At the time, Bush's $1.2 billion hydrogen fuel initiative was seen as forward-thinking by environmentalists, though it certainly had its critics.

The initiative was aimed at lowering the cost of producing hydrogen enough to make fuel-cell vehicles competitive with gas-powered ones by 2010, but 12 years later, it is clear that "the hydrogen highway" is still a long way from being built.

With only a handful of hydrogen fuel stations in the U.S., mostly in California, there is virtually no demand for hydrogen cars, and with only a few hundred of the vehicles produced annually, there is equally low incentive to build the fuelling infrastructure for them.