America's First Pipeline-Fed Hydrogen Fueling Station

hasanabbas1987 writes "Shell has opened America's first pipe-lined hydrogen fueling station in the town of Torrence in Southern California. Shell wasn't alone in this project as Toyota also helped them in this green deed, all of which was funded by the government. At the moment other hydrogen stations around the US still depend upon trucks to supply them with fuel. This marks a new era of green fueling and hopefully this pipeline spreads to other stations. Many of the big car makers like Toyota, Honda and Mercedes have indicated a mass market for hydrogen powered cars by 2015."

Comments

Hydrogen is not a fuel

[hawguy]

There are no vast fields of Hydrogen waiting to be mined (at least not on this planet). Hydrogen is an intermediate energy storage medium most commonly extracted from fossil fuels. It can come from water via electrolysis, but there's a lot of waste energy form that process so as far as I know it's not done on a large scale.

What is the overall efficiency of a Hydrogen powered car (including the energy cost to extract the hydrogen) as opposed to one that runs directly off of fossil fuels?

Well-to-wheels efficiency

[Rei]

To add information to this discussion, here's the net system efficiency, well-to-wheel, of different energy sources:
Link

That graph is from this paper:
Link

All issues of fuel cost, fuel cell vehicle cost, safety, ozone damage, infrastructure cost, and so forth aside, one of the big complaints about hydrogen is that it's just not that efficient.