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As far as access to oil goes, let's see now...$55 billion and 300 American lives for Gulf War I....eventually $200 billion for GWII....did I forget 3000 people dead on 9/11? How much DOES it cost for us to be involved politically and economically in the Muslim world? And what would it be worth to get off oil as the primary fuel?

I am agast that someone on FR of all places would blurt such an inane nonsequitor- are you a moron or a disruptor??? (A) We didnt fight the gulf wars for oil! - I guess the idea of liberating countries from invasions an tyranny didnt penetrate your noggin - and (B) your costs are way out of line, almost all of GW1 was reiminbursed by allies, and Operation Iraqi Freedom has cost more like $20 billion total so far. Whatever happens to oil, the 1 billion Muslims in the world will NOT GO AWAY and we will stay have to deal with those countries. Food for thought!

The reality is that it's a systems engineering problem: what engine/fuel/infrastructure combination is the optimal solution, considering physical and political (=economical) constraints. The cost of just about any physical device is almost entirely driven by production volume barring the necessity for some wildly difficult material cost (which IS a consideration for some fuel cell devices, but not necessarily the critical one).

It's not really a systems engineering as much an economics problem. But your thinking is a great argument for fossil fuels, they are the cheapest energy source per joule. The best infrastructure on the ehicle is an ELECTRIC DRIVETRAIN, there is practically NO ADVANTAGE to fuel cells over ICES and MANY DISADVANTAGES, namely cost and robustness (what happens when your feull cell stack freezes)? The only way to beat oil in the car is to have an energy source that COSTS LESS. Only nuclear power has even a hope of acheiving that, and only if it supplying electrons - to ELECTRIC CARS - hydrogen is far too indirect.

And you go through ALL THAT TROUBLE and STILL find that hydrogen is awfully hard to store, with low energy density/volume. WHY FIGHT NATURE? The natrual solution is to have a liquid energy form... In other words, if oil didnt exist and we were looking for a great energy carrier, mankind would invent gasoline as the perfect one for vehicles

And one last. Why is it that people who have no problem believing that me and my fellow Aerospace Engineers can build a Space Based Strategic Defense System to knock down incoming nuclear re-entry vehicles (which we most certainly CAN do), but believe that we are incapable of coming up with a transportation system that gets us off of oil?

Aeorspace Engineers are quite capable of designing large passenger jets that fly over MACH 1. That alone doesnt make the Concorde pay its own way.

It's not engineering it's economics that drives the viable solution

(A) We didnt fight the gulf wars for oil!

Oh, sure we did. Fighting wars in places like that is called "doing things in your interest". Countries that do things that aren't in their own interest don't last long.

" The best infrastructure on the ehicle is an ELECTRIC DRIVETRAIN, there is practically NO ADVANTAGE to fuel cells over ICES and MANY DISADVANTAGES, namely cost and robustness (what happens when your feull cell stack freezes)?"

One word: "batteries". Solve that, and you might be right. But, uh, when a lot of the guys from my old group spent a year at Ford in 1991-92, trying to do the systems work on a straight electric, that little bugaboo kept biting them. After which, people started chatting about fuel cells...

"In other words, if oil didnt exist and we were looking for a great energy carrier, mankind would invent gasoline as the perfect one for vehicles"

Would man then locate all the raw materials for gas underneath the most politically unstable part of the planet, or just bury it somewhere near Salina, KS for centrality of access?

"Aeorspace Engineers are quite capable of designing large passenger jets that fly over MACH 1. That alone doesnt make the Concorde pay its own way."

The Concorde runs them old, old, old Olympus engines, and fuel specifics have come a looooong way since then (think supersonic fanjets). And Concorde was making money up until the crash. Boeing tried the Transonic route with the Sonic Cruiser but decided that dispatch frequency and seat rpm was more important than just 2/10ths more Mach. But I think the real problem with SST's is simply environmental laws, specifically international ones. But mitigating sonic boom is a big research area now (narrowing the footprint, lowering the intensity), and perhaps in the near future we'll see some good results there. Of course, you won't hear the booms anymore, more like a nice muffled "whump", but it won't last long...and the nice little spotted owl will go right back to sleep. I would expect to see Supersonic corporate jets making their way into the fractional fleet not too far off in the future. Speaking of Supersonic Fan Jets, here's a really nice one that I did a little work on a long, long time ago, and far, far away: The TFE-1042!

It's not engineering it's economics that drives the viable solution

And good engineering makes for good economics.

Nighty nite.