These fuelcell cars and suvs are unbeatable, im glad hyunday is starting limited commercialisation. It's gonna be a huge success. The range is very good at 365 miles and it's easy to monitor how much hydrogen is left into the tank contrary to batteries where you never know really what is the state of charge. As soon as there is a hydrogen infrastructure been build then we gonna have big trucking too that will use hydrogen contrary to batteries that can barrelly apply to small cars only and are rejected by consumers. One way or the other someone gonna fing how to do hydrogen in quantities at low cost and onsite. In 2022 approx, i will be on the market for a used vehicle and i hope to buy a first hydrogen car and i will forget are limp previous ice cars were with vibrations, low power and big weight and cost, pollution, hiccups on acceleration, bothersome transmissions, etc. The world will change overnight as soon as hydrogen fuelcell technology will be put on the market.

"As soon as there is a hydrogen infrastructure been build then we gonna have big trucking too that will use hydrogen contrary to batteries that can barrelly apply to small cars only and are rejected by consumers."

This is the point. There will never be a hydrogen infrastructure and the car companies and the oil companies know it. So what offering hydrogen fueled vehicles gives them is the appearance of caring about us and the environment while still having almost insurmountable hurdles available as an easy excuse for the lack of progress and change. Precisely opposite to EVs and PHEVs which already have the infrastructure and truely threaten change away from oil. And, just like drugs and the drug war, alot of people make money off oil and so we will never stop using what is profitable to the masters.

So here are the facts on the supposedly unsuperable obstacles to hydrogen roll out:
Initial deployment:
'H2Station® CAR-100 provides 70MPa SAE J2601 compliant fast-fill of hydrogen for passenger vehicles with a capacity of up to 100kg/day. All equipment is integrated into a compact station module allowing for easy transport and installation in only two days. This significantly reduces both the investment cost and time from contract to start of operation, which is important when deploying station networks. As fuel sales in a network grows and reach a level feasible for larger stations the CAR-100 can easily be relocated to outskirts of the network.'

http://fuelcellsworks.com/news/2012/09/25/h2-logic-launches-new-h2station%C2%AE-products-for-hydrogen-refueling-of-fuel-cell-powered-material-handling-vehicles-and-passenger-vehicles/

Note that these can be deployed on a rolling basis, so that as hydrogen becomes established in an early adopter area they can move on elsewhere.
100kg/day would be enough to service a couple of hundred vehicles at 30/miles/day.

That sounds an easier roll out to me than a fast charger infrastructure.
The hydrogen for that level of use would be brought in by tanker.

No need to upgrade transmission systems or transformers for a high speed electric charging station.

And:
'The aim is to bring down the cost to that of a natural gas filling station, around 300,000 euros, or $387,500, from around 1 million euros today, said Ulrich Buenger, a coordinator at the European Hydrogen Road Tour 2012, which is funded by industry and the European Commission.'

http://www.mercurynews.com/cars/ci_21628374/hyundai-introduce-worlds-first-production-fuel-cell-electric

Those cost statements are not just figures plucked from the air, but a result of analysis of the components needed to build them.

Europe already has a perfectly adequate infrastructure to deliver LNG for vehicles, and whilst the cost of a hydrogen roll out may for the time being be somewhat higher, vast amounts can be saved on oil import bills, for instance by the use of hydrogen from agricultural and municipal waste.

HarveyD,

#3 Why it shall be hydrohen instead CNG main fuel for heavy city and highway trucks?

Here is the pdf with full info on the Hyundai. It also gives their road map.
It is perfectly clear from this that progress has been as projected, and is not some sort of never never thing as the advocates of batteries as a one size fits all nostrum repeatedly and inaccurately say.
http://www.fch-ju.eu/sites/default/files/documents/ga2010/sae-hoon_kim.pdf

EP:
The efficiency of fuel cells is far greater than petrol engines, so you need to transport a lot less fuel.

We manage perfectly well to pump natural gas, although of course that is rather less corrosive, so the strictures against using pipelines for transport of gaseous fuels hardly seems absolute.
Germany for one also plans to provide a lot of it's hydrogen locally, rather than centrally, so reducing pumping needs.

I have recently found out that more than half of German vehicle miles are for longer journeys, with the differences between that usage pattern and that of the US presumably due to their excellent public transport covering a lot of commuting.
In that case present battery cars would not help much for more than half of the miles travelled, so particularly with electricity at 30 cents/kwh it is hardly surprising that they are keener on fuel cells than battery cars.

'It's fun to speculate about hydrogen made from biomass, but there's nowhere near enough biomass to do the job.'

Please give the figures on which you base this definitive and statement.
Others argue:
'"If you take just 20% of the agricultural and forest residue available in Europe, which can sustainably be taken away from the fields, you can make half of Europe's gasoline demands,"'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19179419

Personally I don't know, but you clearly have access to figures which give you confidence to make an absolute statement, so please show on what that confidence is based.

Hyundai might want to reform NG to H2 like Tesla did with Superchargers.

"That sounds an easier roll out to me than a fast charger infrastructure."

Might be. If we were starting from zero with both hydrogen and electricity. But since the electricity infrastructure is at least 90% in place and since we are already installing a large number of fast chargers hydrogen would be starting too deep in the hole to catch up.

Who is going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in a hydrogen infrastructure when we can drive cheaper per mile on electricty?

Add in the enormous cost of paying for the hydrogen infrastructure and hydrogen as a fuel loses big time.

The efficiency of fuel cells is far greater than petrol engines

We manage perfectly well to pump natural gas

Germany for one also plans to provide a lot of it's hydrogen locally

Please give the figures on which you base this definitive and statement.

You run into hundreds of billions putting a charger in each garage, let alone alongside the road for the 50% of vehicles with no garage.

The annual expenditure on motor fuels in the USA is on the order of $500 billion, so even "hundreds of billions" is quite reasonable if it's spread over as little as a decade.  But it won't cost that much; 100 million chargers at an average of $300 apiece (most just cheap home units) is only $30 billion.

Car companies can turn $1 of NG into $10 of H2. Cars double their cost including fuel over 10 years. Get the car sale profit up front and the fuel profits over a decade.

most people surely never wanna buy a car that reflects that they are a penny pincher.

The alleged superiority of the H2-FCV is its high range per day and quick refilling, but this doesn't help if the nearest H2 station is 20 miles away, let alone 50.  The safety issues with gas at 700 bar (or more, on the storage/dispensing side) argue for a station cost on the same order as a natural gas station, at $350,000 to 3x that*.  You need these things almost everywhere, so figure at least one per 20-mile square on a rough rectangle 4000 miles by 1500 miles, or 15,000 of them.  Cost:  $5-15 billion.  Until the network has achieved full penetration there are places your H2-FCV can only visit on in-and-out trips, or not at all.  So much for its "advantage" over electric.

What's the cachet in running out on the way to the one H2 station in town and needing a tow?

No one wants to look cheap in front of their friends, peers, or neighbors.

* I see ads for truck stops selling upwards of 100-150,000 gallons per month.  Selling even 50,000 gallons of diesel equivalent of LNG per month at 50¢/gallon premium over cost for amortization, a $350,000 LNG installation would be paid off in about 14 months.  The Henry Hub price of NG is about 1/10 the retail price of ULSD; the gross margin for early adopters appears to be well upwards of $1 per gallon-equivalent, maybe over $2.  There's a much better case to be made for LNG than H2.

The link you give does not consider algae, which is a large, but to my mind dubious, resource.

Using the figures you give, we can actually hit around 70% for conversion and compression now

Miles travelled are also falling year on year, not rising.

we might get a third of our hydrogen from biomass sources.

One reason I am pro-nuclear is that 2/3 of motor fuel can be replaced by electricity in current-generation PHEVs (if nuclear, domestic and zero-emission) and the other 1/3 can be replaced by liquid fuels generated from waste.  Domestic garbage and waste biomass can be hydrolyzed to small molecules, then gasified in supercritical water to yield ready-made synthesis gas.  Syngas makes methanol very easily, which is a good motor fuel.  All this takes is heat, which fission generates cleanly and in abundance.

Using either thorium or fast breeders, fission can supply our full energy needs on the time scale of industrial society.  Processed waste and other biomass can supply the remaining demand for fuels and chemicals without risk of depletion.  That's a full solution, and weather barely affects it.  It's one of the best routes, and also one of the lowest-risk.