[DrDavid]

Where is the energy to make hydrogen going to come from? Burning oil, coal, natural gas or nuclear?

[snooker]

I am going to go out to the hydrogen filling station and get a tank full and try it out.

Oooops -- I just checked the nearest hydrogen fueling station is in CA, that's about 3,000 miles from where I live. Oh well maybe they will build one nearby, say within 500 miles, next.

It's the infrastructure. Until the money is put into distribution and filling stations, not gonna be very popular. Then you have to look into the cost to produce the stuff. What are you going to use to extract the hydrogen with, coal? I bet that will be efficient and clean as well.

It's not as simple as it sounds. A hydrogen economy won't be built in our lifetimes.

As a simple aside, today we could get a lot more of our electrical energy from nuclear power. Clean, almost no global warming gasses, cheap. When are we going to start converting over to this form of energy, like France has done.

[Boiler Plate]

You've hit the nail on the head. The biggest problem with hydrogen is that it requires a triple conversion process. Oil, nuke or coal to electricity; electricity to hydrogen and hydrogen to locomotion. Each of these is at best only 2/3 efficient. So for every 8 kWH of power to the wheels you have to burn 27 kWH of energy at a power plant.

[taxed2death]

EEEEGGGGSSSAAACCCTTTLLLYYYY!

Bravo! Give this man 1,000,000.00 dollars!

hmmm, anyone see a "hydrogen tree" around where we can pick hydrogen berries from?

Oh, WAIT, what dummies we are? We should have been drilling for HYDROGEN these last 100 years!!!
NNNOOOOTTTTTT


All these dopers keep forgetting we have to either extract or manufacture hydrogen in some way, shape or form....
ok,
NNEEEXXXTTTT!!!!!!

[layman]

The energy to make hydrogen can be solar. It is clean, free, inexhaustable, and is readily available in the US Southwest.

[kanawa]

Where is the energy to make hydrogen going to come from? Burning oil, coal, natural gas or nuclear?

---

We are sitting on an incredible source of heat.

"99% of the earth mass is hotter than 1'000°C and less than 1% is cooler than 100°C."

Geothermal Energy Facts

Schematic of the Flash Steam Power Plant

Interesting Facts about Geothermal Power

• More than 2900 megawatts produced from geothermal power in the US
• Current geothermal production is the equivalent of 60 million barrels of oil a year.
• Geothermal plants are on line 97% of the time compared to 65% for Nuclear plants and 75% for coal plants.
• Geothermal production saves the emissions of 200 thousands tons of sulfur dioxide, 22 tons of Carbon Dioxide, and 80,000 tons of nitrogen oxides compared to a coal generating plant.

Work is progressing on Hot Dry Rock (HDR) technology.

"...there are huge land areas under which the rock temperature exceeds 200°C at depths less than 5 km. But, in general the permeability of these formations is low, so that engineering and new technology will be necessary to generate energy production economically."

If we can figure that out then it's kma to the Middle East and OPECkers; and hello to an hydrogen economy.