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Originally Posted by Darth_Yuthura
There is another issue to address that really is at the root of the 'hydrogen economy:' the difficulties in transitioning from one source of energy to another. Let's face it, no one would pay more for a vehicle powered by hydrogen under the conditions we have today. People will want gasoline-powered vehicles and any transition to another fuel source will be expensive. Hydrogen isn't like a liquid fossil fuel to store and handle, so the safety codes and gas station tanks and equipment would demand more new designs and implementation than something like gasohol.
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There is a notoriously well-known marketing ploy that would be of good use here. It's called pigeon-holing, and it works by making any alternatives either unavailable or impractical. The market does it all time. Examples of this strategy are readily available, like forcing American consumers to buy Chinese goods, making CRTs unavailable so that people have to buy LCDs, and the most infamous example here on LF, LA's insistence on developing a ****ty MMO and pushing it on us in place of the SP KotOR 3 that most of us wanted (sorry, Avery
). Is it ethical? Not really. Will it be necessary? Well, in this case, yes.
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Originally Posted by Darth_Yuthura
Ethanol is way too unrealistic for practical use of a large scale in the US and with corn, but there are situations where it would make sense to use biodiesel fuel using waste products. That is only a way to make use of something that otherwise would have been lost, but unrealistic on a large scale. Vegetable oil is expensive compared to gasoline, but when it is to be disposed of; what little there is happens to be a good way to scavenge a little more energy that wasn't there before.
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No arguments here about ethanol, but biodiesel has the potential to be cheaply produced from
certain strains of algae far more efficiently than any seed crop, making it a possible and even realistic replacement for petroleum in the short-term using current technology.