Don't do a Don L. Hydrogen is an unlikely enough fuel for small scale
transportation, and most of our arguments here are localized on that one
application. If you consider the community needs (trucks, trains, jets and
rockets, military and commercial applications, chemical industry, and long
term power system buffering), and include production of hydrogen as required
to support whatever fuels we do manufacture for our personalized transport,
hydrogen has a place, and probably a very large place, in our manufactured
fuel system, just that most of it will not be the final fuel of use, except
in a few important exceptional cases. All manufactured fuels are a net loss
from the start, and that issue is as uninteresting for hydrogen as it is for
every other fuel. You could ask yourself how much of the nuclear energy is
thrown away just to keep the temperature down where it is easier to build
the reactor. This is the same sort of thing. Pontificating on hydrogen's
place (as a fuel for a personal car) is going to sound pretty silly when
mass amounts of hydrogen are synthesized for a fuel synthesis process to
make something practical, say butane.