[GummyIII]

Perhaps, you aren't clear, however, since you call hydrogen "an economical alternative to gasoline for vehicle fuels." Hydrogen, as the article makes clear, I make clearer, and you acknowledge IS NOT A FUEL.

Ok, I'm being a little picky, but the orbiter for the space shuttle has three main engines which burn liquid hydrogen. In this sense, it IS a fuel although perhaps not a very reasonable one for most uses.

[FredZarguna]

My point isn't to get into the semantics of "fuel" which some people seem to be hung up on. My point is that hydrogen technology is battery technology. On earth, we have energy stored in fossil fuels because solar energy was converted to binding energy by plants. This energy can be release when fossil fuels are burned. This isn't what we do with hydrogen, because there is no free hydrogen on earth. We have to manufacture free hydrogen: doing that takes energy. So when people call hydrogen an "energy source" they're being misleading (and, I would argue, often deliberately so). It isn't: it's a storage material for energy.