A South Carolina physicist writes about the very questionable future for hydrogen power:
Some fuel cell advocates continue to say that fuel cells are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, but the facts are otherwise.
The recent study by the National Academy of Sciences shows that proton exchange membrane fuel cells (the type that are light enough to be considered for use in transportation) achieve efficiency of 30 percent to 38 percent, and the typical efficiency of production units 10 years from now, after a few hundred hours of use, is unlikely to exceed 39 percent. Large diesel engines, on the other hand, currently achieve peak efficiencies above 52 percent, and they will probably achieve efficiencies above 56 percent a decade from now.
Even with today's high fuel prices, unsubsidized hydrogen gas for the small industrial user is still 30 times more expensive per unit of energy than gasoline. For the past decade, the fuel cell advocates have been saying the price of hydrogen will plummet within a few years, but instead it keeps going up.
He goes on to say biofuels are more likely to solve many of our energy problems in the future, with renewable energy being a prime growth area of our economy in the coming decades.
We could add another high growth area, that being the boom in all sorts of energy devices with the word "hydrogen" prominently sprinkled throughout the sales literature, whether or not there is any hydrogen involved in any meaningful way.
