Re: Hydrogen
As a useful energy storage medium for mobile use, Hydrogen is about the worst you could come up with apart from unicorn farts. It's rubbish, really really REALLY rubbish as a mobile fuel.
It's expensive (in energy) to get to a form that's vaguely usable - needing either compression to silly level, and/or cooling to silly cold temperatures to liquify it. Whatever you put it into will leak it out, so after a couple fo weeks parked up you'll be stuck with an empty tank !
But the energy density is rubbish. Really really rubbish - as in you need a large and hevy high pressure vessel to hold a small amount of fuel/energy.
And it's not really practical to have a dual-fuel vehicle, so if you go hydrogen then you can only use hydrogen filling stations which are much fewer in number than lecky charge points.
And there is really zero compatibility with any of our existing fuel storage, distribution, and retail infrastructure.
However, if you do have abundant hydrogen, then there is a process which will convert it (plus atmospheric CO2) into methanol. Now methanol is a fair bit safer than petrol and diesel. It's far less toxic, burns with less heat radiance. But above all - with trivial modifications new cars could be made multi-fuel capable of running on any mix of petrol, ethanol, and methanol, and methanol can be stored, distributed, and retailed using existing infrastructure. For many filling stations, it could be as simple as re-purposing one tank and the pumps it serves to methanol. So it would be fairly easy to create a widespread network of filling stations with it, and cars would not be stuck if there wasn't one convenient.
The biggest problem with hydrogen is that until we have an excess of carbon free generation (which effectively means a lot more nuclear) then we cannot make it in a carbon neutral manner. So like lecky cars, there's an argument that a hydrogen powered car is coal/gas powered as it'll be the taps on a coal or gas power station that get opened a tad in order to produce the electricity used to make it. or in the case of some methods, it'll be coal that's steam reformed to make hydrogen.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
