The very fast progress in many technologies for the economic and efficient production and use of hydrogen should lead those who opposed it to reconsider, if their purported grounds for the opposition were in fact the underlying cause.

Here is betting that very few of those so opposed will modify their position at all.

Hi EP:
As always I was not really thinking of you in my strictures against opponents of hydrogen and fuel cells, as I in any case just like you would much prefer if we just got on with it and built nuclear which would most efficiently power BEVs.

But they ain't, and the only way I can see of squaring the circle of low carbon without is to use a heck of a lot of hydrogen and its derivatives.

As for the points you raise:

Lower the production cost of fuel cell cars - already happening, and fast.
The Mirai etc are only small trial runs.

Enough hydrogen in the car for decent autonomy - the present generation carries enough for around 265 miles or so.
It is a lot easier on bigger cars to carry more hydrogen, but Toyota have already hit the DOE target of hydrogen by weight for 2020, and further progress giving around another 20% seems perfectly possible.
It is early days, but once the technology is more established either on board reforming or high temperature cells using a variety of fuels may become possible.

Solve the production cost of hydrogen - we are doing pretty good, as this article and umpteen others on this blog show for a variety of technologies.

Build the fuelling infrastructure - it is happening, when opponents said it wouldn't.
Here is Germany:
http://cleanenergypartnership.de/fileadmin/Assets/user_upload/50_TS.pdf
That gives them sketchy coverage of the whole country.

Hope competitive technologies don't improve - eg hybrid cars

FCEVs work just fine as a plug in hybrid, as Audi intend.

The reason that they are not building PHEV FCEVs at the moment is that you build the simplest design first and that tells us nothing about what configuration will be preferred later.

It is odd that those who are keen on getting off petrol suddenly get sentimental about it and want to go for PHEV ICE instead of fuel cells if they can't have their preference of nothing but batteries.

A fuel cell combines far better than an ICE with batteries.
And it still produces zero pollution at point of use and uses no oil, which were supposed to be the two great advantages of electrification.

If hydrogen is very cheap, and there seem to be several ways this might happen, then they won't bother much with plug ins.

If hydrogen is more expensive, than a plug in knocks out the already dubious proposition that they would be too expensive to fuel.

With anything like current batteries BEVs with really decent range won't be winning on cost any time in the forseeable future.

If we are in the business of predicting the future, over the same kind of time we have the DOE predicting $30kw fuel cells, without the breakthroughs needed for much higher density batteries.

The stuff about how unaffordable building hydrogen stations are is simply nonsense.

The same folk were confidently saying that the roll out we have already seen would not happen.

In Europe we already have 3 systems in use, petrol and diesel universal, and NG which is also a high pressure gas and uses much of the same equipment as hydrogen in extensive supply, with for instance 900 stations in Germany alone.

The German's put the cost of rolling out hydrogen stations at around the same level as the NG stations.

So those with the most experience of alternative fuelling infrastructures see the problem as perfectly manageable.

CNG has roughly 3x the energy density of H2 at the same pressure, and much better than that as liquid.

I'm agnostic on the issue of hydrogen per se.  You can get 17 wt% storage by using ammonia; the sodium-amide process converts it to gases at a small energy cost.  Burn it in an engine until the FC makes it, fine; $30/kW has been a fait accompli for years.  What gets me is the upstream end, where un-sequestered NG and even gasified coal will have a large cost advantage over anything electrolytic.  That is what we have to get rid of, preferably by eliminating its market.  HFCs don't do that.

@ECI
"I'm not sentimental about fossil fuels in the least, but recognize that a PHEV that could deliver 80% of its lifetime service as an electric would achieve almost 80% of the cost and environmental savings of a BEV and be universally appealing no matter what the state of your local EV charging infrastructure."

Very nicely put - you can size a PHEV battery for your average drive rather than the longest you would undertake.
Thus, you can get away with 5,10,15 KwH rather than 25kwh as a starting bid.

However, you do need two engines and this increases the cost and complexity.
What is needed is a good range extender generator (not like the one in the BMW I3). [You could run it off CNG if you liked, but diesel or gasoline would do fine. ]

Good point.  Gold is about 1/3 as abundant as Pt, so unless the alloy nanoparticles are far more economical with it then this is pretty much a nothingburger.

@EP, @Peterww, from the same wikipedia link EP posted, the world produces 2700 tons of gold / year and 179 tons of platinum.
From this measure, gold is about 15 times more available than Pt.

Invent a way to produce hydrogen for free and make gasoline with it at a better cost than actual petroleum gasoline.

@Peterww,
Good point about the high cost of Gold, but the gist of this article is: "... They were nearly as active as the commercial Pt catalyst but with much enhanced durability.
This would mean perhaps reduction in operation cost of electrolyzers due to longer intervals between maintenance or replacement.

All the golds in Fort Knox are sitting there, doing nothing. Now there is a way for uncle Sam to actually do something productive with all that gold, an investment that keeps on giving us stored Renewable Energy for home use, industry, transportation...until the end of time!

Compressed hydrogen holds about 10% as much energy as gasoline per volume.

Wiki says that fuel cells run about 40% efficient with Honda claiming a 60% efficient fuel cell. ICEs run about 20%. (Rough numbers here.)

With 40% efficiency a FCEV would be about twice as efficient as a ICEV. With 60% efficiency the FCEV would be about three times as efficient. Either way that means that a lot more hdrogen volume is going to have to be moved and stored compared to gas/diesel. As much as five times more.

That means a lot more space to store H2 compared to the underground tanks now used for gasoline. And it means as much as five times more railroad tankers and fuel trucks to move the volume.

AmIright?

Furthermore with a 300 mile range as opposed to a 400 to 500 mile range for ICEVs we'd need more fueling stations. At 300 vs. 400 we'd need to increase the number of pumps by 25% over what we now use.

Starting with a 10x disadvantage wouldn't that mean it would take

PHEVs using fuel cells would work, but they may lose out based on cost.

With a 1/3rd as large battery pack the battery pack is going to get heavy use and will need to be replaced 3x or more compared to the larger EV pack. Most days the EV pack will be mildly discharged while the PHEV pack will endure a deep discharge.

The fuel cell and tanks may well cost more than extra batteries.

And H2 for the longer trips will certainly be more expensive than charging up once or twice.

The extra/surplus electricity can as easily be used to charge EV batteries and would turn into 2x to 3x more miles driven.

The only hope I can see for fuel cell cars is for fuel cells to get very cheap, very fast and for someone to figure out how to make the cost of H2 per mile the same or less than electricity. That's a double difficult task.