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.
I am not familiar with the quote from Bush which you mention concerning natural gas supplies in the U.S. I do know that several of the major oil companies in the U.S. have been planning huge LNG vaporization facilities on the Gulf Coast and on the Southern California Coast.
My understanding is that there is a projected shortage of natural gas in the U.S. because it is now the preferred fuel for power plants.
Recently, there have been quite a few articles published in favor of building nuclear power plants in the U.S. The use of biomass and renewable energy sources cannot supply enough energy to feed all of the industrial and transportation consumers in the U.S. With world demand for oil going up rapidly, while supply has hit its peak, something has to give.
Here is another thread which might be of interest to you. Note especially some of the replies by Freepers on that thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1496923/posts