I'm no expert on this subject, but if I were Master of the Known Universe(MOTKU)
...or perhaps just President, I would request several billion dollars to do five or six things simultaneously:
1) Convert one of the world's 3500 super tankers to a prototype 100 Megawatt floating/grazing Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) ship that tests the viability of producing
baseload electricity, and liquid ammonia to be used in fuel-cells. But not just regular ammonia, but
non-toxic Ammonia-Borane: H3BNH3 I'd also convert one or two mothballed US Navy supply ships to transport Ammonia-Borane as the "feeder" ship to transport the fuel stateside from the 100MW OTEC plantships that slowly graze at 1/2 knot in the warm tropical waters....
2) Make a sweet deal with Cuba that allows us to conduct joint US/Cuba experiments in the exceptionally warm waters off Cuba's coast (78F) to conduct OTEC "grazing" with this converted supertanker. As an added bonus, the OTEC ship could easily produce some potable water for Cuba at no charge, and probably need to provide some percentage of the Ammonia-borane or borazane (H3BNH3) production for domestic Cuban use in automobiles. Probably have to drop the 1959 embargo against Cuba too, but afterall, Castro will not live forever, and Mother Nature is not going to wait either regarding global Peak Oil...
3) Inform GM and Ford CEOs that if they want a gov't bail-out when they go Chapter 11, they must devote their best engineers to quickly building and testing Fuel Cell automobiles and trucks that utlize H3BNH3. Oh, as MOTKU, I would pass 35 mpg CAFE standards to buy us some time.
4) Repeal the recently passed Energy bill, along with most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and provide tax subsidies to the petro-companies that agree and commit a huge slice of their record profits from now till 2015(?) to energy reconfiguration re fuel cells. Reallocating the billions of revenue from the unaffordable tax cuts, and moving a huge chunk of current military expenses over to Energy Reconfiguration, could facilitate projects for mass transit and energy-related infastructure improvements (with the goal of using less fossil-fuel energy, esp. liquid fuels).
5) As a form of patriotic duty, I would vigerously promote huge incentives to consumers to purchase hybrid vehicles, solar panels, geothermal units, wind turbines, etc, etc. I would stress that we need to use our current hydrocrabon energy subsidy for energy reconfiguration, even if results in lower efficiently (FWIW: OTEC is approx 3.5% efficient, but its renewable as long as the sun keeps shinning)
Renewability is the new mantra...
While I'm at it, I might even try to get farmers to grow some biodiesel for localized farm production operations (of course biomass/biodiesal is not scaleable outside the John Deer tractors and related farm equipment, but it is going to get very expensive to continue transporting diesel from the coastal regions to the "heartland" of the US for farm production.)
6) Lastly, I would pray this whole hybrid/renewable system works, has a small but positive EROEI, and somehow get the world community to also spend trillions in "going Full monty" OTEC/Ammonia-Borane/Fuel Cell in an effort to mitigate the imminent crisis in liquid fuels...after which building the huge fleet to OTEC ships and associated infastructure will prove too energy intensive, and ultimately impossible.
(The warm surface water b/t the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer provides enough solar energy for a couple of thousand OTEC plantships. BTW, there are 3,500 oil tankers in the world, and if possible, these platforms should be converted as fast as humanly possible to OTEC...and I should also note that water's high specific heat means the OTEC process works 24/7 - tropical oceans remain warm all night. This broad scenario assumes items #1-#4 were to transpire...). Here's my favorite short article on OTEC:
"Solar Enery From the Tropical Oceans" by William Avery & Walter Berl
http://www.issues.org/issues/14.2/avery.htm
(Unfortunately, Dr. Avery, a professor at Johns Hopkin's APL and OTEC expert, passed away a couple of years ago...but he wrote the bible on OTEC circa early 1990's technology:
Renewable Energy from the Oceans (Oxford University Press, 1994).
BTW, Saudi Arabia and the ME need potable water, and their coastal waters are warm enough for OTEC ships as well, so I'd work with Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, India and the other industrialized nations to develop an international treaty re OTEC plantship operations, along with the Uppsala Protocol. That should reduce the probability of global resource warfare, or as Heinberg states, the Last One Standing scenario...
Well, that is what I would do if I were MOTKU...
Here's a technical paper I found on this forum that discusses Ammonia-Borane. This seems to be the best choice for fuel cells, but producing hydrogen in large scales with non-fossil fuel yet with baseload electricity, IMO, can only be accomplished via the OTEC/solar process.
TECHNOECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF AREA II HYDROGEN PRODUCTION - PART II Hydrogen from Ammonia and Ammonia-Borane Complex forFuel Cell Applications
http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandf ... 405b15.pdf
This paper provides the second in a series of analysis focusing on the prospects of ammonia and ammonia-borane compounds for use as hydrogen carriers for fuel cell applications.
Due to extreme toxicity of ammonia, it is difficult to envision its widespread use as the future transportation fuel. This is despite the fact that ammonia is a low cost, readily available, environmentally clean and very high-density hydrogen energy storer.
One approach to mitigate this problem is to complex ammonia with a suitable hydride so that the resulting material is neither toxic nor cryogenic. A class of compounds known as
amine-boranes and their certain derivatives meet this requirement. The simplest known stable compound in this group is ammonia-borane, H3BNH3 (or borazane). Borazane is a white crystalline solid that upon heating reacts to release hydrogen in a sequence of reactions that occur at distinct temperature ranges.
Ammonia-borane contains about 20 wt% hydrogen and is stable in water and ambient air.