When I took Thermodynamics from an actual ex-NASA scientist in college, hydrogen cars was one of the crackpot examples we explored. He loved working us through every possible idiot idea, wherein we not only looked at the science (windmills, for example) but calculated all the costs. (Did you know windmills kill amazing amounts of birds?) Nothing, and I mean nothing, came close to the efficiencies and low costs of what we already have. As I recall, one of the drawbacks of hydrogen was that a huge, heavy tank was required to get the same amount of energy you would get from 20 gallons of regular gas. There were other issues as well. As someone pointed out, hydrogen can leak past almost everything you would use to seal it. Also, imagine a wreck where there’s a significant leak and you’d have one heck of a blowtorch. High pressure hydrogen would be more dangerous than gasoline.
The central planning committee of the politburo put forth this idea?
Actually, if you just look at the energy content of material, Hydrogen is actually pretty lousy energy source.
If you look at the energy content of the Hydrogen by mass, it is pretty good, but only because Hydrogen is very light.
If you look at the molar energy content (basically content of the molecule of a substance), Hydrogen is quite lousy.
The current global warming idiots do not understand that. They are looking on the energy content of an unit of mass e.g. (J/kg).
But, scientifically, you should look at energy content of a molar mass M (J x mol/kg).
In this case Hydrogen is very lousy energy source.