[frizzfreeling]

But is it better than petroleum? I mean, it takes 300 million years to turn plants into crude, right? And what kind of efficiency are we talking about there, it's got to be way lower than simple electrolysis. So how did petroleum ever get to where it is now? It's obviously a piss poor way of storing and transporting energy.

All he is really saying is that when you go to the pump, you are not actually paying for the energy content of the gasoline you pump. All you are paying for is the transportation cost, from the aquifer to the well head, through a pipeline, onto a tanker, through a CAT plant that uses the energy already in the oil to crack it, onto a tanker truck and finally into your car. All of these steps, even though they seem vast, pale in comparison to the energy that you are getting free from the fuel itself.

Contrast that with, say, hydrogen fuel, which must in itself be created by YOU (or us) from another fuel source, then be transported much like I described above, but in reality much more complicated and voluminous transport, before it gets to you. If you make the hydrogen out of natural gas, then the process has inherent inefficiency and the hydrogen product has less energy content than the initial content of the natural gas. So why not use the natural gas as a fuel instead? Why use the intervening steps to hydrogen and the associated transport and infrastructure difficulties? The hydrogen from this process cannot become cheaper than the original product. This is just an example...