Hydrogen Hoax

Inventor of the nuclear salt-water rocket and space colonization advocate, Dr. Robert Zubrin has an article in The New Atlantis Journal (Published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Washington, DC think-tank, so take any conclusions with a grain of salt) on the science behind hydrogen power.

The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

His solution is to require all new engines to be flex-fuel capable which would provide a ready customer base for alcohol-based fuels. At first blush this sounds like a heavy mandate, but considering that the Ford Model T was originally designed to run on either gasoline or ethanol, it's hardly an engineering burden on the auto industry. (One wonders where we'd be were it not for prohibition killing off most of the distilleries at a time when the automotive revolution was sweeping the nation.) Unfortunately, for now corn ethanol can only compete on price with gasoline due to heavy subsidies. Tropical countries such as Brazil have had the advantage of using cane sugar which is much cheaper to extract and ferment, but protectionist US trade policies artificially inflate the cost of imported sugar and alcohol. Personally I like the idea of using biodiesel and straight vegetable oil which is far easier to produce, but two obstacles stand in the way of that. One being that diesel passenger vehicles are fairly rare in the US, and the other being that SVO is technically illegal. Gee, I wonder why?