los Angeles could cover itself with photovoltaic arrays and take itself off the grid; it could require all vehicles run directly on electricity (batteries, or overhead lines for trolleys) or hydrogen, and use the photovoltaics to produce the hydrogen as a storage system to bridge the period of the day (known as “night”) when the cells weren’t doing anything but electricity was still being used; and of course, electricity would be needed to run the desalination of seawater that they are geographically advantaged to access.
And the wealthy showbiz jackasses in the Los Angeles basin could pay for it themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it. For the first time in their miserable lives they’d actually acquire some moral high ground — on that one issue. The rest of the country which paid for the huge water projects could then cut them off from both the hydroelectricity supply and water pumped from the reservoirs to their canals.
The only benevolent work that needs to be done on desalination is R&D and likely not even that because all the pieces for dirt cheap abundant desalinized water are already being worked on. Desalination costs are roughly 1/3 energy 1/3 capital costs and 1/3 maintenance.
On energy the 4th generation portable nuclear plants using thorium or waste nuclear fuel promise to drop energy costs by 1/2 or better in volume. In the USA the companies working on that are Flibe, Terrapower, Transatomic and a new entry which looks impressive based on their staff called—Martingale. There’s also a canadian company which the DOE has seen fit to support —over american companies—called Terrestrial. There http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-power-turns-to-salt/
These systems are all +-5 years to pilot and 10 years to production. (this is going to happen unlike fusion which is always 20 years away. )
On maintenance/energy “Engineers at Lockheed-Martin recently developed and patented a molecular filtration membrane called Perforene which can desalinate seawater using only 1/100th the energy of the best existing desalination systems.”
http://www.greenprophet.com/2014/12/graphene-nanotechnology-makes-desalination-100-times-more-efficient/
engineers still need to figure out how to produce graphene to spec on industrial scales. but I’ve seen regular improvements there. I think that’s five years away or less. There are companies around who already say they can do it. but conservatively speaking it will likely be five years before the kinks are got out of production to spec for desalination membranes.
Likely 3d printing will collapse capital costs in desalination plants. As well as newer/better/faster maintenance free materials are coming out all the time because of the ongoing revolution in materials research which will lower the cost of maintenance because salt is very corrosive.
One thing that has not had much attention paid to is finding ways to turn Na and Cl into useful industrial products. Though there are several companies that currently do so. Few desalination plants actually do this. Rather they dilute the brine and send back out to sea. This causes problems with the environmentalists.
I don’t buy into manmade global warming, at all.
In fact, I would have especially welcomed a little warming last month.
I just mentioned Los Angeles and Mexico City, because those cities are notorious for having smog and bad air quality, due to their geography and climate - air masses frequently sit in place for an extended period, like water in a bowl, so local pollution can build up until it makes folks eyes burn. Most other cities are naturally better ventilated.
Air quality is better now in LA than it used to be, but auto exhaust is still their number one air pollution source. Burning hydrogen in the city instead of gasoline and diesel would improve local air quality, and total carbon output be damned. Hydrogen could be produced up the the coast, over the border in Mexico, or even offshore.
California requires automakers to meet tighter fuel efficiency and pollution than the rest of the country, and they closely monitor local air quality, especially in LA. But they don’t enforce total carbon output or overall energy efficiency. So their system would be fine with wasting money or energy elsewhere, to improve what they do measure.
Hydrogen is suitable for niches like that. As the technology improves, there could be a good business case to use it in other niches, or even for widespread adoption at some point.
There are no hard showstoppers - many hydrogen cars are driving around today. They are just not the best value for regular car owners at this point.