Quote:
Originally Posted by greg_the_great  I have offered something. Reactors that produce hydrogen which in turn produces no footprint from vehicles driven. |
I'm not convinced of the efficacy of a hydrogen economy. There's only two methods available to us to produce hydrogen, since you can't just pump it out of the ground - from fossil fuels (which defeats the point of using it as an alternative fuel source) and from electrolysis, which requires electricity to be consumed to create the hydrogen. So unless you're creating electricity by means of something other than coal, nuclear or hydroelectric, all you're doing is inefficiently transporting one form of energy to another.
Everything is dicey after that - there's transport, storage, and liquefaction or storage of hydrogen, because you can't just pour it in a barrel, and it's way too light to waste transport without compressing it.
Effectively, all hydrogen is, is a means of storing energy. We don't mine it, pump it, grow it or collect it - we create it via other means. So if those other means are nuclear, solar, fossil fuels etc. it's useless as a replacement for those sources.