This is an article about the fuel cells intended to be used in biomass digestion and it is being studied in Wisconsin...
This article should be subtitled "How cowpies will save the US". The entire energy requirement for the process is contained in the manure fuel, there is no added energy.
The plan is to put these digesters on farms not necessarily a big single processing facility. This has a number of important effects.
We are able to recover energy from a fuel that is normally wasted, making us less dependent on foreign oil.
Each farmer now has another product to sell, electricity, making them less dependent on subsidies and other programs.
The fact that millions of farms are tougher to knock out than a couple of nuke plants makes our energy supply more stable from a strategic perspective.
The environmental regulations and the pressures they cause to domestic agriculture production become a moot point as the solid waste is sterile and the liquid discharge exceeds drinking water standards. There are minimal greenhouse gasses escaping from a farm with this technology. This adds up to a major blow to the power of greenies and their ilk.
Since the entirety of the solid waste can now be used as fertilizer, which farmers in many areas cannot due to environmental regs, some farmers will not need to use petroleum based fertilizers making our foreign dependence less and increasing the economic viability of farms which also lessens their dependence on agri-welfare.
These are just a few reasons off of the top of my head. There are a number of other reasons to support this kind of technology and it needs to be pursued vigorously and immediately.
It takes more energy to run a fuel cell than you can get out of it. It is impossible to defy the laws of physics.
They could play a role in reducing the need to burn hydrocarbons for transportation. But that's only if you don't burn hydrocarbons in order to create the hydrogen. If you use hydrocarbons to create the hydrogen to replace the gasoline, you'll actually use more hydrocarbons than if you used gasoline in the first place. That's a fact. It's not opinion.
If you use something else as the initial fuel source to create the hydrogen, then you'll obviously conserve hydrocarbons. You suggest cow poop. Another Freeper suggested wave action. Another mentioned solar power.
All that is fine. Combined, they might be able to deliver the energy equivalent to a few dozen gas stations. Let's even imagine hundreds. There is no way on God's Green Earth that they could create enough hydrogen to power even a small fraction of our automobiles in this country. Pound for pound, there is nothing that releases as much energy as oil. Except one.
Uranium.
Something the USA has tons of.
Mark my words. I'll probably be dead before this happens, but by the middle of this century, this nation will have gone through the gut-wrenching debate on whether to shift to a primarily nuclear-powered source of national energy. This nation will have to choose whether it wishes to increase the supply of energy in order to continue to grow, or whether to plunge into a never-ending depression because of the imagined fears of nuclear power. The era of hydrocarbons isn't over, and probably won't be for at least another 100 years, but it simply can't keep up with the rise in global population and the emergence of economies in places like China and India.
Cow poop isn't going to fill the gap.
One paper published online proposes that the thermal gradient could be used for energy generation, H2 producton and liquefaction for storage. see link