It doesn’t take any electricity to produce hydrogen if you produce it photochemically. There are other options as well such as breaking down the oxygen in water to release the hydrogen. If hydrogen production is the only barrier to fuel cell vehicle adoption, and it
pretty much is at this point, that barrier will come down soon.

Government motors is the mouthpiece for Obama’s 1 million EREVs.
To hell with one million EREVs. Give me a fuel cell car now or make
them affordable by 2015 and mass produce them. Displace a significant portion of the vehicles that use 30% of the imported OIL.
That will take GM and the other auto manufacturers selling millions
of fuel cell cars.

There should be an Apollo like program to get to a hydrogen economy if carbon dioxide emissions are as harmful to the environment as scientists believe they are. Only by using a fuel
cell, not a large battery, can an electric car that produces zero emissions travel 500 miles on a single fill. Toyota has the best
fuel cell vehicle in the world and it’s an SUV to boot.

Compressed hydrogen tanks are safe, but they are not
the best option for storing hydrogen both safely and
compactly. Liquid hydrogen is currently the best popular
method of storing hydrogen on a vehicle. There’s no need
to go the compressed gas or liquid hydrogen route though
when you can create a slurry that has the consistency of
Latex paint and characteristics that allow it to be pumped
through cheap iron pipes at standard temperature and
pressure. This slurry outputs twice the hydrogen of liquid hydrogen for the same space.

Fuel Cell vehicles like the Toyota FCHV SUV can go 500
miles on 10k PSI hydrogen now. Liquid hydrogen stores
tighter than 10k PSI compressed gas and slurry is 2x
better than liquid hydrogen for gas produced. You only
need a fuel tank that is 20% larger than the typical gasoline
tank to fuel a fuel cell car for the distances a gasoline car
can go if you use slurry as a hydrogen source.

There are technologies available to allow hydrogen to go
through a pipeline as a gas. A pipeline that can carry h2
gas costs $500k a mile. The advantage of an H2 gas
pipeline is that it can be hidden underground. It is much
easier to bury a pipeline than it is to site an electrical line
that is a serious eyesore. The other advantage of building
a H2 gas pipeline infrastructure is that you can upgrade
the natural gas pipeline network at the same time.
Natural Gas and hydrogen mixed together in the right
concentration will go through traditional pipelines.

Fuel cells are the only way to end dependence on foreign
oil. Batteries are not a solution, especially if you depend
on Lithium that comes from Peru and China. Bush
supported fuel cells because he knows that hybrids
and flex fuel cars are only going to slow consumption
of foreign oil. There simply isn’t enough farmland even
if you use algae to produce biofuels in the quantities
necessary to replace gasoline and diesel.

The problem with EV zealots is that they ignore the range
problem. There is no battery that can power an electric
vehicle for 300 miles that is both small enough and light
enough to be installed in a standard sized vehicle. Even
hydrogen takes up less space and adds less weight
than the best comparable battery. The other thing EV
zealots ignore is the fact that Lithium is not a U.S.
commodity. We simply don’t have any Lithium reserves.

There is plenty of Magnesium available. Magnesium hydride
slurry is a transport medium for hydrogen that will work with
the current gasoline/diesel infrastructure with very little
modification. If waste is used as a source of hydrogen,
methane gas from horse manure, the problem of expensive
electrolysis goes away. The methane from horse manure
will end up in the atmosphere anyways if you don’t do
something with it unlike oil pumped out of the ground or coal
mined out of a mountain.

Converting to a hydrogen infrastructure wouldn’t mark the
beginning of using hydrogen as an industrial gas, it would
merely mean that more has to be produced and used.
Hydrogen is used to produce gasoline now, in a hydrogen
economy we would simply use the hydrogen directly and
skip producing gasoline.

Bob actually sees 300 mile (on battery) range Volt before hydrogen fuel cells are even remotely viable.