What a F@&^ing joke this study is!

I'm sure that a comparison of the electric vs. hydrogen sources used in the study will yield much derisive laughter.

A real April Fool's joke.

OK ... If this is an April Fuels joke, you just got me! ROFL.

If it was tomorrow, I would dignify that study with a response.

Oops, wait a minute, I already have....

Impressive, how they are capable of predicting the evolution of the different technologies by 2100.
Predicting 10 years ahead would already be spectacular, but they do even better.

Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick!! When the president of H2Gen Innovations, Inc. sez the world needs Fool-Cells could you possibly doubt his veracity.

Apparently he can see 100 years into the future; that's a good trick. This is generally laughable marketing material, good for April 1st reading.

All you have to read is that part that says "according to a paper presented at the National Hydrogen Association’s Annual Meeting..." I wonder if there were any papers presented at that meeting arguing that hydrogen fuel in the transportation industry is a dead end technology.

Green Car Congress should be more selective in reviewing before publishing on their website some studies. This one is clearly not serious, cheap the infrastructure for H2 ? recently SAN JOSE reported that their pilot experiment of H2 bus cost 50 times than a diesel bus. In all the study not a word on where the H2 is coming from, not mentionning the desastreaous well to wheel efficiency of H2. California reported recently that most of H2 approachs are essentialy GHG positive compared to Gazoline, far from this rosy piece of desinformation

Nah, Green Car Congress IS selective : remember today is the 1st of April...

Somebody knows how much hydrogen TODAY is needed to produce 1 liter of gasoline from the today poor oil quality?

Interesting approach to feathering your own nest, justifying H2 when there's all that solar energy just going to waste every day and just waiting for utilization to turn it into electricity to charge batteries.

The sad part of all this is "the great unwashed" will believe it if you keep harping at them about how great H2 will be. I think the idea behind selling this red herring is to repeat the same idea over and over again until people acually believing it over time.

As we who read GCC know, there are still too many problems to solve trying to bring H2 to market: manufacturing the gas is way too expense because of the amount of energy that is needed to break the strong atomic bonding, there is no inexpensive, safe way to store the gas in an automobile, and the devices, such as fuel cells and ICEs are very ineffecient in extracting power from the gas.

The problem we have as advocates of plug in electric cars is getting the correct information about H2 to our fellow world citizens and politicians so they can make informed decisions.

I particularly like the assumption that core ICE drivetrain efficiency will not improve over the next 100 years, even though car makers are tripping over themselves to pick low-hanging fruit and reporting gains left right and center.

Combine those with biofuels - not corn ethanol, something sustainably - and aggressive hybridization and you achieve almost the same gain with far less risk.

Note that the study assumes that CCS will become not only technically but also economically feasible and mandatory. It implies that H2 production will not create any CO2 emissions, i.e. that it is wholly based on either renewable or nuclear energy.

Plug-in hybrids and BEV are more efficient and they can be made today. They should get incentives and attention now.

But the risk area for electric cars is the cost of and scaleability of energy storage. Maybe improvements and reductions in cost of batteries and hyper capacitors will make the issue on onboard energy storage moot but its also possible that fuel cell advances will drop the cost of that technology to make it sufficiently competitive. Clearly hydrogen will never be as efficient as ready electrons but it might have a role to play if we get to the point that renewables produce surplus energy. Remember that gas power did not win on efficiency either, it was cost, concentration of power and convenience.

I don't think the applicability of fuel cells at any point in the future should be a religious question the way it is for some BEV advocates. Should plug-ins and BEV wait while some research FC? Of course not. Is H2 research and FC a total waste? No we can't say that today either. The answer will only come when we see the developments in energy storage and fuel cells that has not happened yet. The economics of production and the costs and benefits of any potential product will decide the fake of either technology.

@Treehugger

To be fair, I pointed GCC at this report and I knew it would generate some interesting feedback. GCC has to reflect what is out there even if it is self-serving guff. We all then get a chance to review and discuss the various merits (if any!) and angles.

I kind of like the idea of fuel cells. Maybe back when cars first came out, there were people that said that cars were unnecessary and would not work.

Some may say that they will never work or never be practical. I am not convinced of that.

"The sad part of all this is "the great unwashed" will believe it if you keep harping at them about how great H2 will be."

Applicable to all manner of claims.

The part they leave out is Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVS).

They archive the same or greater as the fuel cells without all of that pesky hydrogen. They have been proven with 10 year old technology. Big corps don't like the fact that you don't need to go to them for the fuel source.

Sure fuel cell's will advance but so well BEV's. BEVS are producible now.

Thomas

I admit that my comment was a bit harsh and this report has been published anyway. Also I think we should make a distinction betwen H2 economy and Fuel cell powered vehicles which can use reformed ethanol. I personally don't believe in a H2 infrastructure, but Fuel cell using reformed ethanol could be a more realistic approach, but in that case the gain in efficiency as well as GHG emission might not be that fantastic compared to PHEV using advanced ICE (HCCI or diesel free piston for example)engine.

Granted, this report is obviously biased, but I don't believe that it is out of the realm of possibility that hydrogen will play a role in being a long term solution to our oil addiction.
All of this arguing over BEV's and FCV's and which vehicle will control the market is unwarranted. In my opinion, the car of the future will be a plug in with a fuel cell, that would be the power source that recharges the batteries when needed. Chevy introduced a fuel cell version of the Volt in China last year. Let's face it, batteries aren't perfect either. A combined powertrain that takes the best qualities from both batteries and fuel cells would be the ultimate vehicle. Cellulosic ethanol prodcution could be easily retrofited to manufacture hydrogen if the ethanol was made from gasification that chemically or biologically converted the syngas.

This gentleman is very pessimistic. He doesn't think that any method will reduce CO2 to 1990 levels until mid century at best, and then only FCEVs with all the waste electricity or hydrocarbons manipulated in accounting to not be counted to reduce accountable driving CO2 to 80% BELOW 1990 Levels.

Drivel.

PHEVs can achieve a market penetration of 50% by 2015, and is not an not unreasonable assumption. Then half the installed LDV fleet will be PHEV or HEV by 2020. CO2 emission would decline to to 60% of present emissions because oil demand would drop to 60% of today's consumption by that date.

The new Nukes coming online by then will chop the coal burners by 20% and cut CO2 by about 15% overall.

So we will below 1990 Kyoto targets and approaching 1970 levels of CO2 output. Problem solved.

But I have a question for all you concerned people. Suppose a country like, say the Netherlands, tried hard and met the Kyoto targets with windmills and lots of mass transit. Should they have to do more in the next post Kyoto treaty because some other slackers did not do their share?

Or would their reward for all the hard work, merely be even more draconian cuts placed and targeted on them?

It's a question that needs answering since I believe a couple of countries, like Netherlands, will actually meet and then exceed their Kyoto targets. Can they just declare victory and keep on keeping on.

I'd like your opinions.

@ Thomas:

"I pointed GCC at this report"

OK, it's April 2nd now, so please come clean with us all. There is no way on earth this is a real report, even the H2 fanatics can't be this deranged - SURELY!?!?

National Hydrogen Association glib disinformation?

April fools joke?

Since when are plug in battery electric cars a worse choice than hydrogen fuel cell ones? Since never.

We need an infrastructure for plug in electrics that are available today, not glib promises of hydrogen for tomorrow.

@Clett et al.

If it was an April Fools prank, it was not by me. I found an uncritical report on Energy Daily (see http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Fuel_Cell_Vehicles_Are_The_Best_Pathway_To_Environmental_And_Energy_Security_999.html)
I thought that it should not go unchallenged given the inefficiency of storing electricity as hydrogen, H2 storage issues, lack of infrastructure etc. I reckoned that GCC would provide a somewhat less credulous forum and, from your comments, I was not mistaken!