Fuel Cell Vehicles - and Who Will Sell the Fuel?

I heard a story today concerning GM and a fuel cell vehicle with a supposed 300-mile range on a tank of fuel. That's good to hear, but with all the attention on designing the vehicles, I've seen relatively little about the issue of concept viability: fuel stations. A few years ago I remember sitting over lunch with a PR person from ChevronTexaco as we were killing some time before I was to interview CEO David O'Reilly. We got onto the topic of alternative fuels and how difficult it would be to make that work until some had set up distribution for those fuels.

You can design cars from now to the next decade, and it won't matter if you can't get the substances to run them. That's where the oil companies should be spending some of those large sums of cash that have been coming in - particularly as their capital expenses seem to have been dropping over the years. someone has to build the stations, create the new storage tanks - generate the fuel that will go into those tanks.

It would be a logical step. Oil companies aren't really in the "energy" business so much as they're in the twin industries of chemical refining and transportation of those materials. Moving to a new set of chemicals will require a lot of work and investment, but in the long run, what else are they going to do?