Or government can tax what it does not like, to pick winners and make losers. In California the total tax for gas for instance is almost $0.68/gallon. In the mean time corn ethanol is being subsidized, much to the detriment of those who like to eat.
I'd like to take a moment also to thank you all that pay taxes for subsidizing, ahem funding tax credits, for my solar panels, thank you all for paying for my electricity.

Also in the 1930s there were already cars that would get around 60 miles per gallon of gasoline. So these cars did not need that many stations, and people were not wanting to drive a hybrid BMW with far less gas mileage just for the sake of acceleration.
Compressed natural gas is much better option than hydrogen, because it being the current source of hydrogen, is much more efficient burning it directly than losing a large percent of the energy in the extraction of hydrogen. As opposed to having roughly the same price per H2 vs gasoline, compressed natural gas is ~40% cheaper vs gasoline.

If hydrogen were to become a viable alternative (no breath holding here, no sir), the moment someone in industry made it so, the water vapor would be the new CO2.

Water vapor is a more potent greenhouse effect contributor than carbon dioxide.

This chicken vs the egg argument is so much scrambled eggs. The roads and refuel stations for the original cars were, I'm sure, few and far between.in outlying areas.
We have this new fantastic info resource, the internet. There's a website for the natgas refuel stations across the country. Hours, pricing. etc Users can even give a quality rating for specific stations.
New tech is never to be bad-mouthed. Even though this or that one falls by the wayside.
Place your bets, oops investments, now

Harry M

From 2011 press release:

"Researchers led by MIT professor Daniel Nocera have produced something they’re calling an “artificial leaf”: Like living leaves, the device can turn the energy of sunlight directly into a chemical fuel that can be stored and used later as an energy source.

The artificial leaf — a silicon solar cell with different catalytic materials bonded onto its two sides — needs no external wires or control circuits to operate. Simply placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, it quickly begins to generate streams of bubbles: oxygen bubbles from one side and hydrogen bubbles from the other. If placed in a container that has a barrier to separate the two sides, the two streams of bubbles can be collected and stored, and used later to deliver power: for example, by feeding them into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current.

The creation of the device is described in a paper published Sept. 30 in the journal Science. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and professor of chemistry at MIT, is the senior author; the paper was co-authored by his former student Steven Reece PhD ’07 (who now works at Sun Catalytix, a company started by Nocera to commercialize his solar-energy inventions), along with five other researchers from Sun Catalytix and MIT.

The device, Nocera explains, is made entirely of earth-abundant, inexpensive materials — mostly silicon, cobalt and nickel — and works in ordinary water. Other attempts to produce devices that could use sunlight to split water have relied on corrosive solutions or on relatively rare and expensive materials such as platinum.

The artificial leaf is a thin sheet of semiconducting silicon — the material most solar cells are made of — which turns the energy of sunlight into a flow of wireless electricity within the sheet. Bound onto the silicon is a layer of a cobalt-based catalyst, which releases oxygen, a material whose potential for generating fuel from sunlight was discovered by Nocera and his co-authors in 2008. The other side of the silicon sheet is coated with a layer of a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy, which releases hydrogen from the water molecules."

I have mused that the key to low cost reactions (chemical/physical) may lie in the production of a three dimensionally precise catalyst. This is how biology works, and it would seem that you could lower the reaction threshold that way.

Jan, wants H-car

Sort of. Look up fuel cells on Wikipedia.

If they were talking about high pressure storage, then likely the reason for the empty space on top is that they were using a metal hydride (solid) storage material similar to the old rechargeable (non-lithium) batteries. It is much safer than liquid or gas phase storage.

Yes, H2 does embrittle metals.

When it's converted to electricity in a hydrogen fuel cell... now go back 'upstream' and look at what it took to get it into the car's tank in the first place.

Ah, they were talking about high-pressure storage in the NPR video... not cryogenic or liquid H2...

Yes, H2 is a tiny molecule and treats lots of 'seals' as if they were window screens. And I seem to recall something about H2 embrittleing metals they seep into, too.

For the proponents of H2 from the Solar Cells on your roof, re-do the math. Some of the estimates from the linked sites imply that your rooftop solar electric could not possibly produce enough H2 for average driving consumption... unless you have an Al Gore-sized home roof. And it looks like they're not factoring in the COST of adding those PV cells to your roof... just assuming the power is 'free' because it comes from solar photons.

Unlike Obama's belief, somebody really had to mine, refine and ship the materials to the companies that MADE all those parts for your roof, and they don't seem to have infinite life expectancy, either. Anyone know of a company recycling 'old' PV arrays or even leasing them with options to replace them with higher-efficiency models as they're developed?

Anyone else ask these kinds of questions?
Cheers!

Trucked?! Piped! Much more efficient.

There will be several Gulches. One type of Gulch will be for people who are unsophisticated, angry the people mistreated them for it, looking to mistreat someone else, and looking for a philosophical objectivist fig leaf to put over that. That Gulch will be the minority. Most of them will people going out and solving problem.

It still requires a power plant to produce electricity to power the hydrogen mfg plant to create hydrogen from water to power cars. Where is the benefit? Why don't you just power cars directly with gasoline or diesel fuel?

I onl;y go by what I read. http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity...

I wouldn't take what California doing for something real it's a semi-fascist state with so many regulations I don't know how they could put in such an infrastructure. The Auto Co.'s could look on You Tube and find many ideas for economical engines that could burn gasoline at more completely. There is a limit to what can be done with the current design of the internal combustion engine. Retooling for some of the US companies could be very costly. You would need deep pocket entrepreneurs to produce a competitive alternate engine vehicle.

The most you should put into a tank is 85% because you need some space for the boiloff to go. Otherwise, you would have an unsafe condition. This would be true for any cryogenic liquid.

I have a storage question. About 25 years ago I read that owing to small size of H, the best that a tank could hold was 85%. That is, 15% escaped into the atmosphere. Has this been improved upon?

When some very big and rich corporation, or billionaire is willing to set up hydrogen fueling stations all across the country and further, is willing to lose money on them for the next 10 years or so, I will then believe wholeheartedly in the viability of hydrogen cars. Who knows? In the words of the incomparable Judy Tenuta, "It could happen."

It goes further than that. GM (when it was General Motors) was investing in a fueling station network that they were going to own, and piloting Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars in 2008 in two areas of the US. It was going well. Government Motors caned the project to focus on the electric car (the volt) instead.

One market was New York and the other was Southern California.

So first our government blocked private industry from building fueling stations and then is taking tax money to do it after they blocked it from happening with a US company.

That makes sense somehow, but I can not figure out how.

If the government would not have taken over GM we would have had them two years ago and have them in full production this fall from General Motor. however Government Motors thought it would be more effective to can the Hydrogen Fuel Cell program GM had pilots running in two areas on (ya way back when they took it over) and put all the R&D into the electric car.

Once again this shows just how stupid our federal government is when it comes to running or investing in a business.

More than likely when I replace my car next (at least 5 years out from that) I will be picking up a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car, which means a Hyundai or Honda. I had a Toyota once and that will never happen again.

OK, putting aside the fact that the Hindenburg was full of Hydrogen...lets look at a few comments in the article:
"So, in 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that provides $20 million a year to build at least 100 hydrogen refueling stations in California by 2024. " - That's roughly two million dollars of tax money per filling station...are these going to be private filling stations or ones that California owns? If they are private, what makes this any better than the gov't giving subsidies to oil companies that the Libs are always complaining about? Huh Libs?
"Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan relied on private investors to help build up to 100 hydrogen stations by 2010. But the plan failed." - So the free market would not support it? So we once again try to force the market to accept it using taxpayer funds...got it...

Californians deserve everything they have voted for over the years...just sayin'.