hey robomatic, good points there.

no matter how many other oil reserves there are, (the amount is questionable anyway since Shell just got into trouble for overestimating its reserves and a lot of other big oil is probably doing that as well) the easiest and cheapest to extract crude is in Saudi. there are also many diff. kinds of crude (venezuelan is different than Saudi crude)

Id say that CHina is indeed the wild card. It has over the last 20 years averaged 8% growth. Its no longer streets of bicycles either, and pollution has become a big problem. (A lot is due to people heating their homes with compressed coal cakes) The govt is trying to keep employment up, but has already forced many of the old polluting steel mills to close down or upgrade.

If it should decide to implement, car pollution controls (no matter how stringent, the fossil fuel based cars will still pollute) on the other hand fuel cell vehicles would not. And you can bet with a billion strong market the big automakers would fight each other to make it work.

sure right now the easiest way to extract hydrogen is reforming from natural gas, which still results in greenhouse gases.
Electrolysis for instance is quite expensive. But one of the advantages of larger fuels cells is they make clean water (a plus isolated villages or places where water is a problem)

also the whole idea of a distributed power generation system allows for less dependence on an old creaky electrical grid which can be an easy terrorist target. One tree fell over last summer and 50million people were without electricity in the worst blackout in history.

a lot of large corporations, banks etc are installing fuel cell back up power supplies right now. A chip manufacturer lost 30million$ in production with a 1 hour power failure.

plus I think quieter streets, cleaner air, and less dependence on fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world would be another plus.

petr