Well, efficiency informs us on cost. Let's couple those costs with efficiency and use the same fuel source.

Natural gas power stations vs hydrogen (from reformed natural gas)

Gas power station = 60% efficient [1]

So a battery vehicle powered by electricity generated from natural gas :

Gas turbine efficiency * transmission line efficiency * battery cycle efficiency

0.6 * 0.94 * 0.95 = 53%

Fuel cell vehicle powered by hydrogen reformed from natural gas

Natural gas is primarily methane. Methane releases 810kJ per mole [2] on burning, and contains 4 moles of hydrogen atoms which would form 2 moles of hydrogen gas. Assuming we remove the carbon from a mole of methane, we get 2 moles of hydrogen molecules. Energy of combusion of hydrogen gas is 286kJ/mol [3], so that's 572kJ/mol per mole of methane or just over 70% of the energy. I'm going to be very generous and assume that steam reformation costs no energy and that no hydrogen is lost in the process.

Methane reformation to hydrogen efficiency * fuel cell efficiency

0.7 * 0.5 = 35%

Therefore starting with the same fuel as an energy source, storage tank to wheels, the fuel cell car requires at least 50% more fuel. Therefore it costs more per mile, and that's before any of the other engineering considerations.

Please don't try to tell me that the cost of electricity produced from natural gas is completely decoupled from the cost of hydrogen produced from natural gas.

[1] Gas turbine plants
[2] https://www.wou.edu/las/physci...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

The horse is still high enough. Twice as high as the pony that fuel cells rode in on, at the least.

Making electricity from a power plant with a traditional thermal conversion cycle (40% efficiency, at best) and making hydrogen by electrolysis (50% efficiency) and using it to power your fuel cell car (again, about 50%) yields

0.4 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.1 or 10% efficiency for the fuel that went in. That's half the efficiency of a traditional internal combustion engine.

Efficiency of an ICE averages about 20%. And I'm being generous with that because that does not take into account the losses from refining raw fuels (like coal, which can be burned unrefined).

Not sure what the efficiency of making hydrogen with steam reformation is, but logically you're throwing away a lot of the chemical energy in the original compound, because in a combustion cycle you'd be burning the carbon as well as the oxygen, and if you want the "green" benefits you also have to spend resources sequestering the carbon byproducts so produced. If it's above 80% efficient (which would seem on inspection to be impossible because of the lost carbon), then you have a vehicle that is clean at the tailpipe but just barely more full-cycle efficient than an ICE based vehicle, all other things being equal. Which they aren't because of the expensive platinum catalyst, heavy cryogenic high pressure tanks, etc, etc, etc.

Battery cycle is about 95% efficient. So even if you burn fossil fuels (40% efficiency) and suffer transmission losses (in the US, 94% efficiency), you still get a car that is more efficient than both ICEs and fuel cells.

0.4 * 0.94 * 0.95 = 35% efficiency

So at less than twice the efficiency of ICEs, electric cars are not the magical panacea that they are painted to be, but they are much better than ICEs and fuel cells. The major play available is in the first stage - the electricity generation. When you start replacing those coal fired power stations with other sources of electricity, they start to get much much greener. And they don't demand the construction of an entirely new fuel distribution infrastructure with difficult engineering challenges.

I remain certain in my position that hydrogen energy is primarily an investment of the fossil fuel industry, designed to help prolong the market for "vintage biomass" as long as possible, either by actually putting hydrogen cars on the road, or diverting investment away from battery technology.

The parts of our brain structure that are most associated with our cognitive abilities evolved from the parts that processed smell. Whales clearly communicate using their song, so what's to say that the parts of their brains that process sound (which would be the bulk of their sensory needs) aren't undergoing the same transition?

And the retroreflecting prism arrays sent to the moon, that anyone with a big enough laser can bounce a beam off and determine what the distance of the moon is at the moment, were presumably put up there by Elvis on his way home. Hell, it's just a few pairs of his rhinestone trousers that fell out of his trunk.

"I'd hit that.... with a roll of 13 or more."

i) They aren't fish, they are mammals
ii) They have social grouping activity, the thing that separates the smart animals from the dumb ones, and the thing responsible for the growth of humans into the dominant species

70% of US corn is fed to livestock. Because of all the economic subsidy that corn receives this means the price of meat in the US is artificially low.

US meat consumption is multiple times that of the next nearest nation ; even if you cut your meat consumption by half, you'd still be eating a lot of meat, and you'd free up vast tracts of agricultural land to grow other crops.

To expand on the sibling's post about Saddam switching oil sales to Euros :

The economy of the US is propped up by a vast debt. We're not talking loans to banks, or China. We're talking petrodollars.

The de-facto currency that oil is traded in was for a long time, the US dollar. Which meant that nations speculated in it, hoarded it, retained reserves of it for the purpose of trading oil.

This meant that the US printed more dollars with impunity, as long as oil markets expanded, meaning the government enjoyed the ability to spend vast amounts of money backed not just by US wealth and productivity, but the wealth and productivity of the whole world.

Then it was proposed that it would be a good idea to start trading for oil in currencies other than the US Dollar. The US financiers were terrified by this.

If the nations of the world no longer needed their dollars to buy oil, they would seek to exchange them for other things of value. And if the nations of the world no longer needed US dollars to buy oil, they would no longer want to accept them in exchange for things of value, so the bulk of the balance would have to come home to the US to be exchanged for things of value there.

This would cause US inflation, devaluation of the US dollar, and vast tracts of US interests suddenly being owned by foreign nationals. The incumbent administration (or rather, their financier friends) could not permit this, so they made an example of one of the countries that dared to make noises about trading their oil for Euros.

It's no coincidence that Iran is having it's feet held to the fire at a time when it is once again proposing to open a non-dollar oil bourse.

Historic precedent, based on two factors -

* High levels of infant mortality
* The need to provide for one's retirement

These countries don't have functioning social care systems. Your children are the only care you're going to get in your dotage. That, combined with the historic trend of high infant mortality, means that high numbers of children are perceived as a form of great fortune. They don't have the career driven lives of the West that are leading our populations to shrink because we're producing fewer than one child per person. Even if the healthcare systems improve and infant mortality rates drop, there is some time before the culture catches up.

The costs of the primary fuel are paramount - the cheapest way to get hydrogen is from steam reformation of natural gas, not from electrolysis. Therefore that is the source that will be used, because the economic cost determines what happens in the market.

Subsidies of fuel cell vehicles are likely the result of lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, since they have the most to gain. As the sibling poster says, battery electric vehicles right now are suitable for over 90% of journeys, and battery technology continues to improve, with faster charging and better capacity and longevity.

And as you yourself point out - fuel cell cars raise the cost of the primary fuel - whatever it is - by a factor of four. It's still the same dichotomy we have now with battery versus chemical fuel.

You can either have a vehicle that has a long range and a rapid refuel time at the cost of ALL the journeys you make being expensive regardless of their length.

Or you can have a vehicle that has very cheap journeys 90% of the time at the cost of additional refuelling time on some of the longer journeys. Given the state of the technology now, it's more like 20 minutes every four hours, than four hours every 20 minutes. And to be honest, I think I could benefit from a 20 minute break after four hours of driving.

CNG can be stored easily in standard pressure tanks. The carbon atoms in the molecules grant these gases the property of having van der Waals forces which allow them to form liquids at relatively low pressures.

Hydrogen molecules are tiny. They slip into the crystal structure of metals and render them brittle. They slip through the gaps in seals. And making hydrogen into a liquid requires extreme pressures and temperatures.

Corn producers like corn syrup because it doesn't spoil and it absorbs what excess crops they have after supplying the human and animal markets (as does the ethanol synthesis scam).

US Sugar producers also like corn syrup because it lets them keep the price of their sugar high (if the sugar import tariffs that protect the Florida sugar growers profits were lifted, natural sugar would be cheaper than corn syrup - without corn syrup, the supply of US sugar would be inadequate to meet the needs of food producers, which would cause a wave of lobbying to get sugar tariffs lifted).

Food producers like corn syrup because it's cheaper than (expensive Florida) sugar and produces foods that have a long shelf life and a taste that inspires the formation of habits.

Natural corn doesn't get a look in. Most of the corn used for the syrup isn't food grade anyway, and if it was, it would still be inconveniently prone to spoiling (lower profits) and less scrummy than a twinkie (lower profits).

No, because

It would be a harder sell.

* One price for... what, how many years of life? Do you sell it for more to a 40 year old than a 50 year old, because they have more life left?

* That much money for one shot (or a course of them)? When clearly the material cost is so much less than the prolonged treatment?

While the actual cost of manufacturing pharmaceuticals already has very little relation to their price (while in patent), it would be too much to swallow that you should pay tens of thousands for a dose of something manufactured in bulk for ... what, a few hundred a pint, tops?

The risk that some Indian pharmaceutical company is going to just synthesis a few thousand gallons of it and sell it on the black market, killing your profits for an entire generation (by which time it will be off patent) is also quite high.

The PR value would be *great*, but you can't take good feelings to the shareholders meeting.

IT. ISN'T. ANONYMOUS.

The transaction log is public. BitCoin *is* the transaction log (and the protocols for updating it).

Every transaction is visible, by design. BitCoin can't work otherwise.

If you only ever trade BitCoin that you mined yourself on your own private hardware, you might have a shot at anonymity. But if you make any kind of exchange transaction to buy them that someone can track, then you can be associated with your entire transaction history. I guarantee that right now there are programs in the major SIGINT orgs of the world that are devoted to associating traditional transactions with BitCoin transactions.