Hydrogen Won't Save Our Economy

anaesthetica writes "Physorg.com is featuring a story asserting that hydrogen is economically infeasible as a replacement for our current energy sources. The premise is that isolating and converting hydrogen into a usable energy source takes up a great deal of energy to begin with, and that subsequently converting that hydrogen fuel into usable energy results in an overall efficiency of only about 25%. Apparently, the increasing scarcity of water is going to make hydrogen too costly and just as politicized as oil." From the article: "[Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel's] overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense. The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."

Comments

Re:sun and wind

[mgblst]

Well, we really should be trying to reduce the problem. The only problem is, you can't really do this on a country by country basis. You really need to reduce the world population (especially in some areas), and it is difficult to do this from inside a country, and outside it has bearing of being a racist. This will not really happen until we have a world government. And we can't really have a world government with rogue nations running around doing anything they want.

I can't believe that I have just given some small justification to the George Bush case for world domination.