Daimler to have 100 fuel cell vehicles on road soon

Q What do fuel cells use as fuel? A Hydrogen.

Q Where does the Hydrogen come from? A The only industrial scale manufacture of Hydrogen is from fossil fuel.

Q Why do BMW and Mercedes Benz advertise zero emission fuel cell cars when the emissions are, in fact, just relocated to the place where fossil fuel is turned into Hydrogen?

good point. first off, by zero emission what is meant is zero 'harmful' emissions. Moreover, some so called zero emission cars that emit CO2 are not such - although CO2 is not a terribly harmful emission to have. yes, the emissions are in fact just relocated, nevertheless they can then be better controlled (ever drive behind an old MB diesel :-)). You can even generalzie further than fossil fuels. Eg, even electrolysis using solar cells will first need to have the solar cells made - again there is pollution in their manufacture. A strong case can be made though that the emmissions for a fuel cell (whatever form they take) are far, far more benign than those of our present engines.

Let me add here that MB does _not_ think particularly highly of fuel cell cars -hype nothwithstanding - since MB does apperently not believe that such cars can be build at the price point AND with the features that customers are willing to settle for. MB is in fact banking on the future, intermediate future that is, success of diesels. Biodiesels are a particularly good bet I would think

regards

I agree that the biodiesel is a great thing - especially since biodiesel is so clean and economical.

However, the power necessary to create hydrogen can come from clean sources even if it does not do so now.

Wind farms are a good possibility. There have been a couple of billion dollar plus projects recently announced and the economics of that technology is apparently competitive. I see no reason why this technology cannot be scaled up by the two or three orders of magnitude necessary to make all electrical power clean and have a huge surplus necessary for copious hydrogen generation.

Hydro is another example. From what I understand, the Six Gorges dam in China will produce so much power that the Chinese will have a hard time using it all. That surplus could also go to hydrogen generation.

I should add that I am not an expert on these technologies and I am just making inferences based upon what I have read.

True enough, nevertheless, ask the people in these affected areas if they believe that they are being polluted and most, I would venture to guess, would think that they are. Especially the six Gorges dam, where I hope the archeologist will get their work done in time. Even if H2 is supplied in an environmentally more benign fashion, there is still the problem of pumping the H2..... we are simply not set up to do this except, possibly, for fleet operations. It will be interesting to see how the H2 experiment in Icland will work out.

regards`