Actually, we have a gas shortage in the U.S. as well. That's why the major oil companies have been planning huge LNG vaporization facilities, so that gas can be imported to the U.S. from overseas.
This results largely from refusing to build nuclear or coal-fired power plants.
I was so sure I had read that during the hydrogen hype, that is when Bush jumped on it, to the euro-greens great surprise until that information was revealed, that the US was counting on its great sources of natural gas. That I always felt as much more viable solution than EU beurocrat way of creating the hydrogen with renevable energy.
First we do not have that renevable energy technology yeat, and with existing technologie there is to much land that needs to be spoiled, with dams, windmills and such things, plus it is in most cases uneconomical.
If we had those good sources of energy, we would not be in much trouble after all, as there would be lot of fossil fuels freed from beeing used to run our electrical grids, heat our homes and such.
Newsweek (I know they are sometimes to leftwinged) recently ran interesting articles about biofuels, where they pointed out increasing usage of it now during high oil costs, and how neccasery it is for the world´s energy prices, that special interests like farmers in the west could not take this market over with all the protections and subsidisions that would entail.
Creating biofuels out of all sorts of biomass, farm waists and specially grown harwests is in fact very efficient way of harnessing the energy of the sun, so we need to go down that road more. Weather that would make the hydrogen economy into a hype or just be a step into it, the future holds.