Hydrogen Fuel

Reason Magazine has an interesting article about the economic feasibility of hydrogen fuel. It gets a little technical in places, but you can follow along easily if you don't get too hung up on it.

The point of the article is to say that the production and other logistical considerations of using hydrogen as a fuel require so much energy (which is produced using conventional means, presumably) that it would actually do more harm to the environment than to simply obtain the same amount of energy from coal, oil, etc.

The author does seem to take for granted that hydrogen would be manufactured in a central location and then transported to distribution points, a schema which, as I understand it, has already been replaced by the notion of producing the hydrogen at the distribution points themselves, thus saving all of the energy needed to store and transport. Even with this, though, the article stills maintains that the simple manufacturing of the hydrogen would be less efficient, even without any transportation and storage considerations.

Like I said, worth the read.